Recommendations for SEO Friendly E-commerce Platforms – Important SEO Considerations
When it comes to E-commerce there is no need to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Nine out of ten times it is cheaper and more effective to use an off-the-shelf solution rather than building a solution from scratch. There are many E-commerce solutions available as SaaS (software as a service) and open source CMS platforms that can be found just by searching online so there is no shortage of good website programs.
As a SEO specialist, Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento and WooCommerce are among my favourite platforms to work with but regardless of what solution you use there are a few things that are worth considering.
Design & Information Architecture
Visually appealing, well-structured and organised design centred on the concept of optimised Information Architecture (IA) allows your users to easily access information and transact on your site. This goes hand in hand with SEO, as content is a huge part of getting optimal search visibility.
IA ties in with link-building, on-page mark-up structure and reducing duplicate content. The more organised and accessible your content is, the easier it is for users to find what they are looking for and the easier it is to create a more effective SEO campaign.
URL Rewriting
The way that your URLs are structured is important. Make sure to use an E-commerce platform that allows you to write your own static URLs. For example, https://www.mywebsite.com/ghg265952.php?558258-vf2 is not a good URL for a web page selling yellow shoes from your shoe store. Using URLs like https://www.mywebsite.com/shoes/yellow or https://www.mywebsite.com/yellow-shoes.html is not only more appropriate but will also give you far better results that the preceding example.
301 & 404 HTTP Statuses
301 redirects are used to tell search engines like Google Search that a page’s location no longer exists and has permanently moved to another address.
For example…
If https://www.mywebsite.com/old has a 301 redirect to https://www.mywebsite.com/new, when a user tries to access https://www.mywebsite.com/old they will automatically be taken to the latter site.
When migrating to another platform it is important to use 301s to redirect users to new versions of redundant pages in order to avoid 404 errors and potentially lose users/customers.
A 404 is a browser error that means that a page no longer exists. It is important to create your own custom 404 that gives users the option to navigate either back to the page they were on before or, to other pages that could be of interest.
URL Canonicalisation
Canonicalising URLs tells search engines the preferred website address to use in order to access a page. Although https://www.website.com and https://website.com may take you to the same page, search engines see them as being two totally different locations. By canonicalising an URL path, this will give you better results when link-building because you will be able to focus and direct as much influence as possible to that location.
Meta Tags & On-Page Mark-up Structure
When choosing your template try avoid hard coding title tags (<title></title>) and headers (h1, h2, h3…etc.). When it comes to on-page content, the title tag and header tags play a crucial part in how your page will be assessed for relevance so it is important to be able to control this.
Example of good page structure…
<head>
<title>TITLE HERE</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Description goes here and should be around 150 characters for optimal use”>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Main Heading</h1>
<h2>Sub-Heading</h2>
<h3>Sub-Heading of h2</h3>
</body>
When writing a description for your product, category and other information pages on the site it is important to think of it as ‘ad copywriting’ and focus on your user behaviour and customer psychology of your ideal client for that specific page or targeted query.
Use mark-up like schema.org and open graph when appropriate in order to display things like customer ratings, company logos, video and optimised social media content distribution…etc.
Tracking & Reporting
Tracking is a valuable part of any search marketing campaign and more so for E-commerce websites. I highly recommend using a platform like Google Tag Manager in order to feed data through to Google Analytics. The beauty of this tool is that is requires minimal coding, is extremely intuitive and very flexible in terms of tracking.
Google Tag Manager allows site owners, marketers and administrators to implement tracking at a granular level by setting up and managing information within the framework and feeding it to Google Analytics. Tag Manager will allow you to track form submissions, button clicks, image clicks and much more.
Content
Make sure you have high quality keyword rich and engaging content in order to improve your visibility. This can be in the form of a blog, articles or any other information that can draw users to your site.
Appropriately labelling your images, videos, PDFs and files with the correct use of mark-up (e.g. image title tag, alt tag …etc. ) and using keywords in your file names is also a good idea but do not overdo it. Try to use between three to seven words separated by ‘ – ‘ dashes and remove stop words like ‘in, to, and, or, is…etc.’ in order to focus just on the keywords you are targeting (make sure to only have one occurrence of each word).
Social media is a good way to make sure information on your site has the potential for virility. Social media can have a huge effect on your SEO campaign and it is important that users are able to share on their various social networks. Implementing a Social Media Marketing Strategy (SMMS) will aid in increasing your search visibility.
In conclusion, the design and AI of your website needs to be appealing and structured well. Don’t forget this as well when you’re rewriting your URLs. Ensuring you have your 301 redirects and 404 errors set-up correctly is so important if you wish to hold on to your customers. URL Canonicalisation helps you to develop good link building and, tracking will enable you to collect data so that your website’s performance and be truthfully reflected in your reporting. Finally, create content that is relevant, engaging and original. If you do this, your content will naturally be keyword rich. If you wish to discuss any of the above in more detail, please do not hesitate to contact us here at SponsoredLinX on 1300 859 600, or visit our website.