This article was co-authored by Mate Dyekiss, SEO Strategist at IMI.
An e-commerce website can create all the technical SEO issues one can imagine: ever-changing inventory, filtering options, search boxes, the same products in different colors or sizes. Here is a list of technical SEO tactics that need to be checked and implemented (if applicable) for e-commerce sites.
1 - HTTP/HTTPS
A secured server is required for an e-commerce website. Why? Your website's users and customers are entering sensitive information like credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, home addresses, and more. With the use of an SSL certificate you activate a secure connection between the browser and web server, protecting your customers’ information.
There are two scenarios:
1 - There’s an HTTP version of the site. It is a common practice to have an HTTP version of some pages when users are just browsing and are not logged in to their account. In this case, implement rel=”canonical” tags pointing to the HTTPS version of the page so the site will not have duplicate content issues.
2 - Everything is on HTTPS. In this case, there is no need for canonicalization since there is no HTTP counterpart. Just make sure your SSL certificate is updated!
2 - Breadcrumb Implementation
I’m sure everyone has experienced this feature already but just to make sure, here’s an example of a breadcrumb navigation at the top of this image:
The use of breadcrumb trails helps both search engines and users easily follow and understand the hierarchy of the site.
3 - Schema
Schema markup is a code you put on your website to ensure search engines understand and show the most useful information for users. In other words, we can highlight certain pieces of information (like the name and description of a product, price, customer reviews and ratings) for search engines, telling them what the information means.
Some useful links:
http://schema.org/AggregateOffer
https://schema.org/AggregateRating
4 - Search box
When there is a search box on the website, it provides an additional way for users to look for something specific – which is great.
The Challenge: The countless search queries from users can create thousands of URLs, and you don’t want these URLs to be indexed.
The Solution: To keep search engines away from indexing these pages, create a “/search/” folder. So whenever the search box is used, it won’t be indexed by search engines.
Example: www.website.com/search/random+query
5 - 404 Pages
The inventory for e-commerce sites is always changing. When a product is no longer available, you have to make sure the page won’t be accessible for users.
If the product is not available anymore and the page is deleted from the site, the user might receive a 404 page. This is not the best for user experience. Make sure to redirect users to the most appropriate page such as the new product that replaced the old one, category page or home page.
The best way to handle this is to implement a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect – permanent redirect – passes around 90% of link juice (ranking power) so if the old product page was ranking well for certain search queries, 90% of that ranking power will be passed along to the new page (unlike a 302 redirect, which is a temporary redirect and it passes 0% of link juice).
Important tip: We all know that things can fall through the cracks. Creating a custom 404 page will ensure the best user experience possible. Ideally, the custom 404 page would contain a link to the previous page the user was on, as well as an apology message – “Oops! We are really sorry but the page you requested cannot be found." After the 404 pages are discovered, it’s important to implement a 301 redirect to the most relevant page or delete the page if it’s not relevant anymore.
6 - Pagination
Pagination is dividing a document into smaller sections, just like this article. It is used to display a limited number of results or posts at once. Just imagine if you were looking for an Italian restaurant in Manhattan on either
The Challenge: Having a page that's too long will increase the load time of the webpage (less than 2 seconds is an ideal load speed time). Slow load speed affects the user experience negatively, so make sure to address the issue. For example, a website that has a category page with 75 products will have to download thumbnails and basic descriptions for each product, which will take a long time. In this case you need to build out additional product pages. It is important that page 2, 3, 4, etc. do not get indexed by Google and show up in the search results.
The Solution: Using rel=”next”, rel=”prev” tags will specify which pages are part of a series. You can ensure search engines will understand the relationship between these pages. Google has a great guide for pagination explaining the steps in detail.
Important tip: It’s important to add <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”> tags to all of the pages in the paginated series except page one. This will serve as an extra step to make sure only the first page in the series is indexed.
7 - Faceted Navigation
Faceted navigation, which is a fancy name for “filtering results” is a popular technique used with Ecommerce sites, but can lead to a lot of issues with search engines if not handled correctly. For example, if I’m looking for a smart TV on bestbuy.com, the site will provide me hundreds of results. I can filter the results to make it easier.
These filtering options above are popular and useful for the users to narrow their searches. However, when this filtering feature is used, a new page (with a new and unique URL string) is being generated. This page is so unique it doesn’t have any value for other users (because they may choose to filter differently) and that is why it is not good if these pages are being indexed by search engines. This is the challenge webmasters have to face when search engines start indexing the dynamically generated URLs.
There are two options available to help with this challenge:
1 - Proper use of rel=”canonical” tags pointing to the canonical page version of the category / product list.
2 - AJAX Navigation (with static HTML): In this option, the URL wouldn’t change when the user is changing categories. This method requires less fine-tuning but could be more time consuming for the web developers.
Keep in mind that every website is different, therefore, the needs are always unique and the solutions need to be customized.
