Did you know that site navigation impacts ecommerce SEO? It does. Think of it this way: web crawlers need to navigate an ecommerce site in order to properly index its pages. If consumers have trouble with navigation, it is almost guaranteed that web crawlers will as well. After all, web crawlers can’t think their way out of problems.
Ecommerce SEO services are on the menu here at Webtek. If you run an ecommerce site and you have any reason to believe that your SEO is not up to snuff, let’s get together and talk. We can address just about any problems your site is facing – even navigation problems.
A Logical Site Structure
Search engine algorithms are designed to return results that appeal to users. Therefore, they are designed to account for the way human beings think. A web crawler trying to index an ecommerce site would carefully analyze site structure to determine its logic. An illogical site structure would confuse a web crawler.
The same applies to human beings. This is why ecommerce experts recommend a site structure as follows:
- Homepage
- Category
- Subcategory
- Product
This is what is known as a hierarchical structure. It makes sense to both the human brain and web crawler programming. With a logical site structure in place, you can start working on other things:
1. Keyword-Rich Text
Ecommerce sites are loaded with text in terms of both product descriptions and links. A good ecommerce site should have non-sales content as well (like blog posts and articles), but that is another topic for another post. When creating both product descriptions and links, make them keyword rich.
Links to product pages should be especially rich in keywords. If a web crawler can understand what links are pointing to by analyzing anchor text, navigation will make a lot more sense.
2. Create an Intuitive Menu Structure
Within your hierarchical structure you are going to have numerous products that need to be organized in some way, shape, or form. We recommend creating an intuitive menu structure through which you can create categories and subcategories. Then group your products accordingly.
Drop down menus work extremely well for this sort of thing. Don’t worry. Web callers don’t have any problems with menus; they can follow them just as easily as human beings.
3. Make Use of Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are an interesting phenomenon that seem ideally suited for ecommerce SEO. Breadcrumbs are simply little snippets of text that appear at the top of a page, telling users with a glance where they are in relation to site hierarchy. Web crawlers pay attention to breadcrumbs as they do what they do. It improves their understanding of an ecommerce site, leading to better indexing.
4. Focus on Mobile Friendly
Be sure that your ecommerce site has been optimized for mobile friendliness. Web crawlers can tell pretty quickly whether that’s the case. Why does it matter? Because Google now gives priority to mobile-friendly sites. It doesn’t matter how much people want your products if your site doesn’t play well with mobile devices.
5. Generate an XML Sitemap
Finally, generating an XML sitemap goes a long way toward helping search engines make sure they are indexing all the most important pages. Sitemaps should be updated whenever you make major changes.
As a company offering ecommerce SEO services in Salt Lake City and beyond, we make it our business to understand how web crawlers approach ecommerce sites. We can help you improve navigation so that both web crawlers and humans are more comfortable with it. Your SEO will improve as a result.
