Technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl and index your web pages. It also increases the chance of your website ranking on SERPs by addressing factors like mobile-friendliness, page speed, and security.
A well-optimized eCommerce site is faster and easier for both users and bots to navigate. That’s why it’s so important to follow the best practices for technical SEO.
Site Navigation
The pages of your ecommerce site must be easy to navigate for both search engines and users. This can be accomplished by having a clearly structured page architecture, including the use of breadcrumb links and an XML sitemap. You should also make sure that your internal links are pointing to the correct pages, and that each page has unique content and isn’t duplicated across multiple pages (which can hurt your SEO).
For eCommerce sites, technical optimization often includes using an SSL certificate to ensure that all website visitors have a secure connection. This helps build customer trust and also gives your website a SEO boost because Google rewards websites that use encryption.
In addition to these foundational elements, ecommerce SEO Nashville can also include optimizing for mobile and user experience. By ensuring that your website loads quickly, is mobile-friendly and provides a seamless shopping experience for users, you’ll be able to attract more shoppers and rank higher in search results. Ecommerce technical SEO is an ongoing process, so it’s important to check in on your website regularly to ensure that it’s following the best practices for SEO. To do this, you can utilize tools such as Ahrefs’ free site speed and performance tool and PageSpeed Insights from Google. You can also outsource a technical SEO specialist to handle these tasks for you if necessary
Site Security
The same things that make your website secure for search engines, particularly in terms of technical SEO Nashville strategies, also improve its security for your users. This doubles the benefits of technical SEO because it allows you to amplify your site’s protections against hackers and outside threats while providing a more efficient and effective shopping experience for your customers
The most common elements of technical SEO include optimizing your page content, structure and backend code for better crawlability, indexing and rendering. The goal is to create a seamless browsing and shopping experience for both search engine bots and users alike.
This includes having a clean URL structure (e.g., using a keyword in your URL instead of random numbers and letters) and using breadcrumb navigation so that both users and search engines know where they are on your site. It also means incorporating structured data, such as star ratings or prices, into your product listings, to create rich snippets that stand out in search results.
Another important technical aspect is ensuring that your site is free of duplicate content, which can be hard to detect when building a new site or updating an existing one. Search engines will reward sites that have a good, logical flow of content, and duplicate pages can hurt your SEO ranking. By analyzing log files and identifying duplicative content, you can remove these pages from your site’s architecture to prevent your SEO ranking from suffering.
Site Load Speed
Ecommerce websites tend to have a lot of pages and content. Keeping up with technical SEO is critical to ensure search engines can crawl and index these pages effectively. Technical SEO also helps optimize a website’s load speed and mobile user experience, both of which are important factors for ranking well in Google search results.
The most common forms of technical SEO include XML sitemaps and structured data. An XML sitemap is an “invitation” of sorts that alerts search engine robots to pages and files on your website. It isn’t visible to your visitors and isn’t used for rankings, but it allows search engines to crawl and index your pages more quickly. Structured data enhances search results by adding information such as star ratings to reviews or prices to products.
Finally, technical SEO includes ensuring there is no duplicate content on your website. Duplicate content can negatively impact your page rankings and confuse visitors. It’s important to check regularly using tools like Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar or Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Technical SEO is an ongoing process that requires the help of a web developer to complete. A web developer can assess the health of your website, provide recommendations for improvements and carry out those improvements on your behalf. It’s important to understand the basics of technical SEO so you can speak confidently about it with your developers and make sure they know what you need from them.
Site Structure
Just like foundational concrete and piles define the stability of buildings, site structure is a core component of any web page’s success. It is the method by which your pages are linked together to form a hierarchy that is both user-friendly and search engine-friendly.
A poor site structure means that users and Google may get lost on your site, resulting in low search visibility and conversions. This is because search engines need to understand the relationship between a page and its context within your site in order to rank it effectively.
To improve SEO, ensure that your homepage is well connected to your product and category pages in a logical way. Ideally, a visitor should only have to click two or three times to get from the homepage to an individual product page. This is called a breadcrumb navigation, and it is an essential feature for UX and SEO.
Another important aspect of site structure is ensuring that your CMS doesn’t publish duplicate content and canonical tags are used appropriately to tell search engines which version of each page should be ranked. Duplicate content is confusing for both users and search engines, so be sure that there are no duplicate page titles or URLs on your ecommerce site. Also, ensure that your CMS is only using one version of a page for ranking purposes (not the HTTPS and non-HTTPS versions). This will help you avoid duplicate content issues.