SEO Services For eBay

eBay is the largest, most popular site for inter-personal, auctions and sales.

The client pool is staggeringly big, with over 171 million active users by Q2 2017, which makes for a wonderful potential for profit. However, it is a potential most people trying to sell on the site is missing entirely.

First and foremost, eBay is a search engine, and failure to understand and take advantage of this leaves you at a disadvantage against all those other sellers who are actively implementing SEO for eBay techniques and reaping its benefits.

You can focus on improving your merchandise, lowering your prices and offering a hands-on customer service, but the best products in the world will make little difference if people don’t see your publications because your listings are not optimized to rank up on eBay searches. You need to reach your potential clients!

Making sure your listings rank high among eBay searches is the best path to increasing your sells on the platform, and this can be achieved through SEO, a combination of strategies and techniques specifically designed to make your listings communicate better with eBay’s search engine, increasing your product’s exposure.

More exposure, more sales. It is that simple …Until it’s not.

Learning to apply effective SEO can be a challenge – especially if you have no previous knowledge on the subject. Furthermore, eBay specifically implements its own criteria for determining what listings rank higher whenever somebody searches for something on the site. This in turn, renders some good SEO practices that’d work perfectly for other sites – such as Amazon or Google – not as effective on the platform.

And this is an important distinction that bears elaboration. Even though you can receive traffic to your listings from external sources – like other search engines such as Google and Bing – it amounts to a relatively small number, usually less than 1% of your total views generated by the site’s own search engines.

This is why it is vital to play by eBay’s unique rules and apply SEO designed explicitly for their platform.

So, to help you with the process of doing a thorough and efficient SEO for eBay implementation, we’ve compiled a list of a few strategies anybody using the platform can benefit from by implementing them on their product’s listings.

The first step on your SEO for eBay journey has to be the proper research and selection of keywords.

They are the building blocks on which we’ll base the rest of our SEO strategies since they influence so much how eBay’s search engine selects your listings. It’s important to keep in mind that to target your keyword research specifically for eBay, you need to go about it a little differently than what you’d do for say, Google.

While you’d usually start your keyword research for a website or blog by using a tool such a Google’s keyword planner, finding the proper keywords that work efficiently for the eBay search engine is best done with a more analog approach, one that is more akin to advertisement. After all, at the end of the day we are trying to find the precise words your potential buyers use to find the thing you are selling, and there are a couple of routes you can take to get them.

Title and descriptions are the sections of a listing that are most under our control, as such, they are the ideal place to apply our intended SEO for eBay techniques.

Titles are incredibly important. They are the first contact your potential buyers will have with the product you are selling. It is also the most visible tool you’ll have (alongside your product’s picture) to make them click on your listings to check it out instead of the other choices.

As important as the title is, the process is surprisingly straightforward. Once you have done the proper keyword research, you have everything you need to put together a compelling title. Just use the keywords that best fit your product’s features and then incorporate the most effective keywords your research came up with.

However! You need to keep in mind that your title is intended to attract a human buyer’s attention as well as to be relevant to search engines. So, it is vital that you don’t just throw a long string of keywords with little meaning or harmony together in an effort to just rank higher. That would be detrimental in the long run. Instead, think of your keywords as Lego pieces. Build your perfect “advertisement copy” quality level title by figuring out the best way to assemble your keywords together. Think of something that will grab your potential buyer’s attention while covering your product’s characteristics.

Some other title recommendations and limitations

You have a maximum of 80 characters to work on your title, try to use them all without cluttering.

When it applies, include brand name, designer or artist.

Include item specific attributes – for example, when selling a blanket include its dimensions.

Avoid words like “wow” or “incredible”, buyers don’t search such terms and are put off by them.

Do not use all caps on your titles.

• The description doubles down the function of a title. It is the first important piece of information that interacts with your potential buyer once he comes into your listings. Just like the title, your intention here is to convey the features and functions of your product as accurately as possible, while incorporating the powerful keywords your research yielded.

  Descriptions should always be written with advertisement quality copy standards. Remember, just as the title, you are not only writing for a search engine to find you, but to have actual human beings interested and going for the product you want to sell.

•  

•  

  Some descriptions recommendations:

Start with the most critical details buyers will need.

Reiterate and include specific information such a size, colors, etc.

Be specific about packaging and what the product consists of.

Edit and format this section to be readable and attractive, with clear paragraph, punctuation and such.

We’ve covered the major points and sections of an eBay listings where you can, and should, focus your SEO efforts to maximize the potential exposure of your product’s listing and help you convert sells. However, there are a few other aspects of an eBay listings that affect your product’s visibility – both positively and negatively – and we wanted to cover them briefly before wrapping up.

Having a 30-Days return policy pushes you up in searches: eBay´s primary concern when ranking listings up or down is to efficiently connect interested buyers with legitimate sellers that will provide what they are looking for. To this end, they take into great consideration things like strong return policies that further proves the legitimacy of your product and services. Incidentally, not having said return policy pushes your listings down on search results.

Being an active seller: eBay’s search engines parse your activity as a seller within the site, which means that they take into consideration things like your feedback, DSR – or Detailed Seller Rating –, and the number of active listings you have at any given time. Listing and selling frequently help your overall ranking exposure, a thing that becomes an asset if you decide to apply a strategy of continually offering lowered priced, more straightforward items alongside the products you would typically focus on, as a way to keep a constant flow of transactions and good reviews.

Not converting sells: you need to be careful on instances where your optimization is bringing a lot of people in to look at your listings, but the terms of your service or characteristics of your products – such as price – are turning people off, since eBay ranks down pages that receive a lot of traffic but don’t convert into sells. This can also be an issue when your title doesn’t perfectly reflect what you are selling.

• Now we’ve covered the very basics as far as SEO for eBay implementations and strategies go. But keep in mind that eBay is a huge, very competitive arena and depending on your particular product it might be a challenge to obtain the desired results you are after just by covering the basics.

  If you are anything more than a casual eBay seller, have a business that transacts continuously on the platform, or are looking to grow your eCommerce exposure through it, it might be a good idea to contact an SEO expert.

  They can guide and implement both, basic and advanced SEO for eBay techniques that will put your listings and products not only on par with the competition but actually give you an edge and have your business grow faster.