e commerce: How to structure your site for SEO?
Anyone running an e-business knows how fierce the competition can be, which is why a well-optimized site structure is absolutely essential.
In this guide, I'll present some of my best tips for structuring an e commerce site for SEO, providing insights on how to ensure your online store is the best it can be!
What are the advantages of a well-optimized e-commerce site structure?
Having a well-designed e commerce site structure is not only beneficial for the user experience, but also highly advantageous for business performance and ranking potential. Here are some of the key benefits:
- Easy navigation: allows users to find products quickly and easily.
- Better engagement: when users find what they need, they're more likely to browse longer, reducing bounce rates.
- Crawling: search engines can crawl and index your site faster, ensuring that all pages are easily found.
- Improved visibility: well-organized categories and product pages optimized with relevant keywords can improve your chances of ranking for relevant searches.
- Confidence in your brand: a professional, well-structured site helps build customer confidence, leading to better conversion.
- Better maintenance: a simple structure makes it easier to update and continuously improve content.
- Responsive design: ensuring your site is mobile- and desktop-friendly enhances the user experience.
Can faceted search impact the visibility of your e-commerce site?
All the above will get you off to a good start with SEO for e commerce sites. However, there are other actions you can take to attract even more search engine traffic and increase your sales. Let's take a look at a few of them.
If you've ever shopped online, you've probably come across faceted navigation, although you may not have realized it! Sorting by price, filtering by size and sorting by color are excellent examples of faceted navigation (also called faceted search or, sometimes, guided navigation).
An example of filtering options on a product category page.
Simply put, faceted navigation is a way of helping visitors navigate and customize a page to find exactly the product they're looking for. Pages created by faceted navigation can also help specific searchers with long queries to find exactly the products they're looking for in the search results.
People search for products in many different ways, so you've probably come across terms in your keyword research that didn't make sense for subcategories. But if your store has faceted navigation, you probably already have URLs set up targeting many of these terms.
For example, there are an estimated 1,000 monthly searches for "ps5 numérique" in France:
If you sell these products and allow visitors to filter them using faceted search, they will probably end up on a URL like this:
/consoles?brand=ps5&version=digital
Since most e-shops canonicalize faceted URLs to a main category or sub-category, this URL is probably not indexable. However, you can solve this problem by changing the canonical to self-referencing.
If you do this for all faceted URLs with a search request, you can often attract more search traffic without creating new content.
How to structure an e-commerce site for SEO?
If you think structuring an online store is as simple as configuring products and payment methods, think again. If you want your brand to be easily found by customers, you need to implement an effective SEO strategy. Here's what you need to do:
- Implement a logical, simplified site taxonomy: Site taxonomy refers to your site's navigation structure, used to organize products into categories and sub-categories. No product page or sub-category should be more than three or four clicks from the home page, because the closer they are, the easier it is for search engine bots and users to find them.
2. Use simple URLs that include your main keywords: URLs should be clear, descriptive and include your main keywords. This helps search engines and users understand what the page is about.
3. Create a simple menu: The menu of your online store should reflect the structure of the site, making it as easy to follow as possible. Adding a multitude of unnecessary pages to the menu risks frustrating or overwhelming the user. Many larger e commerce sites include a side menu that helps to navigate more quickly to the desired product.
4. Optimize your category and product pages Optimizing your pages for the most relevant keywords is essential to improve visibility and ensure that the right page is put in front of your audience at the right time in the buying journey. Tools such as Semrush or Google Keyword Planner can help you with your keyword research and allow you to see what your competitors are ranking for.
- Category pages: these should target broad keywords or plural forms of the main keywords (e.g. children's shoes, women's cardigans, winter coats).
- Product pages: these should target very specific keywords. Each product page must be unique and detailed.
5. Use header tags Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) add structure to your site and make content easier to read. They also help search engines understand your site's hierarchy.
- H1 tags: used for the main title of your page and include your main keyword.
- H2, H3 tags (and so on): used for subtitles.
6. Be mobile-friendly Google prioritizes the mobile version of a site's content for ranking and indexing, so it's essential that your e commerce site's navigation is mobile-friendly. It's also vital that the same content is present on both mobile and desktop versions, as users often browse on mobile but buy on desktop.
7. Use breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs help users navigate from the product page to the main category, improving web accessibility and user experience. Breadcrumbs are generally location-based and are excellent for SEO, as they make it easier for search bots to understand your site.
8. Create a sitemap: An XML sitemap lists all the pages on your site and enables search engines to quickly find and index new URLs for your site. Don't forget to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console to ensure that all your pages are indexed.
9. Avoid orphan pages: An orphan page is a page that is not linked to any other page on your e-commerce site. Important pages should always be linked internally to avoid the risk of becoming "orphaned". That said, there may be cases where orphan pages are acceptable, for example, when a discontinued product still has search volume.
10. Use internal links and repair broken links: Internal links not only help guide customers through the sales funnel, but also improve the SEO value of the site by distributing link equity across multiple pages. Use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text and link category pages to relevant products and vice versa.
How can you increase traffic and achieve an unprecedented conversion rate on your e-commerce site?
To increase traffic to an e-commerce site and guarantee a good conversion rate, it's crucial to focus on several aspects of SEO and user experience.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is essential for improving your website's visibility on search engines. It involves optimizing web pages for relevant keywords and ensuring that each tag (titles, meta-descriptions, etc.) is well defined.
- Positioning : The goal is to reach the best positions on search engines, ideally the first page of results. Good positioning increases the chances of users clicking on my site.
- Backlinks: Backlinks improve your site's popularity and credibility. The more quality sites that link to your site, the higher your search engine ranking.
- CMS (Content Management System): Using a high-performance CMS makes it easy to manage and update the content of your website. It should be chosen according to your specific needs and its compatibility with SEO best practices.
- Internal linking: A good internal linking structure helps search engines to crawl and index your site more efficiently. It also helps visitors navigate easily between different web pages.
- Relevant: The content of your site must be relevant and meet the expectations of your visitors. Use long-tail keywords to attract more targeted traffic ready to convert.
- Google Analytics: This tool is indispensable for analyzing user behavior on your site. It allows you to identify which pages are performing well, and which need improvement for better conversion.
- Domain name: A relevant, easy-to-remember domain name can have a positive impact on users' perception of and trust in your site.
- Algorithm: Understanding and adapting to changes in search engine algorithms is crucial to maintaining and improving your ranking.
- Websites: Analyzing the competition and similar websites can provide valuable insights for improving your own site.
By applying these strategies and optimizing every aspect of your site, you can not only increase traffic but also improve your e commerce site's conversion rate.
Need help with the structure of your e-commerce site?
If you need a helping hand with your site's structure, you've come to the right place! Our team of e commerce SEO experts constantly monitors the latest search trends and ensures that our customers' sites are always optimized. Contact us today to find out how we can improve your site's structure.
