Top E-Commerce Search Ranking Factors

What does it take for an e-commerce site to rank on the first page of the search engine result pages (SERPs)? 

Searchmetrics - with its historical database spanning nine years and more than 250 billion pieces of information - created an industry-specific (e-commerce) keyword set to find out. The following visual from Searchmetrics shows a few examples of the keywords used for the analysis in its whitepaper.


So, what did Searchmetrics discover? A quick rundown is provided below (but more context is found at Searchmetrics):

1. Just three percent of the top 10 e-commerce pages make use of AdSense or Adlinks.
2. E-commerce websites amongst the top 20 search results have less than a third as many social signals as the overall average.
3. The file size of e-commerce pages in the top 10 is more than 30 percent larger than the average file size across all sectors.
4. The number of interactive elements on high-ranking e-commerce websites is almost 40 percent higher than in our benchmark analysis.
5. Across the top 10 Google positions, e-commerce pages have, on average, 70 percent more bullets per list than the overall benchmark.
6. In e-commerce, URLs on the first page of the Google search results have 70 percent more internal links than the overall benchmark.
7. Across the top 20 of Google’s search results, well over half of e-commerce pages have an online store above the fold. This is more than double the overall average.
8. E-commerce pages in the top 10 almost all (99.9 percent) have the TLD .com.
9. Video plays a less significant role in e-commerce than for websites in general. Only 35 percent of e-commerce pages in the top 10 have embedded videos.
10. The word count for e-commerce URLs in the top 10 is around 25 percent higher than the overall aver­age.

Here are the findings compared to general benchmark analysis: