You might think that you’re already doing everything you realistically can to get your ecommerce site to achieve strong positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs). But are you?
In today’s blog post, for instance, we’re taking a closer look at something called the ‘answer box’. It’s the box that you might have noticed at the top of a results page, providing an answer to whatever query you performed a search for.
A quick response to many users’ problems
To give just one example, let’s imagine that you are looking to purchase window film for a building, to better protect occupants and furnishings from solar heat gain and glare at this hotter time of year. You might not be able to easily reach the inside surface of the building’s windows, so you might be wondering whether it’s possible to install window film on the outside surface instead.
So, we Googled “can window films be applied outside”. An answer box popped up at the top of the resultant search page from www.windowtintingco.com, informing us that “the application of window film to the outside surface of some windows may be considered.”
The answer box goes on to provide further relevant information, and a link to the page on the aforementioned website where this text has been taken from.
You, too, can take advantage of these boxes
‘Answer boxes’, then, are a seriously handy feature for users, who might not even need to leave the Google search results page to have their query answered. For the same reasons, they’re also powerful from a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective for the online businesses that manage to capture them. But with so many ‘how-to’ and other content-rich sites out there, does your humble ecommerce site have much chance of grabbing an answer box or two?
The answer to this question might surprise you. Data from one enterprise platform, for example, shows that the Internet’s 10 most popular shopping sites are collectively eligible to appear in the answer boxes arising from over 453,000 search queries.
But even these ‘elite’ sites – including such household names as eBay, Etsy, Walmart and Home Depot – only actually capture 11 per cent of those answer boxes.
‘Eligibility’, meanwhile, was defined as ranking in the first three positions in Google for a search query that brings up an answer box. The top three was chosen for the threshold because data indicates that 98 per cent of the time, it is one of those three sites that grab the answer box for the given query.
So, what does all of this mean for your online retailer?
What it means is that if you can get your ecommerce site into the top three positions for a query that causes an answer box to spring up, you might well have an extremely good chance of winning it – and reaping the consequent benefits for your brand’s online profile, authority and rankings.
Remember that the content standing the best chance of capturing an answer box is that which answers a question in simple language, in a couple of short lines.
Would you like to investigate the full range of SEO possibilities for your website, and start propelling your business to ever-higher rankings, sales and revenue online? If so, our team here at Piranha Designs is available at the other end of the phone. Get in touch now to discover more about our in-depth search engine marketing expertise and packages.
