Although ecommerce remains simply a web platform, it has its own parameters. Positioning ecommerce in Google requires specific knowledge of ecommerce SEO positioning. Here, we group two kinds of technique which make the difference:
ECOMMERCE AND LANDING CONTENT / SEASONAL PAGES
One of the problems that crops up in ecommerce content is seasonality. The best way to present products is with different landing/category pages, one for each type of product, that is: one for autumn products, another for clearance, yet another for sales, another for summer, etc.
At this point, we might be wondering what to do when the season is over or there are no products for the section.
There are different options for these landings, here listed from best to worst:
- Renew content
- Update content
- Forward elsewhere
- Reuse
- Redirect the URL
- Eliminate it
- Send 410 and delist it
There exists a simple and effective way to link them together. Imagine for a moment that it is the autumn season and you reach the landing page for bikinis: evidently you won’t find the product. The trick is to divert the traffic from this landing page: what interests us is getting the user to jump to another page where there might be products they will wish to buy.
How do we do this? We have two options. we can insert a link to another landing or forward it. Nevertheless, the best way to do it is by creating a link. This might make us think twice, but it doesn’t have to necessarily be crude: we can do it gracefully. We could put a banner saying, for instance: “Brrr, cold, isn’t it? Instead of a bikini we suggest a good cashmere jersey”, with a link to the jersey section.
TECHNICAL ASPECTS TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR ECOMMERCE PERFORMANCE
The objectives for any ecommerce are basically threefold, and their ultimate aim is to make the page load very quickly.
- Reducing the number of low-quality pages indexed to the minimum
- Optimizing crawling and indexing.
- Raising the longtail traffic.
Loading quickly is important in the first place, because Google now penalizes slow loaders, and secondly, as a matter of usability and user experience . If loading is slow, there could be the risk of user flight, with the consequent missed conversion opportunity.
We now present some points to bear in mind to get an ecommerce site to load like lightning:
Some of the actions might be related to the server. Changing traditional hosting for cloud hosting and using an image optimizer could be a way to optimize our web page.
To improve the performance of our ecommerce platform at the level of the user, we need to succeed in improving the conversion, navigation and usability.
At bot level, the faster the loading speed, the higher rating we will get for the site, due to the crawl budget or the time the Google crawlers have available to crawl a web; if it takes them too long, it’s likely that there are pages they aren’t going to have time to crawl very often, and therefore their positioning will not be as good as others that are well optimized.
To improve the crawling of our ecommerce, we must avoid 404 errors. We can do forwarding which applies to a large number of URLs. Generally we do this with regular expressions, although always just in the right measure.
In addition, the best thing is to use status code 410, to the extent this is possible.
Be careful too with the indexable low-quality pages: it’s usual that there are some though there should not be many.
The best thing would be to avoid:
-URLs from results of internal searches.
-URLs with multiple filters, such as sizes, colors, price, etc.
-URLs of list orderings.
With respect to sitemaps, it’s best for them to be as segmented as possible and with hreflang tags. For robots, however, we should be clear about which pages we wish to index and which not. By doing this, we reduce crawling over poor-quality pages.
These are a few useful tips which will help to improve the positioning of your ecommerce site.
At Lifting Group, we keep up to date with all the innovations and changes in online marketing and in addition, we enjoy sharing what we know with our users.
