The e-commerce industry is booming day by day. But as the popularity of Amazon and Walmart often dominates the industry, it becomes difficult for new e-commerce companies to differentiate themselves. With the right Ecommerce marketing strategy, it may be possible to distinguish your business from your competition and get your fair share of customers.
Do you know what is the right marketing strategy for your e-commerce site? Well, it is technical SEO that can make your ecommerce site rankings much better. If you are not up to date with technical SEO tips and tricks, it will affect your business to rank on the first page and get the visibility it deserves. In today's highly competitive market where your competition is Amazon or Walmart, first page ranking is not enough, you have to rank on top.
According to a report, by Search Engine Watch in 2020, the average click-through rate received by websites ranked No.1 is 32.5%, Rank No.2 is 17.6%, and Rank No.3 is by 11.4%. So ranking your ecommerce website at the top is a must if you want more business. Do you want to know how to rank your website high? Below are 12 amazing tips that will help you do better technical SEO and rank your website at the top.
Lets know what technical seo can do to Ecommerce Site
Technical SEO is directly related to the design and development of your website. It plays a crucial role in improving the search of your website. If the technical part of SEO goes unnoticed, it greatly affects your website by dropping your page rank and organic traffic. In case your website is not revisited for a while, with the help of technical SEO it is possible to assess the current situation of your site and find out the reason for your site ranking lower.
Site structure is very important:
Check if your site structure is making the content accessible to the visitors? Check your site structure of your website and make sure your important pages are within three clicks from the home page. Make site structure in this way:
Homepage → Categories → Subcategory → Products
Avoid adding subcategories in different sites. Categorize the products in the right way and make sure they don’t belong to multiple categories, and the URL length is not more than 160 character.
URL structure must similar to - www.abc.com/brand/category/product
For example, If you want to name a product page for mi note 7pro, URL should look like- www.abc.com/mi/smartphone/note7pro
Sitemap (XML/HTML)
There are two types of sitemaps: XML and HTML and each has its own strengths, roles and weaknesses.
HTML sitemaps are typically created to help buyers or customers navigate the platform. XML sitemaps, on the other hand, are there to ensure that search engine crawlers can properly index all of the URLs on your website.
Make your crawl budget high:
The crawl budget refers to the number of pages on your site that Google robots crawl on a given day. If your crawl budget is low, you may experience indexing issues that affect your search rankings. This is why optimizing the crawl budget is a must if you want to rank your site high. You can check your crawl budget using Google Search Console.
You can improve your crawl budget by following these things
- Optimizing the link structure of your site.
- Increase the Quality and number of backlinks.
- Fix broken link.
- Get your pages crawled that are important. Pages like thank you, order tracking etc need not be crawled. Hence you can include such pages in your robots.txt file with a disallow tag.
- Work on duplicate content removal.
- Update sitemap daily if possible.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt are files that indicate that a page or section of a website should not be crawled by search engine bots.
Use of Robots.txt:- Blocks pages that are non-public – like login pages, forms, or ones that contain sensitive information.
- Maximizes your crawl budget – block unimportant pages.
- Prevents resource pages from getting indexed – PDFs, images, etc.
Using relevant tools to crawl the website to identify and fix link issues:
Some of the tools mentioned below
- SEMrush
- Screaming Frog
- DeepCrawl
- Ahref
- Above tools can help you identify and fix different HTTP error issues, like 3XX redirection errors, 4XX Client errors, 5XX server errors.
Check Canonical tags
Big e-commerce sites often include product pages that can be accessed from different categories. Therefore, it can lead to different URLs with the same content. This canonical problem can be solved with a canonical tag. A canonical tag is a simple HTML element. It tells Google which URL should be crawled and displayed in the search result. Use canonical tags on the homepage wisely as the duplication of the homepage is quite natural in the case of ecommerce business.
Structured Data
Structured data can be used to improve the products of an e-commerce website in search results in rich snippets. In turn, give it a better chance to rank highly.
This data provides search engines with additional details that can help improve visibility, click-through rates and outperform competitors. Common forms of structured data to include are
- Product name
- Aggregate rating
- Price
- Availability
Adding these structured schemas to your product page will perfectly display the mark-up to the search engines. This improves its chances of ranking high on related query.
UX optimization for the mobile-first index:
In today's era of the mobile first index, UX plays a crucial role in SEO. If you want your customers to easily find products and transact online securely, your website should have UX-friendly. To optimize UX, you need to include the right images, graphics, animations, and CTAs (call to action).
Make sure your website is designed for mobile-first index. In doing so, you choose the mobile version as the fundamental version for indexing.
Redirect/ Use Notify CTA for product pages that are out of stock:
If you have a few pages with out-of-stock products, redirecting them to the next most relevant page is a wise move. Usually, site owners delete these pages resulting in a 404 error. This can negatively affect the search result. Other than that, the 404 error is quite annoying for visitors. Redirecting this page will resolve your issue. You can use 301 for a permanent redirect. By using 302, you can allow Google or other search engines to continue indexing the URL.
Second way is to include, a 'Notify Me' option with space to provide the email address of the concerned customer.
Develop unique content for every product page:
If your e-commerce site has a large number of product pages, you should develop unique content for the pages that are important and generate maximum traffic. Remember to use the "noindex" tag for pages that do not have unique content. Creating unique content will help solve the problem of duplicate content and improve the overall user experience. Make the content more conversational and engaging. Developing mistakenly duplicate content is a common problem for e-commerce sites. Avoid such problems by using canonical tags.
Use the latest technology:
Last but not the least, make sure all of your work is done using the latest technology. Whether protecting your site from cyber hacks or potential crashes or boosting your site's indexing, using the tip would help you the most. Remember to update every plugin or app, shopping cart, add-ons, and security path regularly.
The tips mentioned above will help you with technical SEO for your ecommerce website. Try them out to see how this will drive more sales conversions.
Contact us to opt for our E-commerce marketing services. Contact us if you need professional help.
