It’s important to be open to change when it comes to SEO. ECommerce businesses need to be open to change and adapt with Google constantly changing its algorithm. What can you do to ensure your marketing strategies continue to drive revenue and growth?
Online Shopping Versus In-Store
2020 proved unpredictable. Both smaller and larger brands have been affected by major events. These events have led to many stores closing resulting in a direct impact on eCommerce shopping. In 2020, it is expected that eCommerce will experience a greater impact from physical store closings than in 2019.
Consumers have changed their shopping habits because of these extraordinary events. Many people shop online and take advantage of curbside pick-up. They also look for unique retailers that can offer an experience that matches local health guidelines.
Businesses need to be aware of how consumers’ purchasing habits change as they move into 2021. Lifestyle, economy, and many other factors all play a part in their buying behavior.
The online buyer’s journey has changed
As more people look online to shop for big, small, planned, and impulsive purchases, the number of online shops will increase dramatically. These limitations, along with the fact that retail stores are closing down and local mandates changing constantly, have encouraged shoppers to shop online.
What does this all mean? This means that it is time to invest in SEO for a better online presence.
Google processes approximately 40,000 queries every second. This is equivalent to 3.5 billion searches per day. This is why it is important to take the time to optimize your website to rank for relevant keywords. Site optimizations are only one aspect of large-scale enterprise SEO strategies. Technical and advanced eCommerce SEO is also important.
Technical SEO Elements for Optimizing Enterprise Sites
Your site’s usability and visibility will be greatly improved if you focus on its technical SEO elements. Accessibility and indexability are the two most important technical elements to focus on.
Accessibility
Many factors can directly affect the accessibility of your site to search engine crawlers. The following topics will be covered: site architecture, site navigation and robots.txt file, XML sitemaps and site speed.
What is the best site architecture for an eCommerce site?
You should do your research before you jump into any SEO-related work. You must do keyword research when planning a site structure.
Most eCommerce companies don’t consider keyword research when designing their information architecture. They ask questions like:
- What are the user’s navigation methods on the current site?
- How does my competitor’s site look?
- Which product category do we need more visibility for?
- What are the most important core areas that we should highlight?
- How can we make landing pages more engaging?
- How can we make our users’ visual experiences better?
These are important considerations. However, there is a problem with this approach to building a site’s architecture. It is often little or no data to help build a strong site structure. The person responsible for designing the site is going with their gut instincts. This route is often not recommended by the SEO team. It means that search engines and users will not be impressed. The best structure for an eCommerce website for an enterprise is one that is easy to use and SEO optimized.
Why is SEO important for eCommerce sites?
87% of shoppers conduct product searches before making a purchase. Nearly 63% of online shoppers start their purchasing process by consulting a search engine.
These stats should convince you that organic traffic and SEO are important factors in bringing in relevant traffic. We’ll add two additional statistics to prove it. A recent survey found that organic search was the primary driver of traffic, with 41% of visitors. A 2015 study found that SEO-friendly businesses earn approximately $4.76 per $1 invested.
Not only do users need to be able to navigate your site easily, but search engines also need to know which pages are most important for search relevance.
Optimize your search results with 6 components of site architecture
These six components are essential for optimizing your eCommerce store for search engines.
This is an excellent example of how you can improve your site structure by focusing on relevance. This picture also highlights the importance of designing your site navigation based on your site’s homepage, which is often the most visited page on every eCommerce site.
Using keyword research is a great tool. To optimize each page, you need to use the correct focus keyword(s).
Simple URLs are another way to communicate your site content more effectively. Search engines find it difficult to crawl sites with confusing URLs, and this makes it more difficult for visitors to link to them. Use relevant words to give search engines and people more information about your page.
It is important to use information architecture to ensure that websites are easy to find and use for search engines as well as end-users. It takes a complex website structure and makes it understandable. Google search bots will not be able to find anything on your website if it isn’t obvious. This is a strong rule of thumb.
The more you go into the taxonomy of a site, the more difficult it is to organize site information. Sites are organized to include categories, subcategories, and then faceted navigation pages.
Take Pottery Barn as an example. The top categories are very simple and include Furniture, Outdoor, Rugs, Lighting, and Baths.
Things get more difficult when you go down to product matrix pages (PMP pages) or product listing pages. It is important to arrange filtered content efficiently and simply which allows users to filter and find information.
You need to organize this information. Search engines can also use blogs, community forums, or guides to determine how relevant your site is to a query. Once you have gathered all the information, you can create a plan to organize it so search engines can crawl it more easily.
When organizing a site’s taxonomy you should consider what information a buyer would need as they travel through the buyer journey to conversion.
Many enterprise websites organize topics in keyword buckets around common topic ideas. This helps them understand how well they have organized and created content related to the core topics. It can be difficult to plan all this, so I recommend first defining your content buckets.
Perform keyword research to understand how consumers search online for products.
To get a better understanding of consumer search trends and to locate relevant keywords that aren’t too broad or highly competitive, you can use SEMrush or Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner to do so.
REI could have taken the backpacking bag and started organizing things.
Tip: Tools like MarketMuse can be used to help eCommerce companies identify the weaknesses in their technical SEO strategies. After you have this data, you can organize the information on your site using an SEO plan that addresses the issues.
Once you have gathered and organized all of your site information, it is time to optimize your information architecture for SEO.
1. Navigation
Strong navigation is essential for your site’s visibility and accessibility. Your navigation tells users where to find your products. It also shows search engine crawlers what your site has to offer.
These technical components can have a major impact on your SEO performance.
- Primary MenuThis menu is what online shoppers use to navigate to the most relevant products. Your primary navigation must be simple and direct users to the pages that will generate the most revenue.
- Secondary Menu Many eCommerce stores offer secondary menus to help customers further narrow down their product selections. These secondary menus shouldn’t be complicated.
- Search Bar – On-site searches can keep customers shopping longer on your site. Mobile site search is a major issue for ecommerce websites. You can track the search data of your customers and use it to help you align your Dev team with your SEO team to optimize your keywords.
- Homepage Design: The layout of your website is an important part of your eCommerce navigation. Your homepage should be focused on the highest-revenue products and inform users about new products, sales, or promotional benefits. Your homepage is the first impression. You have five to ten seconds to convince them to visit your site.
2. URL Structure
It is best to keep your site navigation simple and clear when designing your URL structure. It can be hard for users to navigate large catalogs of products or categories.
Google suggests the following tips when working on your URL structure:
- When creating URLs, use logic. Ask yourself if the URL is easy to understand.
- Use hyphens instead of spaces
- Keep URLs under 70 characters if possible.
- Use lowercase letters.
- In your URLs, add keywords that you want to be a focal point.
- When possible, trim unnecessary parameters.
3. Faceted Navigation
An eCommerce website will often have a large selection of products with different sizes, colors, and prices. It is important to have faceted navigation so that your users can benefit from all of this information.
Faceted navigation makes it easier to filter your products using simple descriptors like material, color, and size. This will make it easy for your customers to find the products they are interested in.
It can be difficult to search for faceted navigation if it isn’t implemented correctly. This can result in duplicate pages and unneeded URL combinations. Pages with duplicated or identical content can negatively impact your indexability as well as visibility.
You should think about how to implement faceted navigation on your eCommerce website:
- Search engines can crawl specific URL parameters if you identify them.
- Identify the parameters that are most likely to produce duplicate content
- Configuration logic is used to handle URLs that have unneeded parameters (rel= “nofollow”, or robots.txt disable).
- Increase site indexing
Target is an example of a company that has implemented SEO-friendly facets to improve the user experience. Click on the user’s unique specifications to be directed to the relevant product pages without having to search through many pages.
4. Canonical Tags
Google search robots can use Canonical tags to indicate which pages they prefer to have indexed. These tags are very useful when you have similar pages. Examples may include unique URLs to shopping cart pages, reviews, and search results. The search engine will know which page you are trying to index by using the canonical tag.
How to Set Up Canonical Tags For Search
Webmasters can prevent duplicate content problems by using the rel=canonical element. It specifies the “canonical URL”, which is the preferred version of a webpage.
One Facet Selected
URLs that only have one search parameter should contain a page with a canonical back.
Multiple Facets Selectable
URLs that have more than one search parameter should point to the same page.
As you can see, the robots.txt file should be leveraged in the above example.
To prevent Google from crawling pages that contain more than one key=value pair (more than one), disallow URLs in Robots.txt. This is how it would look:
This command should be included in your robots.txt.
You will be able to resolve most of the canonical problems on the site because there will be an actual structure.
5. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs, in terms of your website’s navigation, are small secondary navigation that tells the user where they are located on a site. Breadcrumbs improve user experience and offer multiple SEO benefits, including:
- This reduces the number of clicks required to reach the desired website.
- Navigation to product and category pages improved
- Internal links are increased
- Your web page should contain keywords
6. Pagination
You likely use pagination to load multiple products onto your website.
You can divide items into smaller sections with pagination. You can add rel=”next”, and rel=”prev”, tags to your content to optimize it for search engines.
In 2019, Google, however, decided that it would no longer use rel=prev/next to pagination.
Your enterprise eCommerce website should remove rel=prev/next.
No.
These tags should not be removed if your website has already used them. These tags could cause problems for your website’s future performance. These tags are used more often than Google by other groups. These tags are used by W3C to improve web accessibility and ADA compliance. This information is used by other browsers to prefetch data.
Robots.txt File
Robots.txt files are used to mark pages that should not be crawled or indexed by search engines.
The purpose of implementing Robots.txt
- Stop the indexing of login pages, forms, and other sensitive information
- Maximize your crawl budget
- Indexing PDFs and whitepapers in blocks are not possible
Although Robots.txt files may be helpful in your indexing efforts due to Google’s ability to determine the most important pages that need to be indexed, most websites don’t use them.
eCommerce websites can still benefit from Robots.txt files containing the following URLs.
- /cart.php
- /search.php
- /checkout.php
- /login.php
Sitemap file in XML
An XML sitemap, which is a file that contains all pages of a website and the frequency they are updated, can be found here. This file is similar in structure to a robot’s file, as it allows search engines to determine which pages on a website they should crawl. XML sitemaps can be very important for enterprise sites because they:
- Millions of pages of information are being crawled
- The site is frequently updated, removed, and added to with new products.
- Continue to make updates to the existing content.
- Do not have strong internal linking to deep pages
- Based on the site architecture, create many orphan pages and dynamic pages
Although XML files can speed up the crawling and indexing of your site, it is not guaranteed that all pages listed in the XML sitemap(s), will be indexed or ranked. These files are not intended to be a suggestion to search engines that these pages are the most important. This information will be used by Google to determine which pages are quality landing pages that should be included in its index.
Google uses XML sitemaps to understand when the URL was last modified.
This is according to John Mueller’s tweet from 2017. Google ignores sitemap priority tags, so you don’t need to add them.
Limitations on XML Sitemaps:
Sitemaps should be limited. Sitemaps should contain no more than 50,000 URLs and file sizes must not exceed 50MB. After submitting the sitemap, Google Search Console will display an error message if the file is larger than 50,000 or 50MB.
Sitemaps in XML to include
For different information, it is recommended that you create multiple sitemaps.
- Sitemaps of images
- Video sitemap(s).
- Google News sitemap (s)
- Products page sitemap(s)
- Faceted URL sitemap(s)
- Sitemap (Category Page)
- Sitemap (s) for subcategory pages
- Store location page sitemap(s)
- Sitemap(s), resource page(s) – i.e. Blog, articles, learn, type pages
- Newsroom sitemap(s)
- Sitemap (s) Events
- Sitemaps for brand pages (if you have multiple brands)
- Collection sitemap(s)
- Sale/Deals sitemap(s)
- Sitemap (s) of new arrivals/releases
URL exclusions for XML sitemap:
You should have multiple sitemaps for each site. However, it is important to think about which URLs should be excluded from your sitemaps. This will prevent Google from indexing or crawling pages that you do not want to be indexed. These are:
- Search URLs for internal site searches
- Paginated pages
- Pages that are not canonical
- URLs for ID/Parameter
- URLs that have multiple facets (as shown in the section Canonical above)
- Robots.txt files block pages
- Pages with meta no index tags
- Duplicate content pages
- URLs for paginated pages
- Comment URLs or Reply
- Campaign ID or pages with tracking codes added
- Archive pages
- Login/Account and other forms filling pages
- Redirect pages 3xx, 4xx error or soft 404 error pages, 5xx server error pages
Search engines will not be able to find 3xx or 4xx URLs in the XML sitemap. This is because search engines are being told that the information does not exist. These status codes are briefly described below.
Redirects: 301 vs. 302 vs. 404 Error page.
301 Redirect
Search engines will see 301 redirects as a permanent redirect to your website to indicate that it has been permanently moved to a new URL.
302 Redirect
Search engines will see 302 redirects as a sign that your website has been temporarily moved. These redirects can be used to temporarily redirect users to a different page while you update your website.
404 Errors
The 404 error does not indicate that the page cannot be found. These errors may occur when your webpage is removed from the server or site, but all links to it are still active.
Once you have identified the pages that are causing problems or must be redirected, you can decide which redirect URL to use to maintain search engine value and link equity.
Although XML sitemaps may seem easy to use, this is a more technical SEO strategy that can be used for enterprise eCommerce websites. Many sites are built on custom platforms, which will require extensive development resources to filter and automatically generate URLs that match the suggestions above.
Page Speed
Google considers page speed a ranking factor and an advanced SEO strategy for large eCommerce websites. Slow page speeds result in search engines crawling fewer pages with their predetermined crawl budget. This can hurt the pages that are indexed as well as your user’s experience. Slower pages can lead to higher bounce rates and lower click-through rates.
How to Increase Page Speed:
Compress Files
To reduce files larger than 150 bytes in size, use tools that enable file compression.
Minify
You can remove unnecessary spaces, commas, and characters from your code. This simple cleanup will improve load speed in most cases.
Redirects
Reduce the number of redirections a user receives before they reach their final destination. Each time you redirect a visitor, there will be an additional wait for the HTTP request to complete.
Delete Render-Blocking JavaScript
A browser must first parse HTML before it can render a page. The browser will be slower if your page contains additional scripts. It will need to execute the script before it can pull up your page.
Schema Markup for Structured Data
Schema Markup makes it easier to search crawlers, understand and display your content.
Schema markup can be used to provide contact information for your company. It’s easy to include contact information in your website’s footer. Human browsers are used to seeing this information.
Search engines must be able to break down this information. Search engines can be told that your contact information is in schema markup, rather than random information.
As an example, here is the code:
Internal Links
Internal linking allows consumers to navigate from one page to the next on your website. This gives consumers more ways to interact with your website. Search engines can crawl internal links, which increases your chances of ranking for certain keywords.
Internal links can be used on any page. You can use internal links on any page: home page, blog posts, and category pages. This is especially important for eCommerce websites. You can also use internal linking with breadcrumb navigation to show related products.
A well-designed site architecture is the first step to setting up an eCommerce business that will be successful. Next, you need more advanced SEO elements like XML sitemaps and Robots.txt files and site speed. Many large ecommerce websites design and build their sites first, then optimize them for SEO best practices after they are finished. You can avoid having to rebuild or rebuild the entire site by starting with the above elements.
