Understanding Technical SEO: The Foundation for E-commerce Success
It’s a story as old as search engines. You’re standing in a queue waiting for coffee, and next to you is someone who can’t help but overhear your phone call. The person on the other end is talking about how they want to focus on SEO for their e-commerce site, and the stranger next to you is equally eager to tell you about all of their latest wins with social media marketing. Then, there’s the third person telling you about technical SEO.
They’re convinced that it’ll be the thing that propels your business into internet stardom. They’re right, by the way. It is one of those things that sounds like it’s something best left to professionals with years of experience and a qualification or two, and there are parts of it that really should be left to someone who knows what they’re doing. But there are rather also parts of it that you can figure out without much support from anyone else, except for Google.
The thing is, technical SEO is important because if you don’t have a solid foundation for your website, there isn’t much else you can do. It starts with your infrastructure – building a website that’s fast, easy to navigate and actually available when people want to find you. If Google can’t find you through its web crawlers, neither can the customers searching for something like your brand.
You’d be surprised at how common it is for brands to forget about technical SEO until they realise that they need to be investing more time and energy into it than anything else. Without a good website built on solid ground, what’s keeping you online.
Optimizing Site Speed: A Crucial Factor for User Experience
Picture this - you’re shopping online, say during the Black Friday sale, and you click on a link for a pair of fabulous shoes. The site loads, but only just. Sort of.
Your anticipation is replaced with frustration because the page refuses to load quickly. What would you do. You’d leave and head to another site for those amazing shoes. Site speed can be that single factor that turns visitors into paying customers, or it could turn them away from your store forever.
The way I see it, for most shoppers today, ‘instant’ is the magic word. Slow-loading sites are not only an inconvenience, but they’re also a dealbreaker for several customers. From an SEO perspective, Google has openly stated that page speed is one of its ranking factors for desktop and mobile searches alike.
More often than not, if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load completely, users will leave. To me, it sounds like nobody has time to wait anymore and if you want to meet your business goals with your website, optimizing site speed becomes even more important. The thing about eCommerce stores and slower loading times is that these pages aren’t like other pages. An eCommerce store will usually have tons of images or videos that can cause slower loading times compared to content-heavy websites.
So then what can be done to optimise site speed. You don’t need everything at once - you just need whatever makes your website memorable enough for visitors to return time after time.
Consider enabling lazy loading so the parts of your website that are being viewed load before other areas on your page do. Compress product images so they remain high quality without being too data-heavy.
You could even consider working with SEO experts who understand eCommerce websites specifically so you can build a store that’s both beautiful and optimised at all levels possible. Remember - there’s no one size fits all solution for site speed optimisation. But there are tailored solutions available depending on how complex your website’s functionality is in the first place.
Mobile Optimization: Ensuring Accessibility for All Devices
It’s 9am and you’re probably on your phone - just like most people are. It’s the first thing you look at when you wake up, then all through your day, and well into the night as you try to get some sleep but end up scrolling on your phone instead. What this really means is that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on 95% of the market.
You’d think that more businesses would prioritise this because it seems obvious - but so many stores still have websites that just aren’t optimised for all devices. The importance of mobile optimisation cannot be overstated. Consumers are so easily distracted, and it takes a lot to hold their attention - especially if there’s another competitor with better UI and UX.
So when you’re building a website or redesigning one, it’s not enough to just keep the desktop view in mind. You have to make sure that your website looks good on every single device - mobile, tablet, desktop. And if you have an app, then make sure that looks good too.
If consumers can’t navigate your website properly, or use all the features on their phone or tablet like they would on their computer - they’re simply not coming back. In fact, Google considers mobile optimisation one of the most important ranking factors on SERPs. So if you don’t focus on optimising your store for all devices, not only will you lose out on potential sales but also lose out in terms of ranking high up on search engines. It seems like making your website accessible for all devices is crucial to reach more people and grow faster.
Structured Data: Enhancing Visibility with Rich Snippets
You know when you’re scrolling through Google looking for the perfect chocolate cake recipe, and suddenly one listing pops up with a five-star rating, luscious images, and even shows baking time right under the title. The way I see it, it almost feels like that result is waving at you while the rest sit quietly in black and blue text.
That eye-catching result is there thanks to structured data, which gives web pages a bit of extra information - and a fighting chance to stand out. For stores with lots of products, structured data isn’t just helpful; it’s what separates you from the crowd on a search engine results page. It provides context so Google knows this isn’t any old page about “shoes” - it’s a product, available in multiple colours, and yes, it’s on sale. Suddenly your product goes from being an unknown SKU in cyberspace to one people notice at first glance.
The more information Google can show directly on the results page via rich snippets - pricing, availability, reviews - the more likely customers will click. While I think it all sounds rather technical and perhaps a bit daunting for smaller business owners at first, once you get into the hang of using schema markup or whatever your platform uses to add structured data automatically (Shopify has some great plugins), it becomes second nature. It’s a direct line to communicating with search engines without having to worry that your beautiful images or unique selling points are going unnoticed.
After all, if someone’s searching for what you’re selling but only sees generic listings with no added info, why would they bother clicking. Rich snippets do some of your work before anyone even lands on your store. And if you’re still not convinced this is worth your time, consider how much more helpful those “people also ask” sections have become over time.
Or how easily you can compare prices straight from the search page. Structured data feeds into these tools that make customers’ lives easier - which at the end of the day should be reason enough to get involved.
URL Structure and Site Architecture: Best Practices for E-commerce
Let's say you’re an e-commerce store owner trying to grow your organic traffic. And you’re up against thousands of other stores in your niche - all doing the same thing. The right URL structure and site architecture can typically make a massive difference in where you rank on Google. You’d think URL structure is all about just creating short, direct links for each product page, but that isn’t the whole story.
Your website’s “address” is just one layer of the house. For search engines to know which room is what, you need to build a strong foundation for that digital real estate. This means logical categorisation through simple URLs, a straightforward navigation bar, and breadcrumbs for users to find their way around your website. A solid site structure helps search engines crawl your website more easily, which gets you indexed quicker and improves your ranking on search results.
Another factor to consider is canonical tags. These prevent duplicate content issues - which are sometimes common if you have similar variants of the same product on different pages (for example - t-shirts available in 4 colours). If a user can choose multiple filters while browsing through products, the url will change every time as they find new categories. Canonical tags tell search engines which URLs are most important so only those ones are crawled and indexed.
If you’re like me and can’t remember all of this while setting up your e-commerce site, try a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to audit your website regularly for duplicate content and broken links.
Monitoring and Auditing: Tools to Track Your Technical SEO Performance
You know that moment when everything seems perfect, but you’re fairly certain you’ve left the stove on. That’s how store owners feel without proper SEO monitoring – there’s a nagging suspicion something’s gone wrong, even if you can’t put a finger on it. And that’s why every store needs technical SEO tracking and auditing tools to ease that anxiety. Appears To Be whether you’re new or have been at this for years, monitoring tools take away the guesswork so you always know exactly where things stand.
What I like about monitoring tools is how they put everything in one place so I don’t need to jump between spreadsheets and docs and dashboards. But they’re also a double-edged sword. It can be incredibly overwhelming with too much data and not enough knowledge of what to do with it.
This is especially true for stores with hundreds of products – trying to manually track impressions, clicks and fixes would make anyone want to quit. This is sort of where Google Search Console has been invaluable because it automates all those tedious little things no one really wants to do by hand. Once your store’s set up with the right keyword strategy, image alt texts and meta tags, all that’s left is to monitor performance.
Tools like Screaming Frog keep an eye on crawling while Google Analytics brings social campaigns under one roof. There are guides available for each tool (usually made by the people who create them) along with free and paid versions depending on what’s best for your store.
I think investing time into good SEO monitoring keeps stores competitive even as algorithms constantly change and new bugs pop up every now and again. And of course, having a bigger picture look at the store makes planning future campaigns easier since there’s already a record of what’s working (and what isn’t).