Technical SEO For ECommerce Websites

This chapter cracks the code on technical SEO, what it is, why you need to be bothered about it, and how to make it work for you.

A Simple Explanation of Technical SEO

In some ways, search engines are biased. They prefer websites that have strong technical characteristics. These can be a secure connection, a responsive design, or a faster loading time among other things that help search engine spiders do their job effectively. A search engine spider, also referred to as a web crawler, is a type of an internet bot that crawls and indexes websites so they can appear in search results.

What happens then? Simple, search engines understand your site better and rank it higher.

Technical SEO makes sure this bias works for your advantage. It takes care of all the backend optimization of an eCommerce website to perform better in SERPs and offer a visually appealing site on the front end to users.

Why Technical SEO Matters?

Search engine algorithms have big yet precise expectations. Technical SEO optimizes the security, design, and construction of your eCommerce site to meet these. It works through your code base, page layouts, and load times, etc. contributing towards page rankings and organic traffic.

If your eCommerce site’s technical SEO is not up to mark it will keep you out of the top results, killing your traffic and eventually, your revenue. With 62% of eCommerce traffic coming from search engines, it is important that your technical SEO factors positively impacts your rankings.

How to do it right for eCommerce websites?

These guidelines will help you to get started with technical SEO for eCommerce.

Start with a secure SSL certified site. This is a security installation creating an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. If your eCommerce website URL does not start with ‘https://’, Google will prefer others over you.

Prime your eCommerce website for mobile-friendly viewing. More than 67.2% of all eCommerce is accessed through mobile devices, and mobile commerce sales will reach $3.56 trillion by the end of 2021. Optimize a responsive website design that will adjust itself to any device.

Improve your site load time or be ready to lose 53% visitors and decrease conversions by 7%, page views by 11%, and customer satisfaction by 16%. Technical SEO covers speed optimization by—
- reducing or compressing image sizes
- building efficient website code
- optimising CSS delivery and code minifying
- reducing redirects
- enabling browser caching
- hosting videos on external platform

Adding structured data improves your product listings and helps your eCommerce site rank better in search results. This means optimising title tags, meta descriptions, schema markup, etc.

Implementing the critical components of XML sitemap and robots.txt file guides guide search engines to crawl and index important pages, and leave pages you don’t want indexed respectively. While robots.txt don’t and cannot block crawlers, they can prevent them from overloading your site with crawl requests and slowing it down.

Using canonical tags to highlight a specific URL as representing the primary copy of a page is a critical technical SEO component. They also prevent duplicate content and pages from affecting your rankings on SERPs.

Stay on Top of Your Website’s Performance with Technical SEO

eCommerce websites need to have sound technical SEO to make sure they are performing their best to rank higher and be visible to users. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools to help you analyze the performance of your site from a search engine perspective.