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List Smarter, Sell More This Holiday Season
Hello Sellers,
We’re getting closer to Black Friday and Small Business Saturday! I hope last week’s trend reports and our new global advertising campaign gave you some fresh ideas. Today, I’m tackling another popular seller question from our Winter Seller Check-In about how to improve listings and increase visibility with SEO.
Question #1: “How do I make sure my listings are getting appropriate traffic?”
Once your great inventory is listed, the next step is optimization. eBay provides robust tools in Seller Hub to help understand your listings visibility, improve conversion, and take action.
Use Traffic Report to Spot and Fix Performance Gaps
In Seller Hub, the Traffic Report breaks down impressions, views, and sales conversion so you can pinpoint where performance is strong or may be breaking down. At eBay Open, our Product Manager David Bernstein walked through how to read the report and explained common causes and fixes for low impressions and low conversion.
Actions to improve low impressions:
- Poor SEO — Optimize titles with popular search keywords
- Wrong category or missing item specifics — Add/fix item specifics (brand, size, type, GTIN/UPC, color, etc.)
- Non‑competitive pricing or shipping — Use Product Research to check sold comparisons
Actions to improve high impressions but low conversion:
- Thin or unclear descriptions — Enhance descriptions: Clear and organized; include item condition, dimensions, and FAQs.
- Expensive or slow shipping — Offer faster options or free shipping where feasible.
- Uncompetitive pricing — Adjust pricing and create offers: Send offers, run sales, or run volume pricing or coupons.
- Negative feedback or low buyer trust — Address feedback: Request revisions when appropriate and respond to negative feedback.
Bonus: David answered the age‑old question — “How can I have a watcher with no views?” — in the session.
Watch the full session on Optimizing your Business Operations.
Use Listing Quality Report to Strengthen Your Listings
Curious how your listings stack up? The Listing Quality report in Seller Hub provides you with analysis of your listings – at listing and category level – and makes recommendations to improve your listing quality.
This downloadable report gives sellers a quick and clear picture of how they are performing compared to similar sellers, and was designed with input from the seller community. The report can be accessed within Seller Hub’s Performance tab under Summary and Traffic pages.
What the report recommends:
Item level actions
- Recommends specific actions to improve your listing quality like adding photos, improving your title, and adding critical information like the specific brand.
Your performance vs. competitors
- Your performance compared to other sellers selling in that category and condition. This can help you prioritize your efforts into the areas of your business that need it the most.
Google Shopping insights
- Listing level report on which items are being rejected by Google and how to fix them.
Watch the full session on using the Listing Quality Report.
Question #2: “How can I get more buyers to see my listings using SEO?”
We invited Google to join our Search team at Winter Check-In to share best practices that help your listings surface on eBay and in external search. Strong titles and complete item specifics are the fastest levers to increase discoverability. In fact, better item specifics can help deliver up to 4x more traffic to your listing.
Title Best Practices
- Keep titles to a max of 80 characters
- Mobile first: the first ~60 characters are always visible (varies by device)
- Frontload important words such as brand, model, size, color, and key feature.
- Avoid extraneous symbols/words (e.g., “L@@k”); they can cut CTR by up to 4x.
- Avoid punctuation, emojis, and non‑text characters
- Be concise; don’t repeat data already captured in item specifics (e.g., “New,” “Free Shipping”)
Item Specifics Best Practices
- Sellers who provide at least 7 attributes perform over 2x better than those with 1
- Provide real, structured values:
- GTIN/UPC/EAN where available
- Core descriptors like color, size, team, parallel, material, and style
- Fill out what’s relevant and accurate to your item and category
- Category nuance matters (e.g., sports trading cards often benefit from 12+ specifics)
Watch the full Google and eBay SEO Best Practices Session for image best practices to complement your SEO and improve conversion.
We’ll continue sharing more answers from your top questions — next week we’ll dive into marketing to your buyers using eBay’s tools. Thanks for everything you do, and here’s to strong visibility and conversions as we head into peak season.
Thanks,
Ron Jaiven, Vice President & General Manager, eBay North America
