How to do CXO, optimization of the e-Commerce user experience
It is called CXO, Customer Experience Optimization, and it is the process that aims to improve the customer journey throughout the journey and to make the brand image stronger in the eyes of the customer by providing high quality experiences and satisfaction. Achieving these goals is also possible thanks to the SEO, which today can no longer be considered only the activity of inserting keywords in the text and creating backlinks for an online store, but more generally an activity that is closely linked to the ability to ensure an excellent user or customer experience (CX).
SEO is taking care of users
When working on the site’s SEO “keeping in mind the aspect of the customer experience, you will build a store that not only reaches higher positions and receives tons of organic traffic, but also converts that traffic into customers”, says Harsh Agrawal in an interesting article on Search Engine Watch.
A modern online store “has many moving parts, with hundreds or thousands of pages of different products, numerous variations of the same page and dynamic elements”, and all are (or should be) aware of the importance of having the store pages placed on the first page of Google, which means more traffic, brand awareness, trust and sales.
The visibility gained on Google, in fact, plays a huge role in making effective marketing and branding, because it creates a level of trust in the eyes of the public that paid ads fail to do; trust that, in turn, results in a better customer experience. And these are features that, along with providing the right product and price, allow an online store to succeed.
Why to take care of the experience
Once, companies thought that differentiating by product and efficiency was the best way to fight the strong competition of the online market, but today the element to stand out and emerge is in the optimization of customer experiences, that must become omnichannel, simple, immediate, customized and without interruption.
The keyword is experience, a term that refers to the quality of interaction between an individual and an element of any kind – a brand, a website, its products, services, a message, an email, a notification or even an individual as a matter of fact.
The optimization work aims to find the right balance between the expectations of a visitor and the business objectives of a brand, and therefore the optimization of the experience is the work to attract, involve and improve the journey of a website visitor throughout its entire cycle, building or maintaining the brand image in the fast-evolving, customer-centric online marketplace.
Intuitively, satisfied visitors will not only get more engagement and be prepared to spend more, but will also show better and deeper brand loyalty.
SEO tactics to improve the CXO
In short, we need to take a holistic approach to customer journey, trying to create a seamless digital experience for our target audience and, at the same time, achieve our business goals and move towards growth.
According to Harsh Agrawal, one method of achieving this is three proven SEO tactics that “directly improve the visibility of your store’s research and at the same time establish an exceptional customer experience”.
That is, we need to take care of technical and content aspects, as we said in the past to increase e-Commerce conversions, also following the indications of Google regarding the creation of effective online stores or best practices for e-Commerce.
Focus on page speed
The first tip is to “make your store load quickly“, because the speed of the page is one of the crucial elements in creating or destroying the rankings and the CX of a virtual store.
We repeated it almost to exhaustion: most people today do not have the patience to wait up to five seconds (but sometimes not even three!) to load the site on which he clicked and will not think twice before bouncing on a competitor.
Despite being an official ranking factor for Google for years, the site’s speed becomes increasingly important for both search rankings and for the CX, and “the huge number of visual elements and dynamic elements in your store can make this seemingly simple task difficult”.
Interventions to increase speed
The best way to optimize site speed is to scan pages via a free tool such as Gtmetrix or Google Pagespeed Insights to evaluate the site’s current performance and receive “a list of suggestions and optimization opportunities that you can then apply to make your store fast”.
For instance, explains the author, the site could host heavy image files that need to be optimized using a compression tool, or you should enable caching in the browser so that regular visitors don’t have to reload the entire page every time and so on. Or, there may be too many unnecessary redirections to product pages or resources that block rendering, negatively affecting the speed of your site.
What is important is to identify the exact reasons for a non-optimal speed, so work to individually improve each aspect.
Providing unique and updated content on each page
Google wants every URL on every site to have unique, high-quality content; for an online store this could be more difficult, because of the countless Urls that are generated due to product variations and categories.
In addition to creating “unique content, optimized for keywords and descriptive for each product page, you then have to deal with the pages of internal search results and product filters (such as color and size) that result in too many duplicate pages of little value that you do not want Google to index”, because “duplicate content (for example, multiple colors or sizes of the same shirt) can seriously damage your SEO”.
How to work to avoid content duplication
To avoid duplication the author presents us with three options:
- Insert a canonical tag (rel = canonical) in the pages of the product variants that refer to the main page of the product.
- Insert a “noindex” tag in the pages that we do not want to be indexed by Google.
- Block variants within the robots.txt file.
Subsequently, it is necessary to “have a plan to manage obsolete content, such as discontinued or seasonal products, treating such content in such a way as not to disperse the SEO value and not to leave customers confused”.
The easiest way to do this is to “use redirects 301 to direct old Urls to new ones”, so that “visitors reach the most up-to-date content on the product they are looking for (thus ensuring a consistent customer experience), while the link juice of the original URL is transmitted correctly to the new page”.
Providing a good mobile experience
The last advice is to focus on the experience provided to mobile users: online shopping on smartphones and tablets has become mainstream in the last ten years and the trends of recent shopping seasons confirm this.
In Black Friday 2018, which generated about $6.2 billion in revenue, nearly 40% of sales came via a mobile device; during Cyber Monday 2019 ($9.2 billion in online revenue in 2019)In contrast, 54% of visitors came from mobile devices, while around 33% bought from their mobile devices, an increase of over 40% compared to the previous year.
Forecasts for this 2021 also reveal that 53.9% of all retail e-commerce will be generated via mobile devices. In other words, “it is likely that most of your visitors come from a smartphone or tablet rather than a desktop device,” the article summarizes.
Despite the numbers, however, “84% of users found it difficult to complete mobile transactions” and this means that “you have a great opportunity to overcome your competitors in terms of customer experience (CX) and ranking, creating an optimized store for mobile devices”.
How to work to improve mobile navigation
Thanks to Google’s first mobile indexing, “the mobile version of your store (not the desktop one!) is the reference point taken by Google to index your website and determine your rankings“.
To ensure a more effective mobile experience we can follow some best practices:
- Incorporate a responsive design, so that “all the contents of your store automatically adapt to the size of the user’s screen”, offering “the same HTML code and the same Urls regardless of the visitor’s device”
- The mobile page speed is an official ranking factor, so “ensure optimal speed on mobile devices by optimizing images, enabling compression, minimizing CSS and JS, avoiding redirections, improving server response times and exploiting browser cache”.
- Do not forget usability, says Harsh Agrawal, which invites us to make “the store easy to navigate, even on mobile devices”. In practice, we can enable automatic filling for contact forms, where possible, and make the buttons large enough to be easily clickable.
No less important is to avoid these common mobile UX errors such as “blocked Javascript and CSS files, unplayable video content (due to Flash), unreadable small font size, messy tactile elements”.
In a nutshell, says the author, “e-commerce on smartphones is a growing trend and Google is prioritizing mobile experience: so, focus on optimizing your store’s mobile devices for better rankings and CX”.
SEO and CXO have the same goals
In his conclusions, Harsh Agrawal argues that “the modern customer will not be satisfied with anything less than a sublime online shopping experience, starting from finding your store on the first page of search results to browsing a fast-loading site, with updated content and so on”.
This means that it is increasingly crucial to work on the SEO of the online store from a CX perspective, also because search engines like Google “have now evolved to the point where they are able to reward an extraordinary customer experience with rankings on the front page”.
The three tactics outlined above “directly improve SEO and CX” and can help “not only to increase your store’s search rankings and get more organic traffic, but also to offer a positive shopping experience that incentivizes customers to come back”.
