The importance of Technical SEO for e-commerce

Technical SEO for e-commerce

Within the e-commerce world, Technical SEO refers to the process of optimising your site for search engines and crawlers to find and index pages. This technical foundation of your e-store determines its final performance, which makes it as important as the foundation of the house.

When you plan to build your house, and you are serious about it, you would want to make sure the foundation is strong and stable.  The same principle should be used in terms of building your e-commerce store. No matter how amazing your products and content are, the technical aspects may stop your site from performing at its best.

Can you feel the urge now?

Keep on reading to learn more about the technical SEO for e-commerce and how to give yourself the best chance to succeed.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about setting up your e-commerce store for success and refers to the so-called ‘behind-the-scenes’ elements. These are not so sexy, but incredibly important factors influencing your e-commerce performance.

The most important elements are:

  • Secure Socket Layer (HTTPS) – search engines will always prioritise secure sites! Is your site SSL-certified?
  • Loading speed and core web vitals – did you know that the Engagement Rate can decrease by 90% with the increase in page load time from one to five seconds.? Are your pages quick enough? There is no second to waste!
  • Mobile-friendliness – there is nothing more frustrating than a slow-loading page on mobile which in addition is not catered to small screens! Does your site look right on mobile?

Please, do not confuse Mobile-friendly with Mobile first approach!

The Mobile-first approach focuses on designing a desktop site starting with the mobile version, which is then adapted to larger screens, while the Mobile-friendly is starting with a desktop version and adapting it to smaller, mobile screen. By following the Mobile-first approach your website will automatically be Mobile-friendly, so this is the way to follow.

Tip 1: Create your e-commerce store with the use of the right CMS.

 

Going deeper into the realm of Technical SEO, we would also check

Crawlability – can search bots easily crawl your pages to gather info about what it is you are offering?

Did you make sure to:

  • Resubmit Sitemap once you add and/or remove pages – this helps search bots understand and crawl your web pages.
  • Maximize crawl budget by removing or canonicalising duplicate pages, and fixing or redirecting broken links. Also, check your Robot.txt instructions for pages that should or should not be blocked!
  • Optimise site architecture – make sure that pages most important to your business are at the top of the hierarchy and can get the greatest number of relevant internal links. Page depth is very important here as well. Make sure that your visitor can find the page in fewer than four clicks.
  • Use Breadcrumb menus – incredibly useful for search bots, but your web visitors will be grateful too.

Indexability – only indexed pages are eligible to be ranked on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)! Are your product pages indexed?

Did you make sure to:

  • Ensure that search bots can access your pages freely.
  • Remove duplicate content so as not to confuse Google’s bots. Confusing bots leads to Google playing safe and not indexing.
  • Audit redirects and fix HTTP errors
  • Check mobile-responsiveness
  • Review Orphan Pages (web pages that have no incoming internal links on a website, so search engines may have difficulty discovering them) and link them to other relevant pages.

How to improve technical SEO for e-commerce?

The first step to improving your e-commerce technical SEO is to assess where you stand by performing a site audit.

If you are one of those ‘time-rich but money-poor’ entrepreneurs, you may be tempted to proceed with a DIY Technical SEO Audit.  Below we provide a list of FREE Technical SEO Tools for you to test your site [and your patience 😉 ].

However, if you want the audit to be conducted thoroughly and professionally – drop us a line and we can produce a full SEO Audit Report with easy-to-follow steps to skyrocket your performance.

Once you know where you fall short, the second step is to create a plan to address all issues. We hope this blog article is giving you some basic ideas of what you may be able to plan and fix most of the issues by yourself. However, if you don’t feel strong in the digital world – we are just a click away.

Tip 2: Keep URLs as short as possible, use hyphens to separate words, and ALWAYS use the focus keyword – the search term you want a page or post to rank for.

 

CONTACT US

FREE Technical SEO tools for DIY audit of your e-commerce site

Did you know you can run the basic technical SEO audit for your e-commerce store by yourself?

Tip 3: ALWAYS ensure you have GA4 (Google Analytics) and Google Search Console plugged in and fully integrated.

Most of the professional SEO tool providers offer free access to their basic elements, and this allows Students and SEO Amateurs to try and test their digital gut feelings.

Below we present you the short list of free technical SEO tools for your DIY e-commerce audit:

Guard your e-commerce performance with Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit is inevitable when you’re experiencing a significant and unexplained drop in your e-commerce rankings or traffic. By conducting a comprehensive SEO Audit, you can find and fix underlying technical issues that impact your digital shop performance.

Moreover, regular Technical SEO audits will help proactively address issues and prevent them from growing into real trouble that can decrease your e-store performance over time.

Do you need someone to take care of your e-commerce performance? Look no further.

Here, at Relton Digital Marketing, we have a proven process of creating and delivering success to businesses.

Get a free consultation for your business.

Want to just run something past someone in the know or in need of just an open, friendly and very honest conversation, then try us.

    Sign up to receive our email newsletter

    We won’t write often, perhaps a lovely warming Merry Christmas message or from time to time, when we think we have something important to say, we’ll message with some of the latest industry updates.