In this lengthy blog I will cover ecommerce SEO Implementation in 2019
The biggest mistake every brand does in developing their brand new ecommerce website is saving money by not getting professional SEO super-vision in the whole process.
I highly recommend to hire a experienced SEO expert to look after the development process.
But if your budget does not allow to hire an SEO specialist then It’s Okay, because after reading and implementing this guide you won’t need to hire SEO specialist 😉
The most common mistake is to overlook SEO importance during developing an ecommerce website in the era even a little element can harm your efforts like if you talk about URL structure.
Some website owners does not even know about URL structure which forms the basis of your SEO Strategy.
Imagine you are going to have huge website which will offer 100s of items separately for different audience like men, women, kids, businesses, fashion enthusiast etc.
How you will plan URL for this kind of website?
I have seen a few example in my career where an ecommerce store put lot of money building strong online base for their brand and bring traffic and sales and they wasted a lot of their budget by ignoring this small but VERY important element.
In this particular example they did not have any mechanism to offer different colors/variants of a product on different urls. So they had to add multiple products to their store to cater to their online marketing team, I bet you must have seen or experienced this kind of scenario in your career too.
I contacted their development to form a mechanism to host product variants on the same product URL where product url can be changed if the different color is selected.
Please notice, you have to use Canonical URL structure to manage identical duplicate issue in the scenario.
However It is just one example of what consequences you can expect if you ignore one little factor of SEO during your development,
In this guide we are just covering what SEO factors you should track during development of the website.
Here is the list for core eCommerce SEO Factors
- On-Page SEO Support
- URL Structure
- Navigation
- Sitemap
- Page Speed
- Mobile View Optimization
1. On-Page SEO Support.
Most of the time ecommerce store built and start running without this basic SEO function which enables website owners to create custom SEO titles, meta descriptions for products, categories, brand pages.
If you are using Shopify then there is a lot of free SEO plugins available on ShopifyAppStore that offers this functionality and other cool features too.
2. URL Structure
I have already discussed the importance of URL structure in this blog but for more details and clearer understanding you should create a category structure of your website in an excel sheet like in the image to plan the whole website structure before going to development.
Note: This is a golden standard of creating URL structure for any kind of website, make sure you use it correctly with keeping your future business plans in mind.
3. Navigation
The second step is to give easy to understand navigation to your users that is also aligned with your URL structure. Research shows that user exit your website if he does not find the desired information in 4 steps. Land > Navigate > Search > Result if not found 80% user will exit the website immediately.
4. Sitemap
Sitemap indirectly helps your website by giving meaningful insights like how many pages you currently have on your website and from Google search console you can see how many pages are indexed out of submitted pages in XML Sitemap. Break this myth that sitemap will index all the pages it contains but it helps google and other search engines to easily navigate all your important pages by getting your data in their preferred formats.
5. Page Speed
Either its ecommerce or other business website page speed can make or break a website in Google. After 2015 Google is strictly account page speed for a web page ranking. Specially when it comes to mobile.
In 2019 if your website does not render in 3 secs then most likely your user will exit your website (According to google you lose upto 70% of traffic due to page load time issue).
You should monitor every type of page’s speed like test page speed for your home page and product page separately, half of the webmaster are happy to see their home page is loading faster but they overlook the basic thing that they only get a sale if their product page loads faster. So make sure you fix this issue everywhere.
6. Mobile View Optimization
Mobile page speed and mobile view is entirely different things. Make sure all your pages loaded properly on mobile view.
Specially look for the following elements.
- Product image
- Your menu should not take more than 15% of the screen when loaded first time.
- All the fonts are easily readable.
- All actionable/modifiable functions such as change color, zoom, size chart etc works on single tap.
- Add to cart button should appear on 2 and half scrolls max.
This list is not enough when it comes to mobile view optimization. Get UX expert and make sure you are not ignoring any single point here.
Following this eCommerce Essential SEO Implementation guide will help you start your store with basic but fundamental SEO Features.
For any more queries, you can write to me at [email protected] Get in touch with me on Call or WhatsApp 03212236688
You can also enroll in our SEO Mastery Course to learn Advance SEO which I also teach in USA/Canada through EraOfEcom – eCommerce Success Platform.
