eCommerce Analytics

Google engineer Matt Cutts recently made some remarks that implied Google was ready to start penalizing websites that were too slow. He also hinted that it might not just be a token nod, either, and that site speed could become a major ranking factor in search engine results. So what can you do to help speed up your eCommerce site?

No Shortage of Options

The good news? There are hundreds of ways to squeeze better performance out of your site. The bad news? There are hundreds of ways to squeeze better performance out of your eCommerce site.

You’ve got a list of a million things you want to improve on your site. You can’t put them all aside to begin a comprehensive new initiative to speed up page load times. So what are the things that can give you the most bang for your buck?

Three 60 Second Tweaks

If your site uses Apache as its web server (most do) and you host it yourself you have access to 3 quick tweaks that can yield some serious speed results.

1) Enable CSS and JavaScript compression. In modern sites, CSS and JavaScript can comprise the majority of each HTML page. By letting Apache compress them before sending you’ll cut their size by up to 90%. Just ass this code to the .htaccess file in your website root directory:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>


2) Set a future expires header for your product images. If you’re like most retailers, you product images don’t change too often. Take advantage of that by allowing users to cache your product images for longer periods of time. By setting a product’s image to expire a month in the future instead of a minute or an hour you give users a snappier experience while decreasing your server load. Of course, then if you update your image and you don’t want your users to have to wait a few weeks to see the new one you’ll have to change the image file name for the browser to get it. To set a cache for your product image files, add this to the .htaccess file on your web root directory:

<FilesMatch "/products/.*\.(jpe?g|png|gif)$">
ExpiredActive ON
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
</FilesMatch>


The above example assumes your product images are in a directory called “products”. You’ll probably have to change that and maybe get a little creative with the FilesMatch regular expression syntax to get this just right. You can learn how FilesMatch works here.

3) Disable ETags. ETags are designed to allow browsers to check in with your web server to see if its already got a particular image or other component cached. So using them should, in theory, speed up your site. But there is some weirdness with the way that Apache constructs them that makes them not work very well for sites that have more than one web server handling the load. Unless you have just one web server or have a specific ETag caching strategy in place, you’re better off disabling the functionality since it reduces the overall number of requests a browser needs to make. To disable ETags, add this code to the .htaccess file in your web root directory:

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

Time’s up

That wasn’t too bad, was it? By doing just these three things you can significantly reduce your site load time and avoid any coming Google penalty without investing too much time and effort.

A well known SEO and SEM strategy for smaller retailers is to dominate niche long-tail keywords instead of competing head to head with big merchants for popular phrases. So instead of trying to rank for blu ray player, a better strategy might be to research keywords that have less competition (say, cheap blu ray player) and try to own those instead. But what happens when popular tools used for this type of keyword research have flaws that raise questions about the validity of their results?

Two of the most common tools for keyword research are free and come from Google itself: the creatively named Keyword Tool and a newer offering, Google Insights for Search. Both tools, more or less, report search volume for a given set of keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool provides an estimated absolute number of searches for a term while Google Insights provides a relative normalized value that makes sense only when compared to other terms or past data.

The problem is that the data in each tool is, more often than not, is contradictory.

Let’s consider our search for Blu-Ray players. First, here’s what the Keyword Tool has to say about the search volume for blu ray player:

The phrase match volume is 1,830,000 while the broad match volume is 4,090,000.

What does Google Insights tells us about the keyword blu ray player?

It scores the phrase match a 29 vs. broad match of 38. In effect, Google is saying that broad match volume is 224% more than the phrase match volume. But the Keyword Tool tells us that broad match volume is only 131% more than phrase match volume. This is a big difference.

It gets even worse when we get into head to head comparisons using a broad match long-tail keyword. Let’s take a look at the keywords blu ray player and cheap blu ray player in Keyword Tool:

We see 8100 searches for cheap blu ray player and 4,090,000 for blu ray player. According to the Keyword Tool, blu ray player is searched for 500 times more often than cheap blu ray player.

For the same keywords Google Insights shows:

A score of 1 for cheap blu ray player and 38 for blu ray player means that according to Google Insights, blu ray player is searched for only 38 times more often than cheap blu ray player.

The tools disagree with each other by an astonishing factor of 1300%.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Mediocre

We can’t heap too much blame on Google. They themselves say that the tools use different methods to analyze their data. They’ve also made no secret that their tools are not particularly accurate when studying low volume keywords.

But if we can’t trust in Google’s own tools using their own data when it comes to keyword analysis, who can we trust? It’s unlikely that 3rd party tools will yield better results given their reliance on sampling and secondary data sources.

Given all its flaws, Google’s tools are still the best available (certainly the best free tools available) so we hold our nose and take the results with a gallon of salt. Ultimately using Keyword Tool or Google Insights will give us a general idea of where opportunity may lie, but only real world testing will tell us for sure.