There are some SEO items that e-commerce sites need to pay attention to in order to achieve success on search engines and to increase their traffic. If you apply these, your SEO performance will increase and you will be able to reach wider audiences. 5 SEO items that will increase your SEO performance and improve your site’s user experience;
1- Your E-Commerce Site Should Be Understandable and Easily Scannable
One of the most important SEO items is that your site should be easily crawlable and understandable by search engines. This will cause your site to gain more traffic and achieve successful rankings through search engines. By arranging your site’s categories semantically and taxonomically and linking them to each other according to the meaning and condition of your content through internal linking, you can make your site easier for search engine bots to understand by search bots.
In addition, all pages, especially important pages, should be accessible with as few clicks as possible, and at the same time, you should organize the click and crawl depth of your site in the most optimal way possible. The recommended click depth to reach the important pages of your sites is 3 clicks, starting from the home page.
Internal links between content, semantic hierarchy of site links, site link architecture are among the very important criteria for SEO success and processes.
2- Cannibalization
Cannibalization can be defined as the problem of two different pages on the same site competing with each other in a common query. A service you offer on the site or the products you sell should not compete with each other on the same keywords. Namely; If two different products have similar content and keywords, they compete, and as a result, the search engine turns to algorithmic calculations to determine which product will rank first.
In the case of two pages competing with each other, the search engine highlights the page that is most relevant to the search query, and this negatively affects the ranking of both pages. In order to prevent this, it is necessary to analyze keyword analysis and queries well, and it is also necessary to avoid preparing pages that will compete with each other.
3- Keyword Analysis and User Search Intent
One of the important points in e-commerce sites is to analyze and choose the right keywords for products and categories. When choosing words, it is necessary to analyze which words will bring more traffic, and it is necessary to determine these words and place them on the product pages. Identifying keywords with high competition rate or low search volume is one of the most common mistakes in keyword selection.
Medium or small scale or newly established e-commerce sites may be more successful in increasing the traffic of the site by using long tail keywords. Keywords that are successful in terms of volume and low in competition should be determined.
It is necessary to analyze the content and search objectives of the users who search with the keywords you are targeting after the search. It should be analyzed very well whether the user is searching for information, price learning or purchasing. Accordingly, content pages that are suitable for the user’s search intent should be created, and content that will meet the user’s needs should be produced.
4- Authentic Content
As in every website, one of the important issues in e-commerce sites is that the prepared content is original and does not become a copy with other websites. The content that you will prepare or that you have on your site should not be cannibalized with each other and should not create a copy content problem. For this, you need to check all the content on your site whether it is original or not.
You should take care not to use content that is used on other sites and does not contain originality, and that has been used on more than one site. When adding content that has been published on different sites to your site, you need to show the difference of your site. You can use the content on your own site by changing the structure of the content or making it more original. If your e-commerce site contains duplicate content, your site’s traffic will decrease and may also negatively affect quality signals.
In order to prevent such negative situations, the reasons that create duplicate pages in the infrastructure should be determined and resolved. Duplicate pages can be crawled and indexed by search bots. Meta tags, robots.txt directives, canonical tags can be used.
5- Editing 4xx Error Pages and Robots.txt File
Pages that have been deleted or have 4xx response codes for different reasons should be edited, which negatively consumes the browsing budget and causes negative user experience for users visiting these 4xx coded links. URL addresses with 404 error codes negatively affect both your crawl budget and site user experience. In order to prevent these situations, first of all, URL addresses with 4xx error codes should be determined as a result of site scans and 301 redirects should be directed to the relevant URL addresses, if any. Otherwise, the relevant links should be updated as http 410 status code.
One of the most common mistakes made when editing a robots.txt file is to unintentionally or intentionally exclude content that is important to crawl by Google bots. When you enter a Disallow: /tag/ command on the robots.txt file, the search engine bots will not scan your content that starts with the tag phrase, and the content that is not crawled will not be included in the search engine indexes. While editing the robots.txt file, it is necessary to check whether important pages are open.
We have listed 5 SEO items for you that should be considered for e-commerce sites. By considering these items, you can increase the visibility of your site in search engines and give your users a better user experience.
