Any mention of e-commerce and one immediately thinks of behemoths like Amazon and Alibaba. While it is true that these giants tend to dominate e-commerce, it is equally true that there are hundreds of smaller e-commerce websites that are operating quite profitably in their niches. These smaller e-commerce platforms can not only survive but also thrive simply by implementing smarter marketing strategies, including SEO that keeps them at the top of the page rankings helping them to generate the desired organic traffic for lead generation and conversion. Some top technical SEO tips that can help e-commerce businesses maintain their edge:

Site Structure

Site structure is fundamental to the easy accessibility of information by visitors. It is important to have all the contents of the website organized in such a way that searching for information becomes logical and intuitive. Ideally, the site structure should be such that all the information can be accessed by the visitors using not more than three clicks from the home page. Ideally, this means that the site structure should be: Homepage > Categories > Subcategories > Products. Smaller sites can easily avoid the subcategories to make things simpler. Additionally, it is important to ensure that each product is assigned to only one sub-category and category as, otherwise, it will create confusion.

URL Structure

Many web developers tend to think that the sole purpose of the URL is to point to a webpage and since it is being read by the computer it does not matter what the syntax is if arbitrary characters are used in the URL. However, on the contrary, it is vital that the URL structure should be clear, simple, consistent, and easily deciphered by both visitors and search engines. You should also attempt to keep the total character length of the URL under 160. Rules for good URL structure include keeping it short, using the focus keyword, clearly defining the hierarchy, and using hyphens, not underscores to separate the words.

Sitemap

Web developers commonly use two different types of sitemaps: HTML and XML, each having their functions, as well as strengths and weaknesses. HTML sitemaps are usually created to help shoppers navigate the e-commerce website better while XML sitemaps are employed to assist search engine bots to crawl and index the site more efficiently. Very importantly, XML sitemaps also serve as an invitation to the search engine to crawl the website. However, it must be understood that by simply having an XML sitemap, there is no certainty that the site will be indexed by the search engine – the sitemap only serves to provide a recommendation to the bots to crawl it. In sharp contrast to HTML sitemaps, the XML sitemaps do not pass on the link authority and thus play no part in improving the search rankings. HTML sitemaps are valuable if the current navigation is limited in the number of pages being linked or the search engine cannot access the present navigation.

Log File Analysis

To analyze the log files, you first need to download them from the server and import them to a log filing tool. The log files can provide detailed information regarding a visitor or a bot interaction. This information can be used to not only pinpoint unknown issues but also make better decisions regarding SEO. One of the biggest benefits of the analysis of log files is that it can reveal the use of the site’s crawl budget, observes the chief of technical SEO at Social Market Way, a leading digital marketing and SEO agency. The crawl budget will be higher if the domain authority is high. Even though log file analysis cannot directly affect the crawl budget of your e-commerce site, you can use the information to optimize the utilization of the budget by identifying the URLs being most frequently crawled, identify orphaned pages not being crawled, and locate pages that are loading slowly so that they can be speeded up.

Crawl Budget

The crawl budget refers to the number of web pages on your site that the search engine bot will crawl per day. If the crawl budget is low, you could be having an indexing issue that will hurt your page rankings. However, since e-commerce websites typically have a very large number of pages, the optimization of the crawl budget is vital. To improve the crawl budget, you can optimize the link structure, remove duplicate content, boost the number of backlinks, fix links that are broken, and update the sitemap periodically.

Canonical Tags

It is quite possible that in large e-commerce sites, there will be certain product pages that a visitor can access from several categories, however, when this happens, there will be a situation where there will be different URLs pointing to the same content. To avoid this kind of confusion and illogicality, it is advisable to use canonical tags, which is a simple HTML element that informs the search engine, which URL is valid for crawling and displaying in the search results. According to https://searchengineland.com, it is possible even to canonicalize different versions of your website, if so desired.

Robots.txt

Since e-commerce websites can have a very large number of pages, it can be a waste of the precious crawl budget if every page were to be indexed even if they are not important. By using the robots.txt file, you can inform the search engine regarding the pages or even sections within specific web pages that should not be crawled by the bots. The use of robots.txt can be done for multiple purposes. For example, it is possible to block pages like forms, login pages, or pages containing sensitive information that are deemed to be non-public from being crawled. You can also conserve your crawl budget by blocking pages that are unimportant or pages that need not be indexed like those containing images, PDF pages, etc.

Conclusion

To be SEO-efficient, e-commerce sites need to take into consideration a large number of technical SEO factors. The ones that have been discussed represent just the tip of the iceberg and make for a very good start for those who have not considered implementing technical SEO. The tips are relatively easy to implement and deliver results that are immediate and enduring.