Over the past few years, the business market has entirely changed, prompting businesses and service providers to shift to online mode. In various sectors, competition is heating up very quickly. Some businesses were able to perform well with templates and ecommerce solutions that were out of the box.
However, it is technical SEO which plays an extremely important role in boosting the performance of these websites. Factors involved in Technical SEO Services influence rankings, visibility, user experience, and various other things involved.
In this article, you will see various tips that will help you improve the performance of your ecommerce websites with the help of technical SEO.
Technical SEO for eCommerce Platforms: How to Boost Performance?
Ecommerce sites that have strong technical SEO get special treatment from search engines. Here is a list of tips given below that will help you improve the technical aspect of your SEO campaign to ensure your website is compliant with the standards of search engines.
- Perform Audits:
You should conduct an audit of your SEO campaign to recognize opportunities and fix errors to ensure a better user experience. This will help you build new SEO strategies on a strong platform.
There are specialized softwares and tools like SEMRush and Screaming Frog. These tools are beneficial in performing audits. They give you a clear picture of your SEO campaigns and help you identify and fix issues to improve the user experience and various other factors.
Read: Subscription-based E-commerce Models: Building Recurring Revenue
- Check the Structure of Your Website:
A well-structured website has various benefits. Firstly, it makes it easy for users to navigate a website efficiently. Secondly, it also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index the site. The website structure should be logical enough to rank higher on search engines.
You may have to analyze the hierarchy of your website’s navigation to enhance technical search engine optimization. Create a map of the pages of your website in a hierarchy tree structure to check whether there is a smooth flow between the structure of your website’s pages. You will also need to access the category, navigation menus, product pages, internal linking and URL structures.
- Make Sure Your URLs Follow an Order:
URLs are often neglected when an eCommerce platform has a comprehensive range of products. There are various content management systems that auto-generate URLs, however, some of these URLs may end up looking messy and end up like: http:/yourdomain.com/index.php?=1214456=e07?=p95. This URL doesn’t offer any valuable information to search engines to rank this page, which makes it poor.
An improved URL will provide the name of the page and the sub-page where you will be able to find the product and its category in the eCommerce site you will be exploring.
| Expert Tip Make sure your URLs are as short as possible, use a focus keyword, clarify the hierarchy they belong to, and always make use of hyphens to separate the words present on the URL. |
- Keep Your Website Secured:
Google always prefer secure websites that are prefixed with HTTPS. Such sites leverage the power of a secure socket layer(SSL). It is a standardized security technology that secures the connection between a website and browser to ensure if someone intercepts the information of a user, they will not be able to read or get the data.
SSL certificates are a significant part of applying technical SEO for eCommerce, as customers would want to conduct purchases from a site that is trustworthy. Nowadays, a lot of top website builders have SSL by default.
- Boost Your Website’s Loading Speed:
The loading speed of a website plays a major role in website rankings. The faster the loading speed, the lower the bounce rate. According to a study, the bounce rate of a website shoots up by 32% as the time taken to load a page goes from 1 to 3 seconds. Hence, the load speed of an eCommerce website shouldn’t be more than 2 seconds. Google has also reflected that the speed of a site is one of the signals it uses to rank pages.
| Did You Know? The total number and size of images and videos loaded at the same time can lower the loading speed of a page. It can have a negative influence on your technical SEO strategy. |
The best thing you can do to improve the loading speed is to compress all multimedia files wherever possible without lowering their quality. You can also use fast hosting and remove unnecessary data from your website’s pages to ensure faster loading speeds.
- Build a Mobile-Friendly Version of Your Website:
According to the latest study, people spend 70% of digital media time on their cell phones. Approximately $3 out of every $4 is spent on online shopping done through smartphones.
Additionally, in 2019, Google started a mobile-first index, which meant that your eCommerce site’s mobile version is the base factor for indexing and analyzing ranks.
Whether it is for a tablet, desktop, or smartphone, similar best practices for a website, such as structured pages, canonical data, and compressed images, are bound to be implemented. However, you need to remember that mobile screens have a variety of interfaces. Hence, pop-up ads that work great on desktops may end up creating a frustrating experience for mobile users.
In addition to these tactics, marketers focusing on technical SEO can leverage optimized keywords, link-building, optimized images, and even crawl their content using SEMRush and other tools to ensure the website is worthy to be indexed.
Final Words
Getting an eCommerce website ranked is a difficult task, especially when technical SEO is involved. However, with the tips mentioned above, you can ensure a user-friendly website that can be easily crawled and easily indexed by search engines. These tips will also help you identify and rectify the errors that can potentially occur in the future. By doing so, you will be able to drive more sales, reach a wider target audience, boost conversion rates, and serve your audiences with the products and services they expect.
