SEO best practices like content quality and linking get a lot of attention from e-commerce entrepreneurs, and for good reason. Implemented correctly, these types of SEO strategies can help give businesses a major boost in website traffic, and more traffic typically translates into more sales.

But have you ever considered what’s going in under the hood of your website? The reality is what your users don’t see is just as crucial to your rankings as what they do, and in some cases, it may even be more significant.

This blog will take you through the basics of Technical Seo, cover what it is, why it’s important, and how to get it working for your e-commerce website. Let’s dive in!

What is Technical SEO?

It’s safe to assume that you are familiar with the term SEO. But Search engine optimization is more than a singular concept. Instead, it’s a collection of structures and strategies used in conjunction to help improve the ranking and visibility of your website.

On-page SEO encompasses the things people visiting your site see and interact with, like your content, copy, and headlines, and a few more subtle characteristics like keywords, meta tags, and internal linking. Then there’s off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is everything that gets done away from your website to help boost your visibility. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, this is how you promote and market your content externally using tactics such as link building, guest blogging, and social media marketing.

Lastly, there’s technical SEO. This optimization strategy seeks to improve your ranking by structuring your website to make it easier for Search Engines to crawl, index, and render your site. You can think of it as a subset of on-page SEO, but instead of focusing on user experience, technical SEO focuses on improving search engine experience, which is crucial to your rankings and visibility.

Why is Technical SEO so Important?

By using technical SEO strategies to make your site easier for search engines to read and understand, you increase your chances of ranking well for relevant search queries, which is ultimately the goal of your broader SEO strategy. While some aspects of technical SEO may overlap features of your on and off-page SEO, other elements are unique to this strategy and should not be overlooked.

Picture technical SEO as the foundation of your website. It doesn’t matter how carefully crafted the content is; if the technical SEO elements are not in order, your website will not rank as high as it otherwise could.

How to Rank Higher with Technical SEO

Now that we’ve covered the what and the why let’s look at a few ways you can use technical SEO to boost your e-commerce website ranking.

Cleanup URL Structure

petsupplies.com/dkwj=4ff/igu00en0=e/eG4g

How your e-commerce site is organized can dramatically affect both user experience and crawlability. Suppose you were presented with a URL that looked something like this:

Do you know what you’re looking at or where you are on a site? Well, turns out a search engine can’t understand this URL structure either.

Now, how about this?

petsupplies.com/pet-food/dog/dry-food

Optimizing your URLs with readable language allows search engines to crawl your site more effectively and enables you to incorporate your keywords within the URL. It’s a win-win that makes it easier for both people and search engines to understand your website, which can help your pages rank higher on relevant searches.

Improve Site Load Times

E-commerce sites are often burdened with slow load times due to the sheer quantity of product pages and images required. However, users and search engines will not reward slow-loading websites with traffic. Evidence suggests that even a 3-second delay for an e-commerce site can result in as much as 53% website abandonment.

Maximize your technical SEO points by ensuring your website is up to speed with these tips:

• Compressing images to reduce file sizes
• Minifying HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files
•  Reducing the number of redirects
•  Enable browser caching
•  Off-load videos to an external hosting platform

Create an Optimized XML Sitemap

If you want search engines to be able to find and understand all the URLs on your website, why not make them a map? An XML sitemap is simply a file containing information on all your website’s URLs. You can use the sitemap to show search engines how to crawl and index your website and which pages to prioritize, helping you rank better for most likely to appear in search queries.

You can also use robot.txt to tell a search engine which pages not to crawl. That may seem counterintuitive because don’t you want search engines to crawl and index your content? Generally, the answer is yes, but you may have specific pages you don’t want to be crawled, and robot.txt files can help prevent your site from being bogged down with requests.

Use Structured Data

You’ve probably noticed Rich Snippets popping up more and more often in your Google search results. These features are a must-have for e-commerce sites looking to stand out from the competition in web searches, and structured data may help you land one. Structured data helps enhance the quality – and possibly the frequency – of your product in search results by providing search engines with essential product information in a format they can understand.

Product Schema is possibly the most important type of structured data for e-commerce websites. This structure allows you to add specific attributes to your product searches, like product name, price, reviews, and availability. It increases but does not guarantee your odds of earning a Rich Snippet (which can help improve your click-through rate).

Other types of schema markups that can be beneficial to e-commerce websites include:

• Website
•  Breadcrumbs
•  Item List
•  Organization schema
•  Video

Technical SEO should be regarded as an essential part of your more extensive SEO toolkit. With it, the work put into on-page and off-page SEO stands a better chance of maximizing your e-commerce website’s exposure and ranking online.

The post Technical SEO: What It is and How to Make it Work for Your Ecommerce Website appeared first on Nirvana Canada.