The 4 SEO Priorities For Ecommerce Sites
Google rarely discloses algorithm details. That lack of transparency forces search engine optimizers to work in the dark. I equate it to the medical profession, where doctors are fighting an unknown illness. Ask 10 doctors why your head hurts, and you could get 10 different answers.
To be sure, searches on Google sometimes directly lead to a purchase. But other times those searches prompt the shopper to identify potential products, to research. The latter makes it difficult to track the return on investment from search engine optimization.
Google rarely discloses algorithm details.
So while I can’t calculate clear-cut ROI from SEO, I can address the activities that, in my experience, typically lead to higher rankings for ecommerce merchants. It’s not a stretch to suggest that 80 percent of your daily SEO activities should be connected to the four items below.
Crawl Budget Googlebot uses a set amount of bandwidth for every website. As it crawls a site, Googlebot follows paths it has encountered before. It also seeks new pages with the remaining bandwidth. Google has said that the more valuable a site, the more bandwidth it will dole out to Googlebot. The result can be pages on a website that are not indexed, either because Google doesn’t know about them or because it takes too much bandwidth to crawl them and ascertain their purpose.
Through crawl budget optimization, you can close down paths and pages that offer users (and Google) little value. Ecommerce sites, especially, can have a lot of bloat due to dynamic URLs and faceted browsing, resulting in duplicate pages.
Canonical tags and the robots.txt file can be your weapons against crawl waste. Identifying the bloat on a large ecommerce site takes time. Implementing the changes takes even more time. It’s typically a manual exercise. But it can produce positive results in terms of expediting Googlebot.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Ecommerce owners frequently tell me that “the title tag helps me rank better for the contained keywords. Meta descriptions are not a ranking signal, but they are nice to have.”
But that’s only half the picture
Eye-tracking studies have shown that searchers scan the “blue link” — the title tag. If the tag resonates, they’ll read the meta description. If the title tag and meta description resonate, they will click. This is important. It means putting time into the title and meta description is necessary, to produce a combined, well-crafted message. For example, consider the search query on Google for “buy nylon guitar strings.” The results on page one are all underwhelming.
