Quick Fire Technical SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

SEO for ecommerce websites involves a myriad of factors. 

From paginated pages to the implementation of infinite scroll and handling faceted navigation, every aspect requires careful consideration. 

This blog post aims to provide you with actionable insights that can help you optimize your e-commerce website for better SEO performance.

Effective Pagination Management

Pagination is an essential part of any e-commerce website, allowing users to navigate through multiple pages of product listings. Here are some best practices for managing pagination:

• Use crawlable anchor text in pagination to help search engines understand the structure of your site.
• Self-referencing canonicals for each paginated page ensure that search engines recognize each page as unique and avoid duplicate content issues.
• Exclude paginated series from your sitemaps.xml to optimize crawl budget.

Although Google has announced it no longer uses rel=”next” or rel=”prev”, Bingbot still does. Therefore, it’s advisable to include them for comprehensive SEO coverage.

[More depth, go back and check out this guide]

Infinite Scroll: Pros, Cons, and Implementation

Infinite scroll enhances user experience by allowing continuous content browsing. However, it may cause crawling issues with Googlebot. To circumvent this, you can:

• Divide infinite scroll content into component pages accessible within the HTML.
• Ensure each component page contains a full URL.
• Implement History API “PushState” on the infinite scroll page to mimic user actions like clicking or turning a page.

Managing Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation allows users to sort and filter product listings. This section presents various SEO strategies for faceted navigation:

• Apply “Noindex” on most filters, but remember this may cause the URL not to show up on SERPs.
• Canonicalise all filtered pages to the category page, which could potentially reduce visibility for specific popular pages.
• Use robots.txt to disallow filtered pages, but beware of the possibility of trapping link equity.

To balance SEO and user experience, ensure all important filtered pages are crawlable and indexable, and optimize them with unique value. Limit the number of filters to 2-3 per page to prevent unnecessary complications.

Optimizing Crawl Budget

Crawl budget optimization is crucial for e-commerce sites with a large number of pages. Here are some tips:

• Disallow low-value pages in robots.txt within faceted navigation to save potential wasted crawl budget.
• Update your XML sitemap to only include important and valuable pages.
• Improve page loading speed and eliminate any redirect chains.

Leveraging Product Structure Data

Using structured data can enhance your product visibility on SERPs and Google Images. This can be achieved through JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata, and can mark up aspects like price, availability, and review rating. To ensure the correct implementation, use tools like Google Structure Data Markup Helper or Merkle Schema Markup Generator.

Help provide rich search results and google images. Certain products can not be used on a category level.

The can be used by 3 ways:

1. JSON-LD
2. RDFa
3. Microdata

They markup:

• Price
• Availability
• Review rating

Product structure data should be valid when you add:

• Name of product
• Plus either: (Review or Aggregate rating)

You can also add:

• Brand
• Description
• SKU if relevant
• Global Identifiers (GTINs)
• Image, must represent the product (JPG,PNG or GIF)
• Any offer that maybe running
  • Availability
  • ItemOffered
  • URL
  • PriceCurrency
  • PriveValidUntil
  • ShippingDetails
• AggregateOffer (Shopping Aggregate pages provide number of different sellers)
  • LowPrice
  • CurrencyPrice
  • HighPrice
  • OfferCount

Product information within Google Image:

• Name
• Image
• Price
• PriceCurrency
• Availability

International SEO: More Than Just Translation

Expanding to international markets? Remember, it’s not just about translating your website content. Consider the following:

• Understand your audience’s cultural background.
• Create a localized linking profile and fresh content.
• Use hreflang, soft redirections, and sitemaps XML for technical SEO.
• Choose a suitable URL structure based on language and region.
• Use CDN local servers to enhance site loading speed.

Remember, “we do not target language, we target behavior.” Catering to your audience’s behavior will ultimately lead to a better SEO performance and user experience.