eCommerce SEO Guide
When people think of SEO, they tend to think about keywords, and optimizing copy for those keywords so it will rank in search engines. But there’s a lot that goes on behind-the-scenes that can make or break your search engine success. And it relies on technical SEO.
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Technical SEO is an often overlooked, but vital, part of search optimization. Your site’s structure and performance can have a huge impact on your eCommerce site’s Google rankings, so it’s important to spend some time focusing on technical considerations.
Technical SEO shouldn’t be confused with on-page SEO, which is where individual pages are optimized for search based largely on keywords and content. On-page SEO is important—in fact, we dedicated lesson 7 to it. But technical SEO impacts your eCommerce site as a whole, and while largely unseen, it’s just as important.
Put simply, technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google find and index your pages. And there are a lot of factors that go into it. In this lesson, we’ll go over the most common considerations for your eCommerce site.
There are a lot of considerations that go into good technical SEO — too many to cover in one lesson. But these items will have the most impact on your eCommerce’s site index and ranking.
According to research done by Google, the probability of a bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. That means that if your website takes three seconds to load, you could lose almost a third of your potential customers.
Page speed is also a ranking factor for Google Search, so the faster your site loads, the better your ranking is likely to be.
More than half of all Google searches happen on a mobile device, and m-commerce continues to grow year-over-year. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, then it’s not optimized for Google.
A sitemap is a file that lists a website’s important pages, and it’s a must-have. It helps search engines to understand your website structure so they can crawl all of your essential pages.
Most CMSs and eCommerce platforms will automatically create an XML sitemap for your eCommerce site.
URLs need to be relatively short, easy to read, and contain your target keywords. It pays to put in some thought about their structure and maintain consistency throughout your site.
Google won’t ding you for having duplicate content on your site necessarily, but it can still affect your rankings. When there are multiple pages that are virtually the same, Google’s algorithm can have a hard time figuring out which one should be ranking for the target keywords. This often results in the less ideal page ranking higher, or all pages canceling each other out.
A major contributor to this problem for eCommerce brands is copy-and-paste product descriptions for similar items, auto-generated URLs for category and product pages that duplicate content, and templated content that repeats on every page.
Google likes comprehensive pages, and word count is a factor in how pages get ranked. This obviously presents a problem for eCommerce brands, who aren’t going to wax poetic in a 1,500-word description for each product. That said, ensuring that you have unique, descriptive content for each product will go a long way toward helping your rankings.
Broken links are literal dead-ends, for both your customers and the Google crawler that reads your site. Find them and prune them.
Google wants your navigation to be uncomplicated and user-friendly, and prevailing wisdom says that pages should not live more than three clicks away from the home page. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it can help guide the structure of your site and you can build new pages with this in mind.
This is the HTML markup on your page that allows Google to identify information that it can display as Rich Snippets in search results. Structured data is also referred to as schema markup, and the primary schema considerations for eCommerce are product reviews and ratings, price, product availability, and video.
If your store lives on Shopify, BigCommerce, or another large eCommerce platform, much of this work is likely done for you, based on the most recent industry standards and best practices. It’s still worth using the tools at your disposal to test your site’s technical SEO on an ongoing basis and make improvements where needed.
