Your online store is open for business, but keywords and content alone won’t drive traffic and conversions. Technical elements such as site structure, page speed, and structured data have an enormous impact on discoverability and whether audiences find and explore your site.
Learn about the key elements of technical search engine optimization (SEO) for ecommerce. This guide explains how to get your online platform up to par so search engines can crawl your product pages and match them to the right queries. You’ll also learn to avoid common problems with scrolling and pagination that can prevent your store from ranking well and attracting customers who are ready to spend.
Why Technical SEO Is Crucial for Ecommerce Websites
According to Statista, 44% of consumers start their online shopping journeys with a search engine. These potential customers are comparing prices, reading reviews, exploring product features, and looking for alternate brands.
Search visibility is critical if your ecommerce business wants to connect with consumers in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If audiences aren’t finding your brand, they’ll navigate to your competitors. You need a prominent position in organic search listings, rich results, and image and video searches to bring audiences to your site.
A technical SEO ecommerce strategy ensures search engines can crawl your site and understand it to index it for appropriate queries. Technical SEO also enhances user experience so that audiences can effortlessly browse your offerings, helping you to maximize site visits and convert leads.
Core Elements of Ecommerce Technical SEO
Technical SEO gets your site ready for crawling and helps search engines infer meaning. A technically strong site is fast loading, well organized, and easy to navigate, which also benefits users.
1. Optimizing Site Structure
Let’s start with how you organize your ecommerce store. You should categorize products logically and label them clearly, in the same way you’d organize a brick-and-mortar store into sections with prominent signage. Your site structure impacts how search engines and customers make sense of your offerings.
- Organize products in logical categories. Use a hierarchical structure with general categories at the top and well-defined subcategories below. By creating a high-level category for living room furniture and subcategories for sofas, end tables, and TV stands, you help search engines understand that sofas are a type of living room furniture.
- Provide clean navigation. Reinforce your site structure with simple navigation menus and help users find items with the fewest clicks. Breadcrumb navigation lets customers jump quickly from subcategories to parent categories. Place menus consistently on each page and use concise anchor text. It’s also helpful to create consistent URLs that reflect page content and include keywords.
- Use internal linking. Search crawlers follow internal links to discover content and see how pages are related. Add links to guide customers and search engines from top-level categories to subcategories, and from subcategories to products. You can also add links from blog posts to product categories and product pages. Strategic links from top-performing pages can help boost lower-ranking pages by sharing authority.
2. Enhancing Site Speed and Performance
Research consistently shows that slow-loading sites increase bounce rate and that faster sites are associated with better conversions. Because site speed impacts user experience, search engines consider a site’s responsiveness as a ranking factor.
Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) and Lighthouse to make sure your site is lightning fast and that audiences can access your offerings instantly. These tools compare your site to minimum performance standards using benchmarks such as Core Web Vitals. Here’s an overview of these standards:
- Largest contentful paint, the point at which the largest content element renders, should notch in at 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to next paint, or the time at which your site responds to a click, tap, or keyboard interaction, should be less than or equal to 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative layout shift, which measures when the page has stabilized, should be less than or equal to 0.1.
Regular audits can catch problems that are slowing your site down, but it’s good practice to optimize your pages as you publish them.
- Compress images to reduce file size while maintaining quality.
- Minimize JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files so they’re compact and quick to download.
- Enable browser caching for faster return visits.
- Remove unnecessary plugins.
3. Managing Crawl Budget and Indexation
Your web pages can only appear in the SERPs if Google can successfully crawl them. However, Google has limited resources and only visits a certain number of pages on each site. This makes it extremely important that you don’t waste crawl budget on unimportant URLs.
Index bloat occurs when unnecessary pages appear in the search index. These include:
- Product pages for the same item in different colors or sizes.
- Product pages for discontinued items.
- Product pages repeated in multiple categories.
- Out-of-date blog posts.
- Confirmation and thank-you pages.
There are a few ways to manage index bloat. Streamline your site and make sure you don’t have pages competing with each other for ranking:
- Delete unnecessary pages.
- Use canonical tags for pages with variations to tell Google which one should appear in the search index.
- Implement robots.txt files and noindex tags to manage crawling.
4. Implementing Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured data is a standardized format that lets you communicate directly with Google about your content. Search engines read this information to accurately index your pages.
Schema is one of the most used and understood vocabularies on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. There are many types of schema, but the one to prioritize for your store is product schema. Use this markup to indicate:
- Product name.
- Product description.
- Brand.
- Measurement.
- Color.
- Size.
- Images.
- Price/currency.
- Model number.
- Availability.
- Aggregate rating.
Using schema, you can tell search engines you’re selling a blue fleece hoodie in size large, for example. One of the biggest benefits of schema markup is that search engines can then display your content as rich snippets, which gives you greater visibility in the SERPs.
Potential customers can see images, prices, availability, and aggregate ratings in product carousels, image results, and rich snippets. This can also improve click-through rate and bring eager shoppers to your site.
Other useful schema types for ecommerce stores include BreadcrumbList, OfferShipping, and MerchantReturnPolicy.
5. Mobile Optimization
According to Statista, smartphones account for nearly 80% of visits to retail websites. Make sure you deliver a stellar mobile experience so customers are more likely to swipe and tap their way to a purchase. In fact, Google’s algorithms take a mobile-first approach, ranking sites based on smartphone performance.
Integrate mobile UX into your processes and use PageSpeed Insights to evaluate user experience across devices. Here are some issues that negatively impact mobile experience and ranking:
- Slow page loading times.
- Images and text spilling off the screen.
- Large pop-ups.
- Buttons and links that are too small to tap.
- Difficult navigation.
- Lengthy forms.
Ecommerce SEO Challenges and How To Overcome Them
I’ve covered the basic elements of technical SEO for ecommerce, which can help you create a strong foundation for your website. But there are a couple of issues to be aware of in terms of how you present your product inventory to search engines and customers.
Faceted Navigation and URL Parameters
Many ecommerce sites provide filters to help customers sort products and find items with specific attributes, such as color, size, brand, and price range. Often, when the filters are applied, the website’s backend adds parameters to the original URL. This generates variations of the original page that are useful for customers but don’t need to be crawled or indexed.
From an SEO perspective, this creates a few problems.
- Search engines use valuable crawl budget to add unnecessary pages to the index.
- Low-value URLs compete with core pages for keyword ranking.
- Too many unimportant pages signal lower overall content quality for your website.
Many brands only need unfiltered category, subcategory, and product pages indexed. To prevent crawling and indexing of faceted navigation pages:
- Use a robots.txt file to manage crawling.
- Apply rel=”canonical” tags to the faceted navigation page to indicate the unfiltered page that should appear in the index.
- Use JavaScript to dynamically filter content without updating the URLs. As these pages aren’t shareable, you may want to build static URLs that Google can crawl and index if there are popular filters your customers use.
Pagination and Infinite Scroll
The way you structure your category pages impacts user experience and SEO. If you have a large-scale store with significant product, consider loading content incrementally to improve page speed.
Infinite Scroll
You can display products as an infinite scroll, where new products appear as users scroll your content. Users don’t have to click to view more products, but it can be hard to find items they scrolled past earlier on long pages. Infinite scroll is also challenging from an SEO perspective, as search crawlers may overlook hidden content. They’re unable to crawl and index content that’s not readily accessible.
To implement an infinite scroll and ensure content is indexed, give each chunk of content its own URL. Link between the URLs to help search crawlers find them.
Pagination
Another option is to divide products across multiple pages. Provide links so users can click “next,” “previous,” or specific page numbers to navigate between URLs. The benefit of using pagination is that each page has a distinct URL for crawling and indexing. Link the pages sequentially so Google understands they’re part of a series.
Technical SEO Tools for Ecommerce Teams
Here are some tools that make technical SEO for ecommerce easier, helping you audit your site, find areas of improvement, and monitor for new problems.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) provides data directly from the search engine giant. You can identify crawl errors, indexing problems, and manual penalties that may influence search performance. You can also use GSC to validate fixes to make sure problems have been remedied and submit requests for page indexing. GSC also evaluates your site’s Core Web Vitals and page experience.
Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse
As mentioned earlier, use PSI to find technical issues impacting site speed and page loading times. This tool identifies URLs that need improvement according to industry benchmarks. PSI also leverages some Lighthouse capabilities to diagnose accessibility and SEO issues.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider audits your ecommerce store to identify technical issues related to duplicate content, broken links, structured data, and mobile usability. This is especially important if your site has hundreds of pages, as it’s challenging to know what’s going on with every page.
Schedule regular audits to keep tabs on your site’s technical health and performance. You can use Screaming Frog to review directives such as canonical tags, redirects, pagination, and robots.txt files. The tool also integrates with GSC, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights so you can gather insights in one place.
Schema Markup Validator
To make sure you’ve implemented structured data correctly, use the Schema Markup Validator. This tool evaluates your markup to ensure that search engines can understand it. It flags problems that may affect indexing and rich results.
Prioritizing Action Items
Once you identify the ecommerce technical SEO issues that need attention on your site, create a plan of action.
- Focus on high-value or revenue-generating pages first for the greatest impact.
- Address simple fixes that are easy to resolve.
- Create a strategy for more complex issues, such as site architecture or navigation.
Ready to improve your site’s technical SEO?
Partner With Victorious for Ecommerce Success
Online shoppers turn to search engines when they’re ready to find products and make purchases. Your brand’s ecommerce growth is directly linked to how well search engines can crawl and index your web pages and the frictionless shopping experience you deliver. At Victorious, we use a data-driven approach to SEO that focuses on measuring performance and achieving tangible improvements in visibility, traffic, and conversions. Learn how our outcome-focused SEO strategies can build a strong digital foundation for your brand and support your long-term growth — schedule a free consultation today.
