Learn how technical SEO can help increase your eCommerce site’s rankings and improve its usability. Why it is important for online business.

In the current environment of eCommerce, having a properly developed website along with good content is not sufficient. Thus, if you want your website to be unique and successful, it has to be search-engine-friendly and user-friendly. This is where technical SEO becomes important.

Technical SEO is the process of making your site more accessible to the search engines so that the search engine can easily index your site. In the case of the eCommerce web stores where hundreds or even thousands of products are posted, technical SEO becomes a key factor to drive the traffic and increase sales.

In this article, we will look at how technical SEO matters for eCommerce websites and discuss the areas like site architecture, page speed, mobile friendliness, URL structure, etc.

The Importance of Technical SEO for eCommerce Business Websites

How an SEO company in Ahmedabad can help to enhance your eCommerce SEO through technical changes. Make it easier for clients to locate and access your site, as well as rank it higher in the search engine results.

1. Improving Site Structure for Improved Crawling and Indexing

Perhaps one of the most important areas of focus in technical SEO is site hierarchy or the structure of the website. Some of the problems that arise from an ill-formatted website include pages not being indexed by the search engines, duplicate content, and a poor user interface, which are all detrimental to the ranking of your site.

eCommerce websites may have many product pages, categories, and filters, so the structure of these websites must be clear. Well-structured categories, subcategories, and the product pages allow search engines to identify the connections between various parts of your site.

This in turn helps in getting your pages indexed and ranked and thus leads to improvement of your website.

Tips for Improving Site Architecture:

Use a flat site structure. This should be done with the aim of minimizing the number of clicks that a user has to make in order to access any given page on your website. It is ideal that any user should be able to get to any product page within three clicks at most from the home page.
Implement breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs assist the visitors and the search engines to identify the position of a given page within the website. They also improve the user experience since it becomes easy to navigate through the site.
Create an XML sitemap: It is simply an XML file containing a list of all the web pages that you consider important so that the search engines can find them easily.

2. Improving the Speed of the Web Pages for Enhanced UX and SERP

One of the major factors for ranking in the search engines is the page speed and it is even more critical in the e-commerce sites. That is because slow loading of the website results in high bounce rates, lower conversion rates, and dissatisfied customers. Researchers have found out that the impact of one-second delay in page loading time is a 7% reduction of leads.

However, for the eCommerce sites, the users are expected to navigate through different pages and therefore, the page speed is crucial. This leads to the slow loading of product pages, which in turn will lead to users abandoning their carts and leaving the site.

Tips for Improving Page Speed:

Optimize images: Optimize the images to make them small in size without having to compromise on the picture quality. The use of modern formats such as WebP for faster loading should be encouraged.
Leverage browser caching: Browser caching involves storing static files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files locally in the users’ device to minimize the time taken to load the same files in subsequent visits.
Minimize HTTP requests: Minimize the number of objects on your pages like scripts and stylesheets to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

3. Mobile Optimization for a Bigger Audience

Based on the current trend where customers are using their mobile devices for shopping, mobile responsiveness cannot be an option but a must-have. Mobile-first indexing is the strategy that has been adopted by Google and this implies that when Google is crawling the site, it first considers the mobile version of the site as the primary version.

Mobile compatibility is very crucial for the eCommerce sites to target the mobile users and also to offer the best experience to the customers. In the case you do not have a mobile-friendly site, you are likely to get a bad experience, low ranking and sales.

Tips for Mobile Optimization:

Responsive design: Ensure that your website is’responsive,’ which means that it is able to adjust to the resolution of the device of the visitor: a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone.
Mobile-friendly navigation: Ensure that the users on the small screen are comfortable while browsing through your site. Make sure the buttons are large enough and the cursor is placed so that one does not have to zoom or scroll to click on the buttons.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Utilize AMP to create much simpler and more mobile-friendly versions of your product pages for the mobile audiences.

4. Making URLs more usable and SEO friendly

The arrangement of URLs is also one of the most important aspects of the technical SEO for the eCommerce websites. Organic URLs help the search engines in the evaluation of the content of your web page and also improve the site’s functionality.

A clean and descriptive URL has a higher chance of being clicked by users or visitors, especially when searching through the search engine, which in turn helps in increasing CTR and ranking.

For instance, as to the eCommerce sites, where the length of the URLs may be long and contain parameters, it is highly important to keep the URL structure as clear as possible.

Tips for structuring URLs:

Keep URLs short and descriptive. When placing links, ensure that they contain keywords and are relevant to the content of the web page. Avoid using large number or special characters or symbols as input string for the data.
Use hyphens to separate words: The usage of hyphens also assists in making the URLs more understandable to the users and the search engines as well. Use only the letters A to F for the register, and do not use underscores or spaces.
Include categories in URLs: If possible, it is better to include the category in the URL so that it can add more information regarding the subject. For example,www.DIT.com/seo/ecommerce-seo-services/.

5. Managing Duplicate Content Issues

There are always many similar pages in eCommerce websites, which are similar product pages, variations in product listings, or session IDs in URLs. Copied content is not good for SEO since it leaves the search engine in a dilemma over which page to rank or which page to display in the search results.

As for the problem of duplicate content, one should use canonical tags that indicate to the search engine which of the copies of the page is primary. What is more, similar pages should be merged, and when creating new ones, it is necessary to use unique and filled with keyword descriptions of products.

Tips for Managing Duplicate Content:

Implement canonical tags: Canonical tags should be used to identify the primary version of a page if there are several versions of this page.
Use 301 redirects: If you have two or more URL’s with the same content, the best option is to use 301 redirects to the first URL.
Create unique content: It is recommended to create your product descriptions from scratch and do not copy and paste descriptions provided by the manufacturer as they may be used by many other sellers.

6. Implementing Structured Data for Rich Snippets

Schema markup is a type of structured data that assists in classifying your website’s content and improving the appearance of search results snippets. For eCommerce websites, structured data can improve product listings by adding extra information like price, review, and stock right on the SERPs.

Rich snippets are useful because they can boost your CTR, as your listings will be more appealing and would provide more information. The use of structured data also assists search engines to understand your products well, thus improving the ranking.

Tips for Implementing Structured Data:

Use schema markup: Utilize schema markup on the product pages so that you can achieve rich snippets on the search engine result pages. Some of the frequent schemas utilized in e-commerce are Product, Review, and Offer.
Test your markup: Validate your markup by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool in order to check if it has been implemented appropriately and if there are no mistakes.
Keep your data updated: Make sure that the data in your structured data is updated frequently in order not to mislead users on issues like prices and availability.

7. How to ensure the Protection and Reliability of a Website

One of the sub-topics under technical SEO is security, and this should be a core concern for any website that handles its customers’ data, such as an eCommerce site.

A secured site is favored by the search engines and the customers are more likely to buy from the site since they are secure. HTTPS stands for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, which should be used to safeguard the users’ details and place your site on a higher ranking.

However, a good hosting service provider that provides a fast and reliable uptime service is very essential in order to have a good user experience and no penalty on the search engine results.

Tips for Enhancing Security and Performance:

Implement HTTPS: Make sure that your site is configured to use an SSL certificate, which is important in the protection of data in the process of its transfer from the browser on the user’s computer to the server.
Monitor site performance: You should monitor your website’s uptime and loading time so you would know how it is performing.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDN is beneficial for accelerating a site and making it more dependable because the contents are hosted on a worldwide server.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is the foundation for any successful e-commerce website, and that is why it is so crucial. In these five areas, such as site architecture, page speed, mobile optimization, URL structure, duplicate content, structured data, and security, one is able to create a website that is both search engine-friendly and user-friendly.

Technical SEO is a method of building up the defense of your e-commerce site and ensuring that not only is organic traffic drawn to the site but also converted. Like any other practice in SEO, it will be crucial to stay abreast of the many factors of technical SEO as the search engines evolve for the improvement and sustenance of the site in the rising online market.

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The Importance of Technical SEO for eCommerce Websites