Over the last 5 years, Flipkart has gained some massive momentum as an online e-commerce marketplace. They started their resurgence with Flipkart-only mobile releases and have now made Flipkart the default shopping app for many.
For Flipkart, fashion has been a central offering in its business for a long time. They started in 2012 with the acquisition of Jabong and Myntra and have since then been growing steadily. This has naturally made the search results page on Flipkart really competitive, and winning in this game would need better SEO for the Flipkart search engine.
Introduction to SEO for Flipkart
Traditionally, users discover your product on the platform through one of 3 ways:
- Search
- Product Recommendations
- In-app advertisements
Of these three methods, Search and in-app advertisements are the most controllable ways to ensure your discovery; however, not everyone wants to burn a hole in their pocket doing ads. So, we must learn how to rank better in the search results on the Flipkart search results page (Also known as SERP).
To understand the importance of SEO on Flipkart, search for any common products, like sneakers or blouses, and you'll see that an overwhelming majority of the search results are not the big brands that you have seen on television. This is not some random coincidence; this is, in fact, an example of how good SEO is hiding the more established brands on the platform that intend to get user attention via more traditional brand placements.
SEO on Flipkart varies from your usual SEO in a few different places:
- All products have user ratings and comments
- More often than not, users do not need to open your listing to see your listing
- Multiple sellers could be selling the exact same product, which makes it difficult to differentiate between them
- Your product image is always shown in the preview
These constraints pose a rather interesting set of potential optimisations to get people to come to your product page rather than anyone else's. Keywords can get you on the SERP, but they still don't lead to any sales.
| Traditional SEO | Flipkart SEO |
|---|---|
| Title | Product Image |
| Meta Description | Price |
| Search Snipper | Rating |
| Website Authority | Reviews |
| Click → website | Product preview → purchase |
Search vs Recommendation
Let's address the elephant in the room before moving forward: yes, you can control recommendations to a certain extent, but most of what helps with showing up on the Search Engine Results Page for Flipkart can also help you pop up in recommendations. However, Flipkart relies on user data to generate recommendations more than just keyword matching.
For most users, product discovery begins at search and continues on with recommendations. Hence, it is important to try and find ways to get shown in the recommendations, but the platform does not give us a lot of control over where and how we get shown in the recommendations.
Hence, my recommendation is to focus heavily on getting into the search engine results. Ranking higher in search can organically drive traffic to your listing, which can in-turn help the algorithm select your listing for the next set of recommendations.
Key factors to rank better on Flipkart
There are no clear guidelines around SEO on Flipkart, and these factors are a blend of information available online and data presented by Flipkart. Most of these factors boil down to viewing the platform from a user's perspective, since that's what Flipkart will be trying to do as well.
Product Title
In traditional SEO, the titles are what the user sees before deciding to click on the link. However, on Flipkart, this trend changes. The title is generally ignored. When looking at a search result listing (Fig. 1), we can see the Brand, image and price tag cover a much larger surface area as compared to the title.
Keep the product title short; ideally, it should be just the name of the product. Try not to stuff too much information here. Many listings use this space to match common search terms; for example, some smaller brands name their products "casual sneaker dress shoe" intentionally to catch the popular keywords "casual dress shoe", "sneaker shoe", and "casual shoe".
Product Images
This is the most important factor. As a share of the total visible space allocated to a listing, the product image captures the highest percentage. Hence, this is where you want to pay attention. Think of the first image as a small banner ad for your listing.
Many sellers resort to shortcuts or tactics such as adding a small "authorised" seal or adding text to this image to make the product image more appealing. But this is considered a violation of the platform's rules and can lead to your listing being removed from the platform, or worse. So it's important to keep in mind that this is the place to put the most attractive product image. Do not reach for gimmicks or shortcuts to gain attention.
Some things that I've seen work well are:
- Creative visualisations: adding an interesting background and showing the product in creative ways can be a great way to stand out from other products.
- Model Photos: Don't just take a picture of the product and remove the background. Get a model (or use AI) to style your product and then use those pictures for the listing. This can help users visualise how they can style your item.
Product FAQs
FAQs aren't always indexed by Flipkart, but it's not a far-fetched assumption that Flipkart would rather surface listings with some decent FAQs as compared to products with no FAQs.
You need to try and answer all the questions posted by the users, try to use product related keywords in your responses so that it can add towards your search relevance.
Product Variations
This is an under rated method to get your listing a higher chance of being viewed. Adding variations to the same product allows Flipkart to show the same product for different search results. You can target more users with the same product.
For example, take the listing: "Womens bracelet", your product variations could easily target "Womens bracelet pink", "Womens bracelet silver", "Womens bracelet golden" and the list goes on.
Product Videos
Now, product videos are not always the best way to rank on the Flipkart search algorithm but we have seen a huge jump in video based e-commerce and this has changed how the top listing on Flipkart look. Almost every listing on Flipkart, today, has a video in the 2nd position of their media for the listing.
Right now, there are no guidelines around the product video quality. The video should ideally be able to showcase your product well. In case you don't have any videos, do not worry. You can create product videos on our product video platform, MakeReels.in
Product Ratings and Reviews
Last but not the least, you need to have decent product ratings. Most of flipkarts users are viewing Flipkart via their phone. This is an importat distinction to understand because of how Flipkart has decidede to add the star rating on the product preview on mobile devices but has no ratings added to the preview on their desktop.
This distiction is interesting, if most your users are purchasing or browsing your products on mobile, you need to have a good star rating since that will determine what the user will browse and eventually purchase.
Methods to Rank on Flipkart
In this section we talk about the tools and methods that can be used to rank on flipkart. This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully its a wide enough list to get you started.
Keyword Search
This is arguably, one of the most challenging steps. There are no established keyword search tools for Flipkart. You are stuck using one of two methods:
1. Online Free Tools
I have seen some tools that do a half decent job of approximating relevant keywords based on a few initial keywords. Ecom Sarthi has one of the best tools for Flipkart keyword research.
2. Using Flipkart Search
Now, this is an age old trick that has been used on search engines for a long time. You log into flipkart and type in the search term that you might want to rank on, when searching you will find additional keywords in the autocomplete. These are generally long-tail keywords for the same keyword that you're entering. You can additionally, scrape your competitors pages and find the keywords that they are using and you can try using those keywords to find long tail keywords and so on and so forth. This is a time-taking process but in the process, you will build an intuition for which products are ranking and you might observe some other patterns within your niche.
Page Optimization
Page optimizations for Flipkart are quite simple. Make sure that you include the brand name, the product name, the product sizes (if applicable), the key features and the variants.
1. Brand Name And Product Title
Long tailed keywords in fashion include things like the brand name and the exact product name. So adding the right brand name and product title can help you rank on these long tailed keywords rather easily.
2. Product Sizes
For most searches in fashion, Flipkart offers the ability to filter based on size availability. Having more sizes available can help you rank on the first position for anyone using these filters. This reduced your need to rank first always to get a purchase.
3. Variants
Most users in fashion look for variants, colour variants especially. Adding variants on your page will help increase dwell time on the page, signaling to Flipkart that your product is worth promoting to the top.
Product Images and Videos
Product images have the highest contribution in increasing CTR (Click-through Rate). Using high-quality photots is very important. When deciding which picture to use first and which images to use next, you need to consider the fact that the first image is the cover image that gets shown on the SERP. Wheras the other media is shown when the user is hovering over the product.
Your first image needs to be able to stand out from the rest of the competition. Style is a very subjective topic and the jeans that are appealing to a 18 year old will be vastly different from what a 25 year old will be interested in. So, you have to try and reach out to all the audiences. Try to have high-contrast backgrounds and use vibrant coloured backgrounds to catch more attention.
Your second or third image can be a model styling the item in different ways. These images will be seen by the user when hovering over the listing or when they open up the listing. These images can vastly boost the users confidence in the product. Fashion is a category where people want to be able to image themselves using the item, so it is imperetive for you to understand your audience well enough to be able to guess how the average buyer wants to look like. This can help with conversion of customers who are in the consideration phase as well as help convert viewers into customers.
Another important part of the media proof in fashion is to have videos that show off the product. While the content of the video has not been proven to help you rank yet, if the content is worthwhile then the dwell time on the page increases. This dwell time increase can be significant considering users are willing to spend upto 60 seconds watching a video as compared to a few seconds glancing product images. So, consider framing your e-commerce video as a product ad.
Optimise Reviews, Ratings and Availability
Most of these are supply-chain challenges. Flipkart is not going to rank you number one, if your product is out of stock. Users are going to rate you poorly if your delivery is not on time. Apart form logistical challenges, poor product quality or exaggerated claims hurt your ratings too. It is very important that you establish a solid quality control check before sending goods to the customer. Make sure that the colour and sizes are accurately represented on the product page and for clothes, do not repackage returned items without proerly washing or dry-cleaning. These are small things that most suppliers ignore and these come back to bite the suppliers with low ratings.
Conclusion
Ranking on the SERP on Flipkart, right now, is easy. You mantain prompt service, ship good quality products and put in effort into representing your product well and you should win. After all, this is exactly what a good customer facing business should do. While putting up products on Flipkart, there is reletively little control that you have over how the listing gets viewed but you can optimise on some very simple parameters to get much higher CTRs and better SERP rakings.
