Make the right choice of CMS is essential for a good start in the world of online commerce. The success of your store will depend on its choice. In order to increase your visibility and have a long-term vision of your business, you will need to invest in a solution that combines management and organic seo.

To promote an e-commerce site and setting up an effective Ecommerce SEO strategy, here are some of the essential optimizations and features to have in e-commerce site.

Table of Contents

• 1. SEO tags and the Hn structure
  • SEO tags
  • Hn tags
• 2. The tree structure
• 3. A sitemap file
• 4. Multi-category product management
• 5. Structured data management
• 6. Loading time

1. SEO tags and the Hn structure

These two types of tags make it possible to structure the content of its pages.

SEO tags

Let understand:

– the Title tag (SEO title): this is the title of the page. It appears in the SERPs, but also on the header of some browsers. Ideally, it should not exceed 60 characters.

– the meta tag (meta description): it is a very short summary of the content of the page. In two lines, you must provide a summary while giving catchy arguments to push Internet users to click on your link. The ideal length is 160 characters. It is therefore necessary that they best describe the content of the pages while respecting a certain length.

These tags allow Internet users to have a taste of what to expect once they arrive on the page. Visible only on the search results page, they are your page’s first points of contact with Internet users. Their mission is to encourage potential customers to click or not on the link to your store.

This is why they must be understandable, catchy and above all, composed of your keyword.

Hn tags

The Hn tags, on the other hand, consist of the H1 title and the subtitles (H2, H3…) which will follow directly on your page. They make it possible to prioritize the content in order to facilitate reading and understanding whether it is by robots or by humans.

Your e-commerce seo solution must give you the possibility to modify and optimize all of these tags so that you can work on your SEO.

2. The tree structure

An e-commerce site has a higher number of pages than a blog or a showcase site. To improve the visibility of the site, and that of each page, establishing a clear architecture is important in order to:

• tidy up your store and make it attractive
• improve the user experience
• make navigation smoother and easier
• create thematic universes

Remember that to index a page, robots must first be able to access it easily.

The ideal is that all the products are accessible to a maximum of 3 clicks from your home page.

When you have several types of items for sale, you have to set up categories, then sub-categories. Each category and sub-category must be effectively meshed within your to facilitate the journey of Internet users and robots, without displaying a mega-menu.

It is therefore interesting to be able to create your own personalized menu to avoid the mega-menu and effectively categorize your different pages.

3. A sitemap file

It allows you to benefit from a complete map of the different URLs of your site. In e-commerce, this is essential, because with the hundred or so pages that you are going to create, it is possible that search engine bots will miss a few. Its implementation facilitates the exploration and indexing of your pages.

Your e-commerce solution should automatically create the sitemap of your site. Another important element, it must be updated automatically according to your modifications (deletion of pages, creation of pages…).

4. Multi-category product management

When you manage a store, even a physical one, it is common for a product to remain attached to its shelf while ending up on the shelves of products on promotion.

• On an online store, this is equivalent to having the same product in two different categories: its parent category and the promotions category.
• On the web, this can cause some SEO issues. Improper configuration can result in duplicate URLs and therefore duplicate content.

For example, robots will index product pages placed in the promotion category and also index those in other categories.

Your e-commerce solution must offer efficient management of multi-category products. This is often managed via canonicals urls but your internal mesh can lose power.

One of the most effective solutions, is to indicate, each time a product is added in another category, its main category. Thus, the product will appear and will be accessible from various sections while keeping the unique url of the main category.

5. Structured data management

Structured data makes it possible to display in search results the information that matters most to consumers, such as price, availability, customer reviews, ratings, etc.

These elements provide a real boost in click-through rates, so you might as well take advantage of it! Your e-commerce platform must offer automatic tagging of structured data. As soon as you create a page, they should be added in your source code.

6. Loading time

As we all know, visitors and search engines don’t like pages and sites that take too long to appear. They scare away internet users who are, it should be noted, always in a hurry. For e-commerce sites, speeding up the loading time is a real issue, because with all the pages and images present, we understand that they can quickly be heavy and slow to load.

Your CMS must offer various improvements at this level in order to improve the speed of your pages: caching system, lazy loading, CDN, WebP, AMP,… As you will have understood, to be successful in e-commerce and more particularly in SEO, you have to choose an adapted and optimized e-commerce solution.