With retail shopping patterns continuing to evolve and an unforeseen pandemic impacting sales, a high performing eCommerce system is critical to your success now more than ever. The focus should always be to streamline the time from search to buy while reducing leakage along the way.
If you are not getting enough traffic to your eCommerce pages, there are some technical, actionable changes that help improve the performance of your eCommerce system. These will ensure the content is in the right spot and firing the right info to speed results and reduce errors.
These changes do not require new or updated content but if these are broken, they can be fixed and improve your eCommerce search engine performance. Ultimately, it is about getting more potential clients to your product pages successfully and quickly.
The suggested adjustments include:
Page construction & structure
It is critical to be careful how each component of the page, metadata and title tags are arranged. One of the typical situations is that the data is there, but not in the right structure.
Example – Your page is not displaying any structured data. Or you are not putting into the right category of the page type.
Data structure
You need to make sure that not only is data coming into your page, but also being displayed correctly. In some situations, data can be from an outside source, but not crawlable which impacts SEO.
Example – Names of your images not being displayed as an image title or image alt tags. This incorrect action reduces your search engine success.
Server and hosting configuration
Some configuration issues can impact your performance and user experience. Potential issues could arise in configuration of URLs, site speed, connection speed, wait time, processes and 301s.
Example – URLs may not be setup correctly. One thing to check is if you are using query parameters.
Current page content technical implementation
How the text and imagery on your page are implemented, impact how search engines can read them. In addition, content caching can help speed performance.
Example – Use of imagery with text embedded is always of question. It is important to continue to use rich imagery and maximize search engine value for it.
Code and Script review
Third party scripts can impact your eCommerce system in a variety of ways. You should review these scripts and how they are implemented for potential negative performance impacts or functionality issues. How many errors are being generated by your code that can be attributed to these scripts?
Example – Are you pulling in scripts from Instagram, using tools to build the page, inserting blog info? If so, they may be causing issues or errors impacting user experience.
Mobile and desktop search
Both equally important. The intent and search terms are varied between the two device types. Your site structure should be appealing to both, with content built for each type of search.
Example – Pages and SERPs created specifically to attract mobile visitors should be focused on keywords and phrases that include research. You must be high ranking to achieve results in Organic mobile search.
The goals of these actions are to increase the number of potential buyers on your system and make their experience frictionless to increase sales.
These suggestions have been developed from Valtira’s experience in planning, deploying and optimizing numerous eCommerce systems built on the leading platforms such as Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and Amazon Marketplace. Our strategists, architects, designers, developers and digital marketers can work with you as an extension of your team to meet your eCommerce goals.
If you would like to discuss these topics to help optimize your eCommerce search engine performance, contact us here, or fill out the form below.