You may have spent a lot of time, effort, and money to make a visually appealing eCommerce website. The objective is to attract customers to get into your website, display their preferred product, and lead them to make a purchase. But is it enough to create a website that looks astonishing? Well, making your site visually unique is only half the way to get desired sales outcome. So, what’s the other half?
It is essential to focus on your overall website performance to rank better in Google Searches. Therefore, your website has to be well structured, SEO optimized, and technically sound as well. Implementing eCommerce search engine optimization is an essential step towards getting the best output.
In this guide, we will provide you with 6 crucial technical SEO tips for eCommerce stores. The guide will surely help you enhance your position on search engine result pages.
Technical SEO Tips for eCommerce websites
Search engine optimization is not just a single term or element to focus on. You have to utilize SEO on every website, including eCommerce sites. Why? The main purpose of creating a website is to display your content or products to your customers.
Therefore, you need to be found by the users or customers looking for anything related to your website. That is why SEO is a key factor for eCommerce stores when it comes to applying marketing strategies.
There are several valid reasons why Technical SEO for an eCommerce website matters. Let’s look closely at some compelling stats related to SEO-
- Most of the users (67.60%) click on the top results of search engine result pages.
- According to most professional marketers (70%), SEO is more effective than the pay-per-click method.
- A search engine accounts for around 93% of all web traffic.
- Around 53% of traffic on websites come from organic search
- The click-through rate is 28.5% of top search results on Google’s search engine result pages. But the CTR falls by the time you get below the 5th search result.
With all these stats in mind, let’s hop into our researched and proven SEO Tips for eCommerce websites.
Improve the Speed of your eCommerce Website
While focusing on technical SEO, take time to improve the speed of your eCommerce website. Your eCommerce website’s loading time affects your visitors’ activity on your site. Customers will exit your website if it takes more than three seconds to load a page. Therefore, your eCommerce store should display every single page without affecting customers’ patience.
Slow loading sites will be the reason for losing customers along with the sales opportunities. To grab every sales opportunity, you must focus on improving the site speed. There are tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights that will give you an insight into the loading time of your website. Moreover, you will get suggestions for improving the loading time of your website as well.
You can apply the following tactics to increase the loading time of your website:
- Minimize or reduce redirects because users prefer to get redirected to their searched terms rather than getting into an external advertisement or website. Moreover, fix the broken links with 301 or 202 errors.
- Reduce the image size on your site because a bigger image size affects the loading time.
- Upload videos on a dedicated or external video platform because it will help you load the videos faster from your site.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) If you are targeting customers from different parts of your globe. With this technique, you’ll have a server on the location of your sales. As a result, customers from a specific location will get your site’s information in a blink of an eye.
- Get the best hosting service that fits your business requirements and maintains the performance.
- Optimize the 3rd party scripts or plugins because it slows down the loading time of your website’s pages. Therefore, utilize the defer or async attributes of HTML that will load the scripts on a need-basis.
As you can see, there is some scope of improvement in a site’s background rather than improving the frontend. If you can do so, obviously, your site speed will increase significantly.
Optimize & create a Clean URL Structure
While discussing SEO Tips for eCommerce, URL structure must be considered as an essential factor. After conducting a search query, customers are redirected through an URL to your eCommerce website. Therefore, optimizing the URL assists the search engine bots in finding, crawling, and determining your website contents. Moreover, with a clean URL structure, your website indexation becomes easier.
A clean URL should include a logical navigation path and exclude numbers and letters. With a clear navigation path, customers can get an idea about where they are on a website. If your URL is not optimized or well-structured, it will look like this –
“https://wakamiglobal.com/dhwe=247/zhu0nun0=i/fhj4e
With the link mentioned above, you won’t get any idea about where you are on a website. Moreover, the search engines will be confused about the exact page location of a website. With an optimized and structured URL, users can easily understand where they are at your website.
“https://wakamiglobal.com/product-tag/handbags/”
With this URL structure, both the users and the search engine can easily understand where you are. In addition, you can include valuable keywords on the URLs to optimize them, which will help your website appear in relevant search results. In addition, a properly structured URL also gets a higher rank in a search result.
Optimize Category Page Structure
Category pages are crucial for generating more sales and conversion. Therefore, we are highlighting the scopes of applying technical SEO tips for eCommerce on category pages.
- Category pages have a huge potential of getting a higher rank on search engine result pages. Therefore, you should create a structure for a category that includes a maximum of three levels. The hierarchical structure should be – Category pages > Subcategories > Product Pages.
- Create a category URL that clearly describes your webpage without any confusing information. For example, if you sell clothes that include “Jacket” as one of the categories, the URL should be like this – www.xyz.com/clothes/Jacket.
- Good category titles with well-researched keywords are the best way to get noticed by the web crawlers. Optimized tiles with top keywords are easily discoverable by the users. Therefore, include keywords on category titles that matter the most such as brand name.
- In the meta description field, the category descriptions are inserted. You should high quality description, title on the meta description area. That is because high-quality content with unique and brief descriptions will significantly improve your click-through rate. In addition, try to provide short but keyword-included H1 tags and product descriptions.
- Change the default name of the images of your content and rename the file, including the keywords. Moreover, a short description with the keyword on the alter tag of the image. Optimizing both the image name and the alter tag adds a remarkable value to your SEO.
- Canonical URL is essential for extending the categories into multiple pages with multi-level filtering. Backlinks are attributed on the main category page via a canonical tag which helps you avoid duplicate contents. As a result, crawlers of google can easily identify your category and subcategory pages.
Structure your Data Properly
Structuring the data of your eCommerce website is the most important task for implementing technical SEO. To rank on top positions in a search result, you must represent structured data. Moreover, your website data should be appropriately structured to promote products via a product feed file. As a result, you can easily promote your products through numerous marketing channels and easily advertise your products.
So, for an eCommerce website, this information must be structured –
- Product name
- Review or rating
- Price
- Product Availability
- Category Name
This information will allow you to specifically indicate the product page which you want to be discovered. As a result, shoppers with relevant product searches will end up in your store by clicking the search results. When the product information comes with properly implemented keywords, it works magically for the sellers. Customers get attracted by-products with a high review, availability, and relevant keywords on title and description.
Work on Your Site’s Security
Website security is one of the major concerns when it comes to technical SEO tips for eCommerce. Shoppers provide sensitive personal information while purchasing products from a website. Therefore, to make your customers feel safe and comfortable, you need to ensure security on your site.
Make sure your eCommerce website includes a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. This certificate encrypts the sensitive data on your website and protects your data from getting stolen. Web addresses starting with HTTPS indicate that the site is secured and the connection is encrypted. Additionally, a green padlock in front of the URL in the search bar means the website is SSL certified.
To get a higher rank in Google search results, an eCommerce website must be SSL certified since google considers it an essential ranking signal. Let’s say you are purchasing a product from an eCommerce site, but there is a “Not Secure” sign just beside the URL. Would you use the credit card after seeing the message with that message?
Include XML sitemap and robots.txt file on Your Site
XML and robots.txt files are two crucial site components that we should not avoid while discussing SEO Tips for eCommerce.
XML sitemap directs search engines robots to navigate your eCommerce site and index the URLs across your entire site. In a word, this map makes the site’s information more accessible for the machines. Sitemaps include a list that has been set up with XML, and search engines can determine what the page is all about. Here is an example of an XML sitemap:
XML sitemaps requests search engines to crawl an URL for serving the SEO purposes of a website. WIth the site maps you are recommending, the search engines crawl and rank specific pages of your site.
On the other hand, the robots.txt file excludes pages you don’t want search engines to crawl or index. As a result, bots won’t make your site slow with too many crawl requests.
For technical SEO, these two components significantly affect Google’s crawling action on your site. With the help of XML sitemap & robots.txt files, search engines can find, crawl, and index your site’s pages effectively.
Final Thoughts
To boost your business and the brand image, you must implement technical SEO for your eCommerce website. There are many SEO tactics that you can apply to your site, but only proven methods can bring you guaranteed success. Therefore, we have developed six crucial Technical SEO Tips for eCommerce Stores that will surely improve your site’s performance and get a better rank on SERP.
