You have probably heard someone bragging about how their business website is on top of Google and wonder how they did it. Or, you are wondering what it means to rank on top of the Google search engine. Well, you may research how to make your e-commerce website rank better and get lots of feedback, but the ultimate solution lies in one item; technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Therefore, by involving professional SEO services, you can discover the following technical tips for your business website to rank high on search results and generate more traffic.
What Is A Technical SEO for E-Commerce ?
Online business is fact-growing, with large sites like Amazon and Walmart dominating the sector. However, small and upcoming websites can also receive their share of sales only when they learn how to strategize their sales pages and be more visible to potential buyers. This is where technical SEO for e-commerce websites comes in.
Technical SEO is the art of enhancing the technical aspects of a website to elevate its ranking in search engines. It is also an optimization of crawling, indexing, and rendering website phases to generate more traffic and gain more rankings. By strengthening the website, more visitors visiting the site are likely to be retained as customers. Therefore, a poorly structured website ranks low in search engines and cannot attract more clicks.
Carrying out technical SEO for e-commerce websites involves the following;
Getting Site And URL Structures In Order
A good sales page should be as clear and easily accessible as possible to visitors. Since not all visitors have equal waiting spans, others will just click on two or three steps before getting bored and leaving the page. A well-deployed e-commerce website should have an organized site structure with not more than three clicks away from the homepage.
An ideal site structure should appear as;
Homepage→ Categories→ Subcategories→ Products.
However, for smaller sites, subcategories can be eliminated, but each product should belong to only one category. Similarly, URL structure should be concise and help the visitors to easily identify what the page sells. Although most URLs look messy due to lots of tags and codes that appear in them, a professional e-commerce website should limit the URL characters to be below 160. If you are selling t-shirts, for example, the URL should be close to;
http://www.website.com/collections/ladies-t-shirts/kingways
Creating Sitemaps
The two types of sitemaps found in an e-commerce website are XML and HTML with each having its role, strengths, and weaknesses. HTML helps shoppers to navigate the site while XML helps search engine robots to inspect and index the URLs within the site. XML sitemaps are more straightforward than HTML and make the site’s information more readable for machines. However, having an XML sitemap does not guarantee that an e-commerce website will be indexed since it only serves as an invitation to crawl a URL.
XML sitemaps are typically produced by web developers and do not indicate the authority of the page. They are ideally generated weekly to improve the indexing of the page. HTML, on the other hand, appears easier to understand at first due to various options that allow visitors to navigate the page. They are useful in such situations like;
- When the current navigation is limited in the linked pages.
- When the current navigation or certain aspects of the website are not accessible to search engines.
- If the linked pages are important and need an additional link that is more visible higher on the website.
Crawl Budgeting
Crawl budget is the number of site pages that Google search bots can crawl on a given day. Low crawl budget is mostly affected by indexing issues which leads to a lower ranking. This means large e-commerce websites need to optimize the crawl budget to generate more traffic to their pages. The following tips can improve the crawl budget of an e-commerce website;
- Overall link structure optimization.
- Increasing backlinks.
- Avoiding content duplication.
- Fixing broken links.
- Regular sitemap update.
Bottom Line
Several essentials help improve the e-commerce website ranking. Besides the above-mentioned three tactics, if you run an e-commerce website and are looking to be ranked higher on search results always conduct regular checks up on the site content to get its technical aspects in order. Alternatively, working with a professional SEO agency in Dubai to quickly fix technical issues on the site and get a better ranking on search engines.
