John Mueller from Google answered a question about how many product listings on a page are recommended as optimal for ranking.
John Mueller suggested that the best answer might be found by considering the question from a different angle.
The person asked the question on Mastodon’s social website.
he he asked:
“@johnmu do you prefer a wide range of products (eg 30 products) on one page because offering many products is a ranking factor?
Or would you prefer a smaller, more targeted product range (eg 2 or 3 products) that contributes more to conversion (less choice stress) in terms of EEAT?
John Mueller suggested that the person asking the question should try to answer it from a usability perspective.
Mueller responded:
“@beresterk That sounds like something I’d defer to usability testing.”
Usability testing is a method of testing a product (or a web page in this case) that allows potential customers to interact with the web page.
How does Google approach usability testing?
In a Google podcast on usability testing, Jenny Gove, a UX researcher at Google, offered these ideas about practice:
“Usability testing is like, for me, exposing the problems and exposing what works really well for users and understanding why.”
The show’s host, Mustafa Kurtuldu, Senior UX Designer at Chrome (at the time), asked:
“How does one start researching when they know next to nothing?”
Jenny replied:
“If you’re thinking about your product, as you’re developing it at this stage of research, it’s great that people are using it for the tasks you’re planning it for.
So even if it’s friends, family, even if it’s people in the office, it’s great to have your product exposed to people like that so you can see what’s going on.
And in usability testing, we’re really looking for the problems that people are having and what works well for them and why it works well for them.
… you will see these things as they work.
…And so, you’ll identify your most common type of critical user journeys and take them through that.
And often, it resembles some language you use. We call that content, you know, the words that you have on your button or where you’ve put something, that just don’t make sense to most people.”
She also suggested that friends and family who will be testing may be biased, so it’s good to test with people outside of those circles at some point to get a more unbiased result.
A great way to perform usability testing on a website is by using Microsoft’s free user behavior analysis tool Clarity.
The purpose of Microsoft Clarity is to show how people interact with a website, such as understanding how far users scroll before leaving a webpage and other similar statistics.
Microsoft published a blog post that shows how to debug website usability.
They offered three areas where Clarity helps improve usability and user experience:
Increase product discovery Improve site navigation Create a responsive design
As an example, Clarity will show things like dead clicks, which are an indication that users are getting stuck on a certain part of the page. Excessive scrolling is another sign of poor UX.
What does Google prefer?
Returning to the question of how many products to use on a page, the subtext of Mueller’s answer could be to identify what number of products on a page is optimal for the user.
The essence of SEO is generally considered to be the optimization of a web page for ranking purposes, which means identifying what Google prefers.
So the person who asked the question responded to Mueller’s suggestion by doubling down on finding out Google’s preferences.
He asked:
“@johnmu thanks for replying, I appreciate it!
On behalf of the conversion type: Yes!
When it comes to SERP ranking, what does Google prefer or recommend?
Or in the end, does Google look at conversion rate to decide which category (store) page deserves a top ranking?
Am I answering my own question yet?”
John Mueller replied:
“@beresterk I don’t think Google has a preference for itself.
It’s almost certain that things are subtly classified differently, but that’s probably more anecdotal, and not by design.
Try it.
I imagine the biggest effect is really on the user side, which is more about your bottom line than anything else.”
Mueller didn’t shy away from advising the person to take a look at usability testing to better understand the ideal number of products to use on a web page.
He confirmed that pages could rank differently based on how many products are on the page, meaning changes in content.
But he suggested that these changes are not by design, implying perhaps that this is not a sort of sorting signal. Only Google responds to content.
It’s a good answer from Mueller because it reminds us that optimizing for Google isn’t always about how Google can respond to a change.
This may seem counterintuitive in the context of SEO, but Google now has many more signals related to user experience, such as the review system algorithm.
So it’s good to balance SEO by looking at a problem from a user’s context.
Read Mastodon’s question and answer here:
Prefer a wide range of products (eg 30 products) on one page?
Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero
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