The importance of SEO in e-commerce websites is now known by everyone involved in the vast E-commerce industry. We have listed below 20 SEO steps that must be implemented for an effective SEO oriented E-commerce campaign :
What is 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
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
You also need to pay attention to Javascript optimization when optimizing for SEO on e-commerce websites. 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. Google bots should not encounter a complex website structure when navigating your website. If that happens, bots may not understand your website’s architecture and may index it incorrectly or may not reach your important pages.
Home —–>Category——>Product
7- Out of Stock Product
In case your product runs out of stock, your product page can be redirected to a 200 status code page, and a “notify me” button can be put on the page when the product is restocked.
It can also be directed to an upper category with a 301-302 redirect. Therefore, eliminating any problems in terms of SEO (search engine optimization).
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. Therefore, your pages may not be crawled by the googlebot.
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
Pagination has become undesirable in terms of SEO after the latest google updates. Instead you can opt for a infinite scroll, a feature that allows you to browse and scroll through website elements without stop.
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.
