The importance of SEO in e-commerce websites is now known by everyone involved in the vast E-commerce industry. There is no limit to the digital strategies that brands offering products and services, especially in specific areas, can produce with many technical operations to reach their potential customers and benefit from the benefits of e-commerce SEO!
Have you met Growth Marketing, the broad digital marketing that combines 360-degree digital strategies and tries to reach customers through different communication channels? If you haven’t yet, we recommend you to read our ‘Growth Marketing‘ content.
SEO Strategy on E-commerce Sites
The SEO strategy is a marketing strategy created for services and products while working on a road plan about the future of a site. E-commerce sites are an accumulation of efforts to produce an SEO strategy, with an aim to reach the user in the fastest and most efficient manner possible. Thanks to product marketing techniques, you can create efficient product pages and categories for your potential customers by optimizing the website architecture, performance, and accurate information of your current website.
How to apply SEO strategies for e-commerce sites?
Since SEO strategy for Ecommerce websites consists of wide range of applicable criteria, it is important to check which of these strategies are suitable for your site. The most important step is to make sure that you optimize for the SEO strategies that we mentioned below:
1. Website Speed
Maintaining fast website speed would be the most effective way to start optimizing for SEO Ecommerce strategies, considering the fact that websites with high site speed are ranked high by Google. Site speed is an important SEO ranking factor that allows you to rank higher on SERPs. Thanks to high website speed, your website’s bounce rate will also be low.
The best way for website speed optimization is as follows;
- File Optimization
- Image/Video Optimization
- Lazy Loading
- Removal of unnecessary files and codes
- Investigation of server problems
2. Mobile First Indexing (MFI)
MFI is another metric we should pay attention to when optimizing for SEO on e-commerce sites. With Responsive Design, all content in the web version of our site is also available in mobile version. Since Google is switching to Mobile-First Indexing, your mobile design must be perfect and facilities for the highest possible speeds.
3. Crawlability and indexability
Google bots crawl your e-commerce site and scan it from top to bottom. As a result of this crawl, it assigns an index to your site through the keywords in your content. When people later use E-commerce search queries, those with the highest level of relevance among the indexed websites rank higher.
- HTML+CSS+JS
- What we see: User Interface
- What Google Bot sees: Source Codes
4. Javascript Optimization
Javascript optimization can be especially important on websites with custom software and can be intervened faster. Since JS files cause more weight than other files, there may be visible changes in site speed and loading as a result of optimization work. With URL Inspection Tool on Google Search Console, we can launch a query on whether Google indexed our page or not.
Linking should not be done with JS. Since Google bots do not crawl javascript files, they cannot access the category you are referring to. Therefore, the bot will not reach any product in that category. Linking should be using an href=”” tag.
5. Crawl Budget
Since there can be many pages listed on any e-commerce website, we need to be pay attention to the crawl budget when optimizing for SEO. Google assigns a certain crawl budget to each web page. For this reason, we must create a crawl budget that will correlate with our website correctly and positively.
If there is no-index tag applied, google will not index these pages. Pages that do not attract traffic should be left out the crawl budget using a no-index tag.
6. Site Architecture
Another issue we need to consider when optimizing SEO for E-commerce Websites is the website’s architecture. Breadcrumb in the site architecture is one of the best examples of this. With breadcrumb or menu, you can show users and search engine bots how to navigate from the first page to the last page and which pages are linked and which pages are not.
Simple Site Architecture Example: Homepage —–> Category Page ——> Product Page
7. Out of Stock Product
If you place ‘Out of Stock’ or ‘Notify When Arrived’ buttons on your product pages in cases where our website is out of stock, users will not see 404 pages and will be able to request products. So why are we making this suggestion?
Mostly out of stock product pages returning a 404 status code indicates that ‘not found’ pages are increasing on many e-commerce websites and users cannot reach some products they want to reach. If we do not want to experience such situations and do not want the user to jump from our site; You should redirect the method we recommend or the relevant page with 301 permanent or 302 temporary redirection.
8. Duplicate Pages
One of the biggest problems we encounter when performing SEO analysis on E-commerce Sites is that each of the meta descriptions, titles and content are not unique.
Duplicate-titled pages and URLs can negatively impact your crawl budget. In this case, our actual pages that we want to be crawled are not crawled and our traffic values may decrease.
This problem is usually encountered in e-commerce websites with a large number of products and products variants. For example, let’s imagine that we are selling a phone with different color options; The content and titles of these product pages will be almost the same, and this will most likely lead to a double content-title problem. In order to avoid SEO problems of this kind, we can solve the issue as follows;
- After determining one of the product variants (Let us say: The black, 64GB model) as the main page to be crawled and accessed, we add the “canonical” tag to the code on the other product variants to indicate to the search engine that this is our main page.
- Or you can add a “noindex” tag so that the search engine does not index pages other than the main product page.
9. Pagination & Infinite Scroll
Whether you use pagination or infinite scroll on your website! The main point you need to pay attention to here is whether your pagination is working correctly.
For example, if you enable the infinite scroll feature on your category and product pages, then you should pay attention to the following tags in the HTML and give them to the search engine more accurately. Although Google has not been interested in prev-next tags since 2019, some search engines like Bing can look at these tags to understand pagination.
The key point here is, do you really want the next product pages to be indexed? If you do, you can present these pages to your users with a more unique URL, Meta tag and Canonical.
10- Sitemaps
Another SEO optimization for E-commerce websites is sitemaps. If you have a large website with a high product range and a large number of brands, all brand’s categories should be redirected to separate sitemaps. Your link setup needs to be dynamic: It should update automatically every time a product is added or removed.
Extra Info: Your sitemap files must be in XML format.
11- Log Analysis
E-commerce SEO log analysis is a clear analysis of which pages the Google bot crawled on your e-commerce website. The log provides info on date ranges, crawl frequency, and response codes.
We can visualize such data by exporting them to excel.
12- Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup provides a user-oriented view by displaying various snippets of the website in a certain SEO oriented way.
The most commonly used schema models are organization and sitelink search box schema.
Organization: Information about the site.
Sitelink search box: It is a search box that displays relevant links to different sections of the site for the user, without them entering the site itself! This feature is super helpfuls, as it allows us, using Google Search Console, to examine the mistakes we made in the product section.
13- Sites with Multilingual Content
Language optimization for SEO is key if your content is multilingual, Let’s assume that a website has content in both English and Turkish languages. In this case, Hreflang tags should be marked by specifying the Turkish version and English version of the x product on the site in the page source code. Thus, a correct reference is made to the bots.
The x-default parameter will notify the google bot that the site has language support If it was redirected to the landing page.
14- Keeping In Touch With Google Algorithms & Updates
Following Google algorithms and updates will provide you with the resources and most important information to make your site compatible with Google. You can check the changes, updates, and arrangements made by Google from this link.
For example, one of Google’s updates is the Google MUM Algorithm. You can directly optimize your website for this algorithm.
15- One-Page SEO Elements
- Creating SEO Friendly URLs,
- Writing Meta Titles and Descriptions compatible with your content,
- Constructing a Content Hierarchy,
- Optimizing images,
- Publishing high quality content.
While doing On-Page SEO, you need to apply these optimizations perfectly on your website.
16- Competitor Analysis
It is very important to conduct a competitor analysis when optimizing for SEO for e-commerce sites. You need to spot weaknesses by analyzing the points where your competitors website is better than yours.
By examining your competitor’s most indexed pages, you can develop a competitive strategy accordingly.
17- Keyword Analysis
By analyzing how many keywords the competing sites has in their content, you can utilize these Keywords to get ahead of your competitors with more quality and relevant content.
18- Understanding User Intent (User-Intent)
While optimizing for Seo on e-commerce websites, you need to analyze the user search intent very well and create your page content with this strategy.
User search intent is classified as follows:
Navigational: Query based on a general search
Informational: Query based on information
Commercial:Query based on a purchase
Transactional: Query based on user interaction
19- Featured Snippets
With snippets such as paragraphs-listings-tables, your website can gain the possibility of appearing in the first rankings on Google.
20- Site Migration
If you are moving your e-commerce site to another domain, you need to pay attention to the following SEO considerations. In order to avoid losing all that hard earned rankings from your old domain.
- Preparing a list of the old URLs and directing them to the new domain.
- Updating the HTML tag
- Editing in-site links
- Search Console check up
- Creation of new search console accounts
- Final check ups
You should not forget 301 redirects. 301 redirects are necessary for you to transfer all backlinks authority to the new domain.
