These days, eCommerce is one of the fastest-growing industries. For eCommerce websites, technical SEO is one of the essential things. This is because these websites have a large number of pages. 

There are various SEO tools that you can use to do the audit of your eCommerce website. The benefit of doing this audit is that you can find out the list of issues & errors on which you have to work in order to improve the ranking of your website.

The following are the best SEO technical tips that help to increase the traffic and generate more leads & sales.

1. URL structure

Ecommerce websites have a lot of products. A properly defined URL structure is vital for the better performance of eCommerce websites.  

In eCommerce websites, if you don’t organize the URL structure from the beginning then you may have to face many problems. There are different categories on an eCommerce website and under each category, there are different products. 

So, each product URL should be defined as;

www.example.com/category-name/product-name

By defining all of the product URLs in this way helps to avoid confusion for the search engine when its bots come to index the pages. 

2. Site Structure

The ideal structure of an eCommerce website should be like that;

Homepage > Categories > Subcategories > Products

It is essential to have a well-defined site structure so that visitors can access the website. It should be clear and consistent.

Pro tip: Always make sure to keep the important pages/product pages no more than three clicks away from the homepage. 

3. Sitemap

A sitemap is used to tell the search engine bots to crawl and index the pages. Basically, there are two types of sitemaps; HTML & XML. HTML sitemap is for the users so that they can navigate the website easily. On the other hand, the XML sitemap is for the search engine.

It is important to understand that by submitting an XML sitemap, doesn’t mean that your web pages will be indexed. It’s just a way of recommending website pages to the search engine bots to crawl & index them.

For SEO purposes, XML sitemaps serve as an invitation to the search engine bots to crawl a URL. This sitemap is generated by the developers. 

HTML sitemap is much easier to understand by the users so that they can easily access the web pages. 

4. Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file that tells search engine bots which web pages it should crawl and which not to. There are several benefits of this file like;

a) Block pages of your website so that you don’t want to index. 

b) Maximize your crawl budget.

c) Prevents resource pages like PDF, images, etc to be indexed by the search engine.

In an eCommerce website, there are few pages on which it is essential to implement robots.txt file. For example;

• /cart.php
• /checkout.php
• /finishorder.php
• /*login.php

5. Redirect product pages

In an eCommerce store, there are several pages that are out of stock or showing 404 errors. It is necessary to redirect that page to the most relevant page. 

For redirection, you can use 301 permanent redirects. If not, you can also use the 302 redirects, by allowing Google to continue indexing the URL. 

6. Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content issues can create trouble for the SEO of an eCommerce website. Google is against duplicate content and is refining the SERP constantly by removing the webpages that have duplicate content. There are many updates that Google has announced against this issue. 

Along with this issue, there is another issue which is named as “thin content” on the website. This issue is also not good for the user experience. Due to these content issues, users will not get satisfaction and this will increase the bounce rate of the website. It is vital to fix this issue if your website has one.

7. Page Speed

Google considers page speed as one of its ranking signals. This simply means that if your page has low speed then your website will get less traffic and due to which you have to face loss in revenue. 

The faster the page speed of your website, the better you will get ranking, traffic & ROI. In order to check the page speed, you can use tools as there are numerous tools available online for free of cost. 

With the tools, you will also get to know which factors are responsible for the high load speed of your pages. This will be beneficial for you to work on the factors.

8. Schema 

This will help you to enhance the appearance of your products in the search results as they are shown to the users in the form of rich snippets. 

The structured data provides additional information to the search engine in order to improve the visibility & CTR of the products. The most common forms of structured data that include are product name, price, delivery, rating, availability, and discounts.

By adding these structured data to the product pages of your website, you can increase the chances of CTR, traffic, and web ranking. If all of these factors get improved then automatically you can see an increase in ROI.

9. Mobile-Friendly Website

These days, your website must be mobile-friendly as Google considers it to be one of the most vital ranking factors. Google firstly checks the mobile version of your website to determine indexing & rankings.

In order to improve the rankings, you need to focus on the design of your website which should be responsive, must have user-friendly URLs, and good page speed on mobile & desktop.

10. Internal Linking

Internal linking is an important SEO strategy for eCommerce websites. Through internal linking, web pages are connected with each other. It also helps search engines to understand which of your web pages are more useful & popular.

Conclusion:

There are several aspects of technical SEO that need to be considered. It is essential to find out the issues and resolve them in order to avoid big consequences in the future. I hope this article will help you at the initial stage in order to understand more about technical eCommerce SEO .