The aim of technical SEO is to improve the architecture of a website. It involves optimizing your site to facilitate its crawling and indexing by search engine bots, which in turn can help boost your organic rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you have an ecommerce website, working on your technical SEO is absolutely essential. It demonstrates to search engines that your online store offers value and pushes them to display it higher up on the list of search results.
1. Increase your site speed
Having a website that loads quickly provides visitors with a better user experience and also has a positive influence on SEO. A fast page-loading speed serves as a signal to search engines like Google that you have a quality site.
To gauge your site’s current performance, you can use any of the various tools available, like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This free, easy-to-use tool allows you to test and measure your pages’ speeds for both mobile and desktop users.
There are numerous steps you can take to increase your ecommerce site’s speed and ensure that its pages load more quickly:
- Optimize product images: High-quality product images are essential for online stores, but they can slow a site down if they’re too large. Remedy this issue by compressing your images to reduce their weight without compromising on quality. Don’t forget to also add an alt attribute to each image to further bolster your SEO.
- Reduce redirects: Redirects are sometimes required in ecommerce, such as when you update a URL or have an out-of-stock product. However, having too many of them can decrease your site speed. Use redirects only when necessary and remove them when they’re no longer relevant.
- Minify site code: Minifying your site’s CSS, HTML, and JavaScript reduces the size of the files by getting rid of any unnecessary characters, comments, spaces, and other unrequired elements. Going through each line of code can be a time-consuming process, so it’s advantageous to avail of plugins that do it automatically or choose an ecommerce platform that’ll take care of it for you.
2. Ensure that you have a mobile-friendly site
With an increasing number of consumers opting to shop online using their smartphones, it’s not surprising that Google considers mobile-friendliness to be an important factor when it comes to site rankings. It’s therefore clear that your strategy for improving your technical SEO should include optimizing your website for mobile use.
As with anything concerning SEO, when working to make sure that you have a mobile-friendly site, keep user experience in mind. The goal is to make shopping on your website as enjoyable as possible and to minimize frustration, remembering that what looks good when viewed from a desktop computer may not work as well when viewed from a mobile device.
This means prioritizing a responsive design, avoiding or limiting pop-ups, and optimizing your typography to ensure your site’s readability for mobile use. Fortunately, most actions you take to improve your site’s technical SEO will also help to improve the mobile experience.
3. Work on the structure of your URLs
The structure of your website’s URLs is crucial to optimizing technical SEO, as this is where search engine bots begin when crawling your various pages. Well-structured URLs provide search engines and internet users with a clear indication of what your pages are about.
To optimize your URLs, be sure to include relevant keywords, add hyphens between words, and keep their length short by avoiding the use of “filler” words that don’t add value.
Depending on your chosen content management system, you may be able to auto-generate URLs as you create pages for your site. This may give you a URL that resembles the following:
- https://yourshop.com/product.php?id:98
While this might be nice for saving time, it won’t do any favors for your SEO. It’s well worth the little bit of extra effort to ensure that your URLs are well organized and clear, as can be seen in this improvement:
- https://yourshop.com/category/subcategory/product-name
If your online store has multiple categories, subcategories, etc., your URLs should follow the same structure. This becomes all the more important if you offer hundreds or even thousands of products for sale!
To help you improve your site’s technical SEO, here are a few tips to follow. Be sure to also check out the WiziShop blog’s SEO category, where you’ll find more guidance on how to reach the top search results and drive more traffic to your online store!
