Since the world of SEO is complex for eCommerce sites to forge a path that may work for their business, the checklist we have devised can be of great help. Whether your store is to buy gadgets online or is a clothing store, this checklist is for every eCommerce site.
Before we begin, if you are a beginner, you need to understand what technical SEO is.
Technical SEO: Technical SEO, as the name suggests, refers to improving the technical aspects of your site’s web pages to increase their chances of ranking better in search engines. Making the website faster, easier to crawl, and understandable for the search engines are all main technical optimization metrics. Technical SEO, in other words, is on-site SEO that includes improving your elements on the website to rank higher. Please do not confuse it with off-page SEO geared more towards generating exposure and visibility of your website.
What are those search engine techniques that you need to apply to rank better and generate sales?
eCommerce Website SEO Checklist
#1 Make Sure Your Website is Crawlable
If the search engine cannot crawl your website, then all will be lost as it can’t rank your content. Meaning, if the content isn’t being ranked, then your products won’t rank either in the search results. Which is bad news for you.
To make sure search engines crawl and index your page, here’s a checklist within a checklist.
- Remove crawl blocks in your robots.txt file.
- Fix all nofollow internal links
- Include the pages in your sitemap
- Build quality backlinks
- Include powerful internal links
- Make your pages valuable and unique
- Remove rogue no-index tags
In case you’re having trouble following, here’s where you should read it in detail.
#2 Add Schema Markup to Your Website
Since you are an eCommerce website, you need your items to be shown in Google’s search results. The ideal situation is Google displaying the price, rating, availability, and product details on search result pages.
To achieve the above, you need to add a schema markup that is a batch of HTML tags that enables Google to display the necessary product information for users to decide whether they want to click on it or not. Not just this, your products look appealing, giving searchers an impression of a high-quality and reliable website.
Go to the products report of Google Search Console, and you will find your current schema markup setup.
#3 Target the Right Keywords
Keyword research is the essential factor of any website, especially of an eCommerce store. Not only are you targeting brand-specific keywords, but also product and sales-related keywords as well. Unfortunately, many make the mistake of targeting the wrong keyword or doing entirely faulty keyword research.
Going after the highest search volume that is brand-related isn’t the best route, as many would assume. It is the low-search-volume keywords where your focus should be as they bring in conversions.
So always keep in mind to target the low volume yet more specific terms.
#4 Avoid and Remove Duplicated Content
Google is all about unique, new, high-quality, and informative content, which is why websites that have duplicate content will automatically land in the bad book. For Google, if 60% of your content matches another site, it will be considered copied or duplicated.
This is why you must keep the content as original as possible. Moreover, if you have multiple product pages for the same item that is different colors, it is also considered a duplication from Google’s standpoint.
So, you have to curb duplication errors and make sure your website is user-friendly and enhances user-experience by providing everything on one page.
#5 Mobile-first Optimization
If you are keeping up with Google, then you must know about ‘mobile-first indexing.’ In a nutshell, Google doesn’t pay your desktop website much heed and indexes and ranks your site based on your mobile content.
This occurred due to the consumer statistics that dictate that most websites are visited through smartphones rather than desktops, making mobile-optimization a top priority.
Hence, making your eCommerce website mobile responsive is extremely important for your ranking and search engine visibility. Once your site adapts to every handheld device’ screen, correctly showing the content without overlapping – you are good to go.
Wrapping Up
A tool like Ahref will help you accurately determine any loose ends within your website. Moreover, it is easy to understand and navigate around for beginners. While in terms of providing helpful insights by auditing your site, it is top-notch. So go ahead and make sure your technical SEO is applied the right way, and you will see great results in due time.
