There are an estimated 12 - 24 million eCommerce websites across the globe, with more being added to the list every day. In such a competitive realm, we cannot stress the importance of building an e-store that actively drives organic traffic.
Now, an eCommerce website is much different from a general business website. That’s because, an eCommerce site has numerous pages, product images, reviews, and a complicated architecture. Therefore, learned eCommerce website development company professionals stay cautious from the very beginning so as to make the site SEO-friendly.
Proven Strategies of Building an SEO-Friendly E-store
Site Architecture
Site architecture is crucial for all eCommerce websites. That’s because, it already has lots of product pages or has a potential to scale up once the business grows.
The site architecture enables you to map how the users flow through the site. It also helps search engine bots to crawl the site in a proper manner. As a site owner, you must want the users to be able to find out the key pages and understand the relationship between different pages.
Before building the navigation process and the site architecture, you must walk through the following mind-mapping procedure:
What search queries consumers can hit before they get into the site?
What pages on your site may get the most traffic?
What are the exit pages?
If you want to integrate the drop-down menu (as most sites do), make sure to use HTML. Search engines cannot find out your navigation if it’s not written in HTML.
If you use filters (which an eCommerce website should use), pay attention to the URL parameters. Remember, if you don’t want to index filters, you should use the hashtag before the parameters.
Add breadcrumbs to the product pages so as to give the users as well as the search engines an opportunity to see where the product fits in your website.
An example of breadcrumb may include:
www.xyz.com > home decor > coloured candles
Instead of the site URL, Google may show the breadcrumb in the search result.
As you can understand, a logical navigation in your website is crucial for making it SEO friendly.
Technical SEO
If you are wondering, the technical SEO is not only about meta tags and sitemaps. In fact, gradually, the line between the on-page SEO and technical SEO is blurring. Building a website with clean URLs, avoiding stacked redirects, and using correct internal linking should be at the heart of an eCommerce web development.
Here are a few things to bear in mind:
Schema markup
With schema markup or rich snippet, you will be able to highlight the crucial pieces of information for Google and other search engines. Now, there are two types of schemas that you can add to an eCommerce website. These include:
Review schema markup - it requires two types of markup: individual review and aggregate ratings. To incorporate an aggregate rating, you need to take overall rating value, best and worst rating and rating count into consideration. And to include individual review, you need review date, reviewer, review value, review body and the best and worst rating.
Product schema markup - it demands the product name and pricing. You can also add other cool features such as brand name, description, image, and URL.
If you are overwhelmed to start, using the structured data markup helper and the structured data testing tool can come in handy. These ensure that you can set up the structured data properly.
Clean URL
Having a disorganized URL structure is a major issue for your consumers, especially if your site is loaded with numerous products and categories. Here are a few things to keep an eye on while creating URL:
Ditch extra parameters like ?productId=12864396&cp
Stick to lower-case letters for the entire URL
Don’t use spaces or underscores. Instead, opt for dashes
Keep it short
Add targeted keywords
Use HTTPS instead of HTTP|
An eCommerce website is the hub of private information like credit/debit card numbers, passwords, home address, etc. Therefore, adopting high-end security measures is crucial for your e-store. And trust us when we say, it actually enhances your site’s SEO-friendliness.
Wondering what’s the difference between HTTP and HTTPS? We will explain below.
HTTPS or Security HyperText Transfer Protocol is a more secure version of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). It adds a layer of security by using SSL (Secure Socket Layers) in order to transfer data. Thus, it helps to avoid damages by third parties and keeps the data encrypted.
Quick note: Google announced that sites providing a secure experience through HTTPS will obtain higher ranking benefits.
Keyword Research
You must have waited for this point, isn’t it? After all, what’s SEO without keywords!
Creating a keyword list is an integral part to make your eCommerce website SEO-friendly. However, shy away from stuffing keywords as Google considers it as a malpractice. Instead, opt for writing high-quality content including long-tail keywords.
Quick note: long-tail keywords have about 4.15% higher conversion rate than short-tail keywords (source: Seer Interactive).
You can find a detailed keyword research guide here. We’re sure it will come in handy once you look to integrate relevant keywords in your eCommerce website. If you don’t want to invest that amount of time, how about seeking assistance from a top SEO agency while shortlisting the keywords?
Conclusion
Implementing these steps will effectively make your e-store SEO friendly and drive more organic traffic.
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