One SEO professional asked John Mueller in a hangout about a large e-commerce site.
They wanted to know how to improve the quality of the entire site overall.
For e-commerce, they are not sure about how to improve the quality of that type of site.
John explained that he doesn’t believe there is really just one trick that you can do.
However, he did mention that some things that you can focus on could be product reviews, and making sure they are improved since the product reviews update.
But there isn’t really one solution. John believes it would be tricky.
Additionally, John also mentioned the following:
- Improving the quality of the reviews that people leave on the site,
- Do a user study using reviewers who are not familiar with the site to get as objective of the feedback that you possibly can,
- John mentioned a blog post they authored some time back about five years ago – Questions to Ask to Improve the Quality of Your Site. He believes these questions are still worth answering,
- Also, make sure you do a link building campaign,
- But he also really emphasized working with real people on a user study to find out where the quality is lacking.
John said that the perception of users is significant enough that Google can pick up on this and use it for ranking as well.
This happens at approximately the 22:19 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 6 22:20
And also one last question is, is like a general one. So for large e-commerce sites how to improve the perceived quality of the whole website at Google’s side. Many like blog articles said maybe backlinks and maybe some content quality. But for e-commerce sites, we don’t know how to improve our content quality. Yeah.
John 22:50
Yeah. I also don’t think there’s, there’s one trick that you can do. I think we’ve given some types of things that you can focus on with the reviews updates that we’ve done for product reviews, some of that might apply. But I don’t think there’s like one, one solution to improving the overall quality of any larger website, and especially on e-commerce, I imagine that’s quite tricky.
And there, there’s sometimes things like working to improve the quality of the reviews that people leave, if it’s user generated reviews, for example, making sure that you’re highlighting the useful reviews, for example. I don’t know, it seems like a lot of things come in there.
What I usually recommend is that people do some kind of a user study, in that they take some people who are not directly associated with your website and have them run through some tasks on your website and on other people’s websites, and try to get as objective feedback as possible from them. So I don’t know, what is it, maybe five years longer? Probably.
We did a blog post specific for a Panda update, about 20-something questions that you can ask yourself about the quality of your website. And I find those kinds of questions really useful. And doing a user study usually brings up some ideas of things that maybe you missed, or maybe you didn’t want to accept for whatever reason.
So that’s kind of the direction I would go, not focus on purely like, well for SEO, I will make a blog or for SEO, I will try to do some link building campaign or something like that. But rather try to really work together with real people and figure out, where are some areas that you can improve?
It might be that it ends up like you improve the design of your website and that changes the perception of users significantly enough that we can pick up some of that and use that for ranking as well. It’s really hard to say.
SEO Professional 6 25:10
Okay, so it’s like, care about the users and then the site will–yeah.
John 25:16
Yeah, I mean, very simplified. That’s essentially it. Obviously it’s, it’s not very directly actionable. But you can’t send your users cake and they’ll be happy. And then your website will rank higher.
