Do you know global retail ecommerce sales will cross $4.5 trillion by 2021?
Since online shopping trends have been increased, more and more businesses are opting to establish an online retail store. If you own an eCommerce business, it is vital to optimizing your website for improved visibility and traffic. For this, the website should be well-optimized for SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is the systematic process to increase the traffic on a website through enhancing the visibility and online presence of a business. The high SEO rankings is a time-consuming process. You need to perform certain activities such as off-page SEO and on-page SEO.
Although technical SEO is crucial for all types of online businesses, the importance of eCommerce is even more critical. Technical SEO for eCommerce allows customers to find your business. Still, not sure how technical SEO impacts an eCommerce platform? Read on, and you will get your answer.
This article focuses on the crucial technical factors that affect eCommerce SEO. These elements help to improvise the site for its online visibility that increases web traffic.
Now, let's explore the factors for technical eCommerce SEO.
Website structure is the most vital element of technical SEO. The layout, design, colour, and fonts should be user-friendly. The well-organized content helps the search engines to understand the site and rank it appropriately. Besides, it allows users to find the right product on the eCommerce platform, which improves customer engagement rate. Eventually, improves SEO score.
Canonical tags are the most efficient way to avoid the duplicate content issue. They inform search engines about the specific URL related to the particular page on a website. The uniformity of the URL structure allows search engines to index the sites easily.
XML and HTML sitemaps are essential to boost the ranking of eCommerce SEO. HTML sitemaps guide shoppers navigate the platform while XML sitemaps, on the contrary, are there to assure that the search engine robots can accurately index the URLs completely the website.
XML sitemaps are user-friendly and easy to generate. This sitemap makes the websites' information easily presentable for the robots. Hence, the site can be crawled properly.
This is an efficient factor which allows informing the search engine not to crawl certain pages of a website. Using the robots.txt helps to block non public pages (i.e. login forms). As a result, you will be able to display on the search engines what is the most relevant and crucial for the eCommerce business.
The crucial element of an eCommerce site is its speed. The website should be optimized for the faster loading results to improve SEO score and web traffic. According to Google, the ideal page loading speed should be under 3 seconds. The faster your site is, the quicker and higher SEO ranking it will achieve. In short, an eCommerce website should be optimized for its speed for improved visibility.
It is essential to redirect out of stock product pages for an eCommerce business. When it shows a 404 error for an out of stock product page, it negatively affects eCommerce SEO score. Also, the error pages are annoying to the customers. Hence, the out of pages of an eCommerce site should be redirected to the most relevant search results.
Title tags are the page title that has significant SEO potential due to the massive impact on a page's CTR (Click-Through-Rate). As the title tag will inform the users and search engines what the page is about. A well-optimized title tag should be between 55-60 characters with indicative description and target keywords.
Similar to the title tag, a meta description is also an important element of technical SEO for eCommerce platforms. The details help the search engines robots to display the right results for searched results. Also, the meta description gives a brief about the product page and guides users to land on the right product page.
Alternative (Alt) text for an image is the most important for web accessibility. If the product image is not loaded for some reason, the text will be displayed on the location. Hence, the search engine can crawl the right page and index it properly.
All in all, technical SEO is crucial for an eCommerce platform. Whether the main goal is to establish brand recognition, improve visibility or gain more traffic, everything can not be achieved without proper eCommerce SEO. Thus, make sure that the technical SEO factors such as website structure, page speed, meta tags, page redirection, and others are well-optimized for the website.
If you are running an online retail store, focus on the above factors that highly contribute to the technical SEO of a site. The well-performed technical SEO for an eCommerce platform benefits your business to expand growth easily and quickly.
Rakshit is a content marketer at PeddleWeb, an internet advertising company in India. He holds spectacular skills in digital marketing, branding, lead generation, customer retention, and a few more.
