One of the most excellent methods to attract new consumers is to increase traffic to your e-commerce site, but this is easier said than done.
You could use digital advertisements, but given how costly Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are becoming, it would be impossible to engage in competitive keyword bidding with more established e-commerce companies. Technical SEO for eCommerce comes into play here.
One of the fairest chances for reducing your reliance on sponsored channels, improving your Google search rating, and increasing organic traffic to your website is search engine optimization (SEO).
This post offers a little bit of everything for all skill levels, whether you are new to eCommerce SEO or just seeking innovative ways to increase traffic to your business. To go on to the next step, choose one of the following 10 helpful hints about technical SEO for eCommerce:
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on enhancing a website’s technical characteristics to raise the ranking of its pages in search engines. The three pillars that support the concept of “technical optimization” are making a website quicker, more straightforward to crawl, and more intelligible for search engines.
On-page SEO is concerned with enhancing aspects of a website to get better search engine rankings. On-page SEO is a larger category, of which technical SEO is a subset. It is the antithesis of off-page SEO, which is about increasing visibility for a website via other means. On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages of a website.
How important is technical SEO?
Although on-page SEO and content are important, website owners often disregard technical SEO because it sounds “complex.” Technical SEO, however, is essential since it enables search engines to crawl your website and rank it in the search results from the outset.
All the elements that make your website quick, responsive to mobile devices, user-friendly, and valuable are included in technical SEO. Without it, you can have a visually appealing website that runs slowly, is unusable on mobile devices, fails to point customers to the information they want, or has technical problems when visitors try to contact you or buy your goods.
There are innumerable specific advantages to using technical SEO for eCommerce, but the overall benefit is that if your site is thoroughly optimized, you are likely to produce more organic traffic.
These advantages pertain to making your website simpler to crawl, index, and browse so that you may attract more search engine visits. Below are only a few benefits of technical SEO for eCommerce:
- Following Google’s recommendations for optimizing websites
- Having a website that is accessible from any device, even mobile ones, is a desirable feature.
- Ensuring that all people may access your website swiftly
- Making it simple for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your website
- Getting rid of pop-ups and other intrusive features that hurt user experience
- Maintaining the security of your website.
- Creating a URL architecture that is favorable to search engines is a priority.
- Cleaning up your website by getting rid of 404 pages and broken links.
- The inclusion of structured data will improve the way that your sites appear in the search
- Making a robots.txt file available to search engines to instruct them what to crawl (and what not to crawl)
- Creating a sitemap for your website as a “roadmap” can help index.
Checklist to Improve Technical SEO for eCommerce
1> Check Your Website Structure
A website that has been thoughtfully organized not only helps send readers on the proper path but also makes it simpler for search engines to crawl and index the website. The higher a site ranks, the more logical and organized its structure is.
If you want to increase your technical SEO for an eCommerce website, you may need to rethink the navigation hierarchy on your site.
Determine whether or not the organization of the pages on your website flows by using a hierarchical tree structure to map out your website’s content. You will also need to evaluate the navigation menus, the pages of the categories and products, the internal linking, and the structures of the URLs.
2> Make an optimized URL
URLs are often ignored when thousands of goods are available on an eCommerce website. URLs are automatically generated by most content management systems (CMS). However, they are sometimes cumbersome and look something like this: http://yourdomain.com/index.php?=6512524=e03=?p=89. This URL is not very good since it does not give the search engines any information that would help rank this page.
A more optimal URL would be something like this: http://www.example.com/collections/blue-mountain-bike. In this illustration, the eCommerce website comes first, followed by the category to which the goods belong and then the product itself.
Always use hyphens to separate words in URLs, utilize a focal keyword, keep URLs as short as possible, and establish their hierarchy.
3> Secure Your Website
HTTPS, an abbreviation for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure,” is the primary protocol to guarantee that data transmission on websites, including online commerce, is done securely. It is essential to take advantage of it to ensure that your clients may disclose their personal information, including payment data, securely.
The algorithm used by Google evaluates the HTTPS implementation of a website; if two sites are tied for the same position, the one that adheres to the protocol is given priority over the other page. If you use one of the finest eCommerce systems, they already have guidelines that explain how to implement HTTPS into your website; all you have to do is follow their instructions.
In this particular scenario, it is not only a matter of applying SEO strategies but also about ensuring that the user experience is positive and that your client’s data are not jeopardized. Constructing a website conforming to the established safety procedures is essential.
4> Improve Your Loading Speeds
Let’s say you switch on your laptop or smartphone and go online to buy. You put the relevant search terms into the search engine since you’re searching for a wristwatch. You click on the first online shopping site that appears on the search engine results page (SERP), and it loads and navigates with more than sufficient time.
What steps would you take at this very moment? You will, in all likelihood, navigate away from that website and go to a different one.
That is the pivotal moment. Even if you provide exceptional items, helpful services, or other typical features, a slow-loading website might cause you to lose a significant portion of your consumer base.
In addition to considering the user’s viewpoint, the search engine says that site speed is a consideration in their ranking algorithms. This implies that the quicker your site loads, the higher the rating it will get from the search engine.
High-sized graphics are a significant factor in the poor loading performance of e-commerce websites. Although product photographs are heavily relied upon by e-commerce platforms, it is never advised to cut corners regarding image quality and standards.
Therefore, you may optimize the pictures to reduce file size without sacrificing image quality.
5> Optimized Content
In addition to the e-commerce pages, putting a blog on your website may be an effective technique for attracting more leads and improving your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). This allows you to investigate new keywords and offer valuable information to prospective consumers. However, it would help if you plan your blog before starting one.
Begin by researching the demographics of your target clients. Which fields do they concentrate their attention on? What are the primary requests that they have? How can you develop material that assists them in resolving the problems that they are having?
After analyzing it, choose the keywords that are going to be utilized for each post, and then invest in the creation of content that delivers information that is both helpful and interesting to your audience.
Create articles tailored to the various phases of the customer’s journey while maintaining a voice consistent with your company’s branding.
6> Link-Building
Building links lures other websites to link to your online storefront for commercial transactions. Because links provide a message to search engines indicating that the page in question is a high-quality resource that should be cited, this strategy is often used in Technical SEO for eCommerce.
The ideal strategy to construct backlinks is cultivating connections with influential individuals, bloggers, and respectable businesses that advertise your goods.
In essence, what you want to do is to have other websites link to your own. This may be accomplished via the writing of reviews, the distribution of press releases, and mentions of the brand.
7> Crawl Your Site
Utilize diagnostic tools like SEMrush and Screaming Frog to determine whether technical problems harm your SEO. Broken links, missing alt text or metadata, thin or duplicate content, insecure sites, and poor redirects will all be brought to your attention by an eCommerce website crawl.
Crawling your website regularly serves the same purpose as doing maintenance on a vehicle. It guarantees that all technical parts function to their full potential; if they aren’t, the issues can be readily fixed.
8> Optimized Images
Google’s ability to comprehend the information depends on the alt text, often known as the picture description. Images can improve a website’s ranking on Google if optimized. Always strive to be as concise and detailed as possible in your picture descriptions.
If you have a photograph of a dog, for instance, rather than simply referring to it as a “dog,” it is preferable to specify the particular breed rather than using the generic term. In this specific setting, optimizing keywords has to be considered to make the most of technical SEO for eCommerce. In addition, remember to reduce the size of the images so that they load more quickly.
9> Check Your Robot.txt File
A robots.txt file is a sort of file that provides instructions to web bots on which sections of a website they may or may not crawl. They restrict resources such as PDFs from being indexed and prohibit access to sites such as login pages that are either not publicly accessible or not of significant importance.
When uncontrolled, a search engine robot has the potential to crawl sites that are irrelevant to climbing the SERPs, such as shopping cart links, wish lists, test links, and other such connections.
10> Mobile Optimisation
In the US, smartphone use amounts to 70% of all digital media time. Mobile devices account for almost $3 of every $4 spent on online transactions. Additionally, Google made the transition to a mobile-first index in 2019, which means that SERP rankings and indexing start with the mobile version of your eCommerce site.
The same website best practices, such as organized pages, compressed graphics, and canonical data, apply using a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Keep in mind that mobile displays have a different interface from desktop screens, so pop-up advertisements that are effective on desktops may frustrate mobile consumers.
Wrap Up:
Polishing your brand occurs automatically as a byproduct of honing your SEO approach. When you provide consumers with the most up-to-date and accurate information on a product (promptly), a convincing argument for making a purchase, responses to the frequently asked questions (FAQs) they anticipate, and genuine endorsements from third parties, you give them reasons to revisit your website.
Developing a brand requires dedication over an extended period. Even if it does not immediately result in a purchase, it reassures clients that they can trust your company. In addition, paying close attention to your technical SEO for eCommerce is essential to gaining that trust.
