Technical SEO is undoubtedly one of the most vital phases of Search Engine Optimization. You may have continuously posted extremely engaging & informative content on a trendy topic, but if your eCommerce website has numerous unresolved technical SEO issues, then you?ll find it troublesome to rank high in SERPs. As an outcome, it?s genuinely become imperative that you spend valuable time & optimize the technical SEO aspects of your eCommerce site but eCommerce website design should be perfect.
In this article, we?ll explain the key features of technical SEO and below 7 effective tips, you can perform to boost your site?s traffic & overall search presence.
Before we begin, let?s discuss some basics about technical SEO.
Table Of Contents
- What Technical SEO exactly is?
- 7 Technical SEO Tactics
- Optimize Site Structure
- Optimize URL Structure
- Make use of Canonical Tags
- Optimize site speed
- Use focussed keywords
- Do Weekly Site Audit
- Don’t forget Optimizing XML Sitemap
- Concluding Remarks
What Technical SEO Exactly is?
Technical SEO is the method of optimizing the indexing, crawling, and rendering stage of your e-commerce website to gain higher search rankings.
Neil Patel, a bestselling author & Entrepreneur, has a simple explanation for technical SEO: ?Any search engine optimization work that is performed aside from the content. It?s basically placing a powerful infrastructure to give your content the best opportunity it can have to rank high for relevant keywords and catchwords.?
Besides, the Yoast team also summarizes its definition well: It involves optimizing the technological features of your site to help it rank higher in search results. It is a comprehensive field that incorporates an extensive range of SEO topics, including:
- Crawling and indexing
- Canonical URLs
- Mobile-friendly optimization
- Site structure
- SSL (secure sockets layer) certifications
- Website speed
- Image SEO
- XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemaps
Technical SEO Tactics
Now, when you have understood the basics of technical SEO, here are 7 tactics you can implement to further boost traffic, and in turn, search rankings.
1. Optimize Site Structure
The first and foremost tactic you must implement is the optimization of the eCommerce site’s structure. The site structure should be optimized in a way that helps visitors access the content quickly. The best way to begin optimization is by keeping useful pages no more than 3 clicks away from the home page.
The prototypical Ecommerce site structure should be:
Homepage > Categories > Subcategories > Products (Brand or services)
If your site is small, then you can avoid including subcategories. But don’t forget to ensure each product refers to only one category or subcategory.
Likewise, your site’s URL structure should also be precise and logical. Below we have shown different examples for different URLs.
- Good URL: www.abc.com/brand/category/product_name
- Bad URL: www.abc.com/brand/pqrst
For instance, if you are selling an Apple product such as AirPods, the URL should be:
- www.abc.com/Apple/Airpods
Notwithstanding, keep in mind you maintain the URL length beneath 160 characters. Don?t exceed it.
2. Optimize URL Structure
As we said earlier, like the site’s structure optimization, URL structure’s order also matters a lot. There is a range of tags and poorly looking codes are vital to discuss!
In general, you need to make the URL structure extremely simple-to-read that gives the visitors a crystal clear understanding of what the site/page is all about. We suggest following these formulas for better results. Make sure you optimize them as given below. Missing one of these can lead you to face poor results.
- Category pages: yourecommercesite.com/category-title
- Subcategory pages: yourecommercesite.com/category-title/subcategory-title
- Sub-subcategory pages: yourecommercesite.com/category-title/subcategory-title/subcategory-title
- Product pages: yourecommercesite.com/category-title/subcategory-titlee/subcategory-title/product
Hopefully, you optimize URLs accordingly. No matter what niche your eCommerce business is either related to clothing, electronic gadgets, or groceries, the right optimization will always lead to more user engagement and a boost in traffic.
Here are some of the general guidelines that you can take into account while optimizing the URL structure.
- Keep the URL as concise as possible
- Prefer using hyphens to distinguish words
- Use relevant & targeted keyword
- Simplify the hierarchy
3. Make Use of Canonical Tags
Your preference should always be to eliminate or reduce content duplicacy issues if you actually want to boost ranking. Although using the best SEO tool like Semrush & Copyscape, you can easily scan & resolve duplicate content issues, still many times it becomes hectic and time-consuming.
At this time, you are advised to use canonical URLs! Canonical URLs perform their best job when you reproduce an article from one website to the other. By setting up a canonical URL, you can easily add the rel-canonical tag through the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin and get rid of content duplication issues & Google penalties. If you?re managing an eCommerce site with several indistinguishable pages, then setting up & optimizing conical tags will give you outstanding results.
4. Optimize Site Speed
Don?t make your visitors wait with an e-commerce site that takes a lot of seconds to load. According to a survey, nearly 1 in 4 visitors leaves a site when it takes more than 4 seconds to get loaded. Therefore, if you’re overlooking your eCommerce site’s speed, then you can face drastic results.
If your site is taking more than 3 seconds to load properly, then take immediate action to improve its loading speed. As your eCommerce website may have a lot of product images and videos, the best way to boost speed is to use high-quality, lighter images and short videos.
Besides, you are also advised to make your site’s code quite lighter; since the size of the code can also lead to slow speed. With the help of professional eCommerce website developers, you can manage all these aspects hassle-free.
5. Use Focussed Keywords
The other important SEO tactic that you must implement is using targeted keywords in image Alt text because Google doesn’t observe what?s in an image! Despite it uses metadata the includes image file name & alt text. Image Alt-text is used within an HTML code that describes the look and characteristics of an image on a page.
For effective results, it is advised to keep the alt text descriptive with satisfactory use of the focussed keywords, so apart from image optimization, you can also ensure enhanced performance of your eCommerce website in search engines.
6. Do Weekly Site Audit
If you want everything to be running smoothly on your eCommerce website, so you can have greater visitor engagement and a boost in traffic, a weekly SEO audit is the best solution to opt for! In an audit, you can resolve all on-page & off-page technical SEO issues that hinder your site from ranking higher in SERPs consistently.
A number of tools can help you to perform weekly audits effectively. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are the best of them! But we’d highly suggest Semrush for this job as it considers Google’s policies & standards thoroughly and gives a complete overview of the technical aspects of your site.
7. Don’t Forget Optimizing XML Sitemap
No doubt, sitemaps are essential for Google to find, index, and crawl your web pages. But if not optimized properly, can lead to destructive results.
Luckily, it?s now simple to formulate an XML sitemap. If you love using WordPress, then you can easily create it using free WordPress plugins, for example – Yoast and Google XML Sitemaps.
Make sure when you are done with creating the XML sitemap, you don’t forget to submit it to Google through Google Search Console. If you, then be prepared to face further technical challenges.
Login to your Google Search Console account carefully and then move to Sitemaps -> Add a new sitemap option and at the end, click on the ?Submit” button.
Once you’re done, follow these XML sitemap exceptional practices for further technical SEO related improvements.
- Give more preference to high-quality pages in your XML sitemap.
- Consider utilizing dynamic sitemaps than the static one.
Concluding Remarks:
Hopefully, by implementing these technical SEO tactics, you can well run your eCommerce site and get success in improving overall traffic and conversions. Besides these tactics, there are many more that you can implement such as finding the best keywords opportunities, optimizing internal links, SSL certification, etc.
We sincerely hope you stay tuned with us for more such interesting articles. If you find the information useful, then don?t forget to hit like & do share!
HAPPY READING!!
Author Bio
Morris Edwards is a Manager at Awebstar, a website designing agency in Singapore which is dealing with mobile app development, eCommerce development, SEO, social media marketing, and more. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Awebstar.com.sg.
