E-commerce is one of the most fiercely competitive industries around, with 40% of online store owners reporting the market has ‘very tough competition’ in a recent survey.
Online shoppers also have sky-high expectations and lack patience for things like slow loading times and stores that don’t have many reviews.
These two factors make standing out in the e-commerce world exceptionally difficult, but e-commerce SEO provides a reliable solution.
By outranking your competitors on search engines like Google, you’ll score the majority of clicks from your target audience, generating a ton of traffic to your store in the process.
43% of all e-commerce traffic comes from Google, so engaging in SEO is a must for any online store eager to gain visibility.
Yet, you must learn how to master e-commerce technical SEO before you can become a true search engine Jedi.
Technical SEO refers to crucial ‘behind-the-scenes’ factors on your website that affect your search rankings. While all websites contend with technical SEO, e-commerce stores tend to have the most trouble with it.
Slow loading speed, indexing problems, and duplicate content are all examples of common technical errors that affect many online stores, and it’s important to know how to identify and fix them.
Airtight technical SEO will do your site a ton of good, including:
- Higher rankings on search engines like Google
- Lightning-fast speed for loading and responsiveness
- A top-tier user experience
- Lower bounce rates and higher dwell times
- Higher customer conversions
- A better mobile experience (which is extremely important for online stores)
As you can see, it’s well worth your time to learn how technical SEO works.
That’s why we put together this extremely comprehensive guide breaking down technical SEO for e-commerce businesses, so stay tuned to learn more!
What is Technical SEO, Anyway?
There are countless subsets of SEO, which can make things a bit confusing for newcomers.
You can pump just about any term into the formula ‘(something) SEO,’ and there’s bound to be an article about it somewhere.
Just for fun, here’s what happens if you search for ‘Harry Potter SEO’ on Google:
Sure enough, it’s a thing.
Anyway, let’s keep things simple.
At the most basic level, there are three major subsets of SEO that apply to all strategies – regardless of industry or niche.
They are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO:
- On-page SEO. These are all the optimizations you make on the customer-facing side of your website to rank better on search engines. The most common examples are creating content and using relevant keywords.
- Off-page SEO. This refers to all the optimizations you make which occur off your website, like building backlinks (links on other websites that ‘point back’ to yours), and creating social media content.
Lastly, there’s technical SEO.
| With technical SEO, you dive behind-the-scenes into your website’s code and architecture. There, you optimize your site for both users and search engines. This includes things like improving loading speed, using canonical tags (more on these later), and fixing broken links. |
Poor technical SEO will spell disaster for your performance on search engines, and your user experience will take a nosedive.
This is because technical errors can cause your website to:
- Disappear from search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Not load correctly on mobile devices (which will likely lead to lost conversions).
- Load slowly, causing many users to click off your site.
- Develop lots of broken links, costing you valuable traffic and potential revenue.
These problems (more like catastrophes) should provide you with more than enough incentive to keep track of your technical SEO.
Why Do E-Commerce Sites Struggle with Technical SEO?
As mentioned previously, e-commerce stores and technical SEO factors have a tumultuous relationship, and it’s worse than other types of sites.
Why is that?
It has to do with how online stores work.
By nature, e-commerce stores will have:
- Hundreds, sometimes thousands of web pages to manage (the average is between 227 and 423 pages)
- Frequent content updates due to new products, prices, and promotions
- A majority of customers shopping on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets
These three reasons pose significant challenges to online stores, so let’s take a closer look at each one.
Tons of web pages to manage (duplicate content issues)
An e-commerce store typically has more web pages to deal with than other types of websites.
The average store owner contends with tons of product pages, category pages, and subcategory pages. Speaking of product pages, it’s normal to have dozens of them for a single product. This is because store owners have to create a new web page for different colors, sizes, and styles.
For example, let’s say you sell a cowboy hat on your site, but it comes in 3 different sizes and 10 different colors.
That means you’ll have 13 pages for a single product!
This very issue also causes problems with duplicate content, where you’re trying to rank two virtually identical web pages for the same keyword.
In the case of our cowboy hat, Google will see 13 versions of it, all attempting to rank for identical keywords.
What will Google do?
It will only rank one page at a time, causing dips in traffic and visibility for all pages, which is bad news.
We’ll dive into how to fix duplicate content in a bit, but for now just know it’s a frustrating problem that plagues many e-commerce store owners.
Frequent content updates to implement
Let’s stick with the cowboy hat example for a second because we can use it to illustrate the next problem store owners have with technical SEO.
For the longest time, you sell your cowboy hats for $19.95 each. However, you’ve got a promotion coming up that’ll knock the price down by 20%, making them $15.96.
This means you just need to go in and tweak the price on the cowboy hat, and you’re done, right?
Wrong.
As we’ve already established, you have 13 distinct product pages for the hat, meaning you’ll have to update the price 13 individual times.
What’s worse is it’s just one product.
Imagine if the promotion you’re running affects all the products in your store, which is typically what happens.
That’s why larger stores make heavy use of API integrations, scheduled updates (which update product information automatically), and product information management (PIM) systems.
A majority of customers shop on mobile devices
In the current era, the vast majority of customers browse e-commerce stores using smartphones and tablets instead of desktop computers.
Research shows that at least 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their device in the past 6 months, and it’s estimated that over 50% of all e-commerce purchases made during the 2022 holiday season were made using mobile devices.
As a result, it’s imperative that online stores display properly on smartphones and tablets. Otherwise, you’ll lose a lot of business.
How to Improve Your E-Commerce Store’s Technical SEO
Okay, enough talk about problems; let’s move on to the solutions!
While technical SEO is undoubtedly challenging for online stores, it’s still doable, especially if you follow the right steps.
Here’s a step-by-step guide that will teach you how to audit and improve your store’s technical SEO.
Step #1: Audit your current technical SEO performance
Regardless of your goals, you should ALWAYS kick off a technical SEO strategy with a comprehensive audit.
This is because you’ll uncover your current strengths and weaknesses during the audit process, including any glaring errors that you should address before moving on.
For example, if you start optimizing your store for mobile devices, but fail to realize that Google hasn’t indexed a majority of your product pages, your efforts will be in vain.
Here are common tools of the trade that’ll help you perform successful audits:
- HOTH SEO Report Tool. This free tool will let you know if you’re properly optimized for mobile, SSL enabled, and have a sitemap or not. It also contains lots of other SEO metrics, so don’t wait to try it out.
- Google Search Console (GSC). You should set up your website on GSC if you haven’t already because it lets you monitor your SEO performance on Google. In particular, the Index Coverage Report notifies you of any crawling and indexing errors, which is invaluable. You can read more about how to use GSC here.
- HOTH PageSpeed Checker. Sonic the Hedgehog-worthy loading speeds and response times are a must, so use our free tool to see if your site is up to snuff.
We’ll be honest, technical SEO audits are pretty complicated, and there’s a lot beginners may miss. Our Technical SEO Audit services are the way to go if you have zero experience with the process.
Our experts will audit your website from head to toe, checking every technical factor known to humanity in the process. Once we’re done, we’ll provide you with a detailed report and hop on a call to go over everything we found.
Step #2: Make sure your store is easy to navigate
Remember, technical SEO isn’t just about appealing to search engine algorithms; it’s also about enhancing your user experience.
In that vein, your site must feature effortless navigation. Otherwise, your prospects will have a hard time finding what they’re looking for, causing them to click off your site and look elsewhere.
Your product categories should be front and center, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to sift through subcategories, either, so try to limit them if you have a lot.
Besides that, make heavy use of internal links and breadcrumbs.
If your site contains plenty of internal links, your users won’t have any trouble finding what they’re looking for. Internal links also keep users engaged in your content loop, which is great for your dwell times.
Breadcrumb navigation refers to keeping track of a user’s path through your categories and subcategories with little reminders.
Here’s a quick example of what breadcrumb navigation looks like:
Clothing > Hats > Cowboy Hats
As you can see, it’s a small visual reminder of where you are in a store’s hierarchy of pages, categories, and subcategories. Also, each category would contain a hyperlink.
Here’s an example of breadcrumbs on Nordstrom’s site:
It’s a helpful way to remind users where they are in your website, and provides a quick and easy way to jump to other categories (such as if you clicked on Clothing or Men in the image above).
Step #3: Use a clean URL structure
The URLs you use also matter for your SEO and for your users. For instance, if your URLs are all long strings of nonsense numbers and characters, your target audience won’t remember them.
However, if they’re short and logical, it’ll be easy for your users to share your web pages and navigate straight to the pages they want.
Here’s an example of a cluttered URL:
https://www.yoursite.com/d/1nUCnTq-unl8OnLQO9WEXv2XZ5m_Ktrhexy9OWcD9p
Now, here’s an example of a clean URL:
https://www.yoursite.com/seo-blog
See how much easier that is to remember? Google’s search algorithms also prefer shorter URLs that follow logical structures, so you have every incentive to tighten things up.
Here are some best practices for writing SEO-friendly URLs:
- Keep them short
- Include target keywords (if possible)
- Separate words with hyphens
- Always use lowercase letters
- Use static URLs instead of dynamic
Step #4: Make sure your site loads and responds quickly
Your site’s loading speed is another factor that matters to both users and search engines.
On the user side, your prospects will get fed up if your site doesn’t load and respond in an instant, and they’ll click back to the search results if they experience a delay.
Is it really that bad, though?
Yes.
According to research, a one-second delay in loading speed causes a 7% loss in conversions and 11% fewer page views.
Put in perspective, if your store earns $50,000 per day, a delay of just one second will cost you approximately $1 million per year.
On the search engine side, Google’s Core Web Vitals tests the loading speed of every site in its index, and sites with poor loading speed don’t receive high rankings.
To both check your site speed and find suggestions for improvement, take advantage of Google Lighthouse for Chrome. It contains PageSpeed Insights, which will test your loading times and recommend ways to speed things up.
Step #5: Make your store mobile-friendly
Google has used mobile-first indexing since 2017, so your store needs to work on mobile devices if you want to succeed with your SEO strategy.
This means Google will always rank the mobile version of your website first, which is bad news if you only have a desktop version of your store.
The #1 way to make your website mobile-friendly is to incorporate a responsive design, which means your site will automatically change its display resolutions if a user is on a mobile device.
Check out our guide on mobile-friendly web design to learn more.
Step #6: Implement structured data and rich snippets
If you want to gain even more visibility for your online store, then you should target rich snippets by including structured data.
What’s that?
Structured data, also called schema markup, is a standardized format for A) providing information about a web page and B) classifying the page’s content.
In other words, it’s how you qualify for rich snippets on Google like this:
Do you see how Google provided us with a direct answer to our query via a ‘snippet’ from a highlighted page? Moreover, this web page appears in position zero, meaning it appears above the organic search results.
Here’s a rich snippet specifically for e-commerce:
Check out this guide on how to incorporate structured data to learn how it works.
Step #7: Get rid of duplicate content
As mentioned before, duplicate content is an issue that affects many e-commerce stores, but there are solutions.
In particular, canonical tags make managing similar (or identical) pages a breeze.
A canonical tag signals to search engines that a particular version of a web page is the version to include in search engine results, and to ignore the rest.
Here’s a quick rundown of how it works:
- The primary version of the page receives a canonical tag that points at itself.
- Every similar web page also receives a canonical tag, which refers to the original version.
In other words, every canonical tag should point to the original page. This lets Google and other search engines know that they should only rank the primary page and keep the other identical pages off the search results.
Step #8: Build lots of internal links
You need to make a habit of including internal links in every piece of content you create. Also, ensure every page on your site has at least one internal link pointing at it. Otherwise, you could wind up with orphan pages, which are web pages that have no links pointing to them.
As a result, orphan pages are next-to-impossible to find on your website and by search engines. That’s bad news, especially if the page in question is an important product page.
Whenever you’re writing blogs or product descriptions, brainstorm any relevant internal linking opportunities. For instance, if you’re writing a blog about a particular product, why not link to it? As stated before, internal links keep users engaged with your content, so don’t be shy about using them.
Step #9: Create an XML sitemap and upload it to GSC
An XML sitemap is a file that helps guide search engines to the most important pages on your site that you want to appear in their indexes.
Without one, search engine crawler bots may not locate all the pages you want to include in the search results.
You could create an XML sitemap manually, but this is a time-intensive process, especially for larger websites. The manual process involves creating a list of all your website’s URLs, coding them, and then uploading them to GSC (and other search engine webmaster tools).
There are also free tools you can use that will create sitemaps for you, like this one.
Step #10: Monitor your progress regularly
At this point, all that’s left is to keep an eye on your technical SEO factors into the immediate future.
You should never go too long without checking crucial technical metrics like your site’s loading speed, indexing errors, broken links, and site architecture – since things are always subject to change.
GSC and our free suite of SEO tools are your best friends in this regard, as they’ll help you keep track of all your technical SEO efforts.
Get in Touch with E-Commerce Technical SEO Experts
That’s what it takes to ensure flawless technical SEO for your online store.
Doing so will ensure a pleasant user experience and higher search rankings, so it’s definitely worth the effort.
However, technical SEO is both complex and time-consuming, which can prove to be too much for online store owners without much time on their hands.
You can always hand the process off to our experts for a technical SEO audit or for HOTH X, our fully managed SEO service.
