It is safe to say that SEO for large ecommerce sites can be very challenging to say the least. Ecommerce websites often have a large number of pages and can sometimes reach tens of thousands which can create complex issues especially when filtering out expired products and categories of products, SEO for ecommerce sites necessitates a different kind of SEO tactics.
Let’s be clear: this article is does not to cover the basics of SEO, therefore basic onsite optimization and link building practices should be done already prior to applying this SEO optimization strategies to your ecommerce website.
Once you have performed and completed all SEO tactics you are ready to start advance SEO strategies for ecommerce websites.
Here we go…
Safeguard your site make sure its on HTTPS
As they say safety first! Having a secure website is imperative for ecommerce sites. With exchanges of personal details and users trusting you with highly sensitive payment information, security is of the utmost importance. Keep in mind that buying an SSL certificate is one thing, install it correctly is another.
Optimize category pages
Now that your website is as secure as a bank, it’s time to optimize your category pages. These are the pages on which to target those top-level keywords and should be high traffic generators.
Category pages are often left not optimized and generic or duplicate title tags. It always pays to have at least a solid H1 tag and paragraph that describes the category.
To further boost the ranking of your category pages for relevant keywords, try to focus your link-building campaign on generating links to them. Since the category pages serve as doorways to your products, it is a great practice to prioritize these in your site optimization efforts.
Optimize product pages
Although not as important as category pages and can often be a nightmare to optimize due to their large quantity, Product pages when optimized can generate the highest quality of visitors.
A good place to start is with the product descriptions. Get into the habit of writing unique descriptions for each product. It can be tempting to copy and paste the description from the manufacturer, but this means placing duplicate content on your site. And that’s SEO suicide.
Images
An image is better than a thousand words, humans are visual animals at the end of the day. Use only the highest quality images you can find. Ensure that the product images are compressed and are not large causing the website to be very slow. Also add appropriate alternative text to all images found on the website. Optimizing images could generate visitors to your website from users using Google image search.
Site architecture
Providing seamless internal navigation is essential not only for good user experience but also to help Google crawl and index your site. Ensure that categories are linked to from the homepage and that products are linked to from the category pages.
Provide links to products in blog content in order to continue the user journey and funnel them towards making a purchase. Try to link any new products from the homepage, as it will increase their chances of being indexed quicker by Google and getting found faster by users.
Breadcrumbs are also an important addition, as they ensure that every part of the user’s path is clickable. This helps users navigate back to parent categories as quickly and easily as possible. Plus, they also appear in Google’s search results, giving users an immediate overview of the site structure.
Short and clean URLs
Keep them clean and remove parameters, nonsensical characters, for example: https://www.websitename.com/category/product/
Be neat and tidy by sticking to lower case letters, utilizing hyphens instead of underscores and keeping them short but sweet.
Schema for product pages
This is one of the most important tactics that is often missed due to its complexity. Adding schema markup to your product pages is will surely improve the appearance of your site in the SERPs. It will als increase your click through rate.
There are two types of schema that you should add to your products: product schema and review schema.
Each product page should use the same template and therefore have a consistent layout. This means you can add schema markup to the template using microdata and the schema will be generated for each new product page.
Just make sure that you regularly test your schema using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, and if you’re new to it all, then utilize Google’s Markup Helper.
Monitoring performance
Any SEO strategy should include continual monitoring and analyzing the results.
Stay on top of identifying broken links and error pages. Analyse what’s working and what’s not, there are many applications that can help you with this task such as Moz and SEM Rush.
There’s no doubt that SEO for large ecommerce sites is time-consuming. That’s why so many ecommerce sites don’t have the level of optimization they should, which presents a great opportunity for those who are willing to invest in SEO Services to increase their website traffic and grow their sales.