Blog article
5 common technical SEO issues for eCommerce websites
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Technical SEO refers to any changes you make to a website or server that can affect its search engine rankings. It consists of optimizing page titles, sitemaps, http headers, andĀ title tags, to name a few.
What technical SEOĀ doesnātĀ involve areĀ keyword researchĀ and backlinks.
Donāt overlook the following five technical SEO issues thinking that they may need hundreds of hours to fix. Theyāre simple and easy to fix and help you quickly improve search visibility.
1. Your site is still on HTTP
Securing your site with HTTPs is the single-most important SEO ranking factor today. People transact on your ecommerce site dailyāit needs to be secure.
Itās more important than ever because an insecure domain displays a āNot secureā message on the address bar or displays a full page that indicates the site is not safe to visit. This can totally destroy conversions, as people would rather just navigate away from the site.
According to one study, an SSL certificate improved conversions fromĀ 11 to 42%. Another study showed that using an SSL certificate resulted in anĀ 87% increase in conversions.
Since Chrome 68 was released in July 2018, the browser has been flagging HTTP sites as ānot secure.ā
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How to check
- To ensure this doesnāt happen to your site, check if your site is on HTTPs. To do this, type the domain into Google Chrome. If you see the āsecureā message, youāre good.
The fix
- To convert a site to HTTPs, you need an SSL certificateāa few cloud-based SSL certificate vendors are Comodo, SSL, and DigiCERT
- Next, simply install the certificate, and your site is now on HTTPs
2. Your site isnāt indexed correctly
For any search engine, the pages that arenāt indexed donāt exist; they donāt show up on the SERPs. One of the most important things to take care of with technical SEO is to understand if the site and all its pages are indexed on search engines.
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How to check
- Run a search for your brand name on Google to see if your site shows up in the search results. If it doesnāt, you may have indexation issuesĀ with your site.
- To confirm it further, type in āSite:yoursitename.comā into Google. You can see the number of live indexed pages for your site with this step.
The fix
Based on what you see, hereās what you can gather:
- If your site isnāt indexed at all, meaning no page shows up in the results, submit your site to Google first throughĀ Google Search Console. Submitting your site to the Search Console is the first step you can take to let search engines know about your site.
- If your site is indexed but there are more pages on the SERPs than you currently have, itās likely that your site was hacked and the hackers uploaded a ton of spam files. Itās also possible that Google is indexing older versions of the site. Youāll need a developer to get rid of the spam files and to remove older versions of the site from the index.
- Also, check if youāre using a no index tag on your homepage and other important pages. To do that, load the page on a browser, right click and click on the option that says View page source. Check for this line of code: </head> section:<meta name=ārobotsā content=ānoindex, followā>. If the line is present on any of the important pages, ask your developer to remove the code because the code tells search engines to not index that page.
3. Your site has an incorrectly configured robots.txt file
Think of the robots.txt file as an instruction manualĀ that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can access from your site. An incorrectly configured robots.txt file often uses the wrong syntax, unintentionally blocks entire directories, or sets the site or certain pages of the site to no index unintentionally.
How to check
- To see the issues with the robots.txt file, first type your siteās URL into the browser and add this suffix to it: /robots.txt
Hereās an example: yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
- If the result is User-agent: *Disallow:/, that means that your site is preventing all crawlersāincluding search engine crawlersāfrom crawling the site. If you block search engine crawlers, your site doesnāt exist for the search engines.
The fix
- To fix this, you shouldĀ ask your developerĀ why the robots.txt tag is set up that way. And if itās not necessary, ask them to get it removed.
4. Pages donāt load quickly
More thanĀ half of the visitorsĀ to your site will abandon their visit if your site takes longer than three seconds to load. Slow-loading pages can lead to big revenue drops.
Hereās an example:Ā Mobify did a testĀ to understand the impact of site speed on their conversion rates. They reduced page load time by 100 milliseconds for the homepage, resulting in a 1.11% increase in conversions. The percentage seems tiny but adds up to $380,000 worth of additional sales annually. Thatās how much improving page speeds can mean for you.
How to check
- UseĀ Google PageSpeed InsightsĀ to understand why your page is slow.
- Ensure you check the siteās mobile and desktop versions.
- With the tool, you can see all speed-related problems and also get a monthly report that identifies issues across the entire site.
The fix
- Apply the recommendations from the PageSpeed Insights report.
5. Your URL structure is messed up
A clean URL structure is what you need next. Your URL needs to have logical and legible navigation. A clean URL effectively tells users where they are on the site. Both users and search engines know where they are on a site if the URL structure is clean and meaningful.
How to check
- Check to see if your URL is free of numbers or a string of random letters. Even search enginesālet alone potential customersāhave a hard time figuring out messy URLs.
Hereās an example of a messy URL: www.yoursite.com/3ff/jklootnuy=efght
The fix
- Optimize the URL so itās easy for people and search engines.
- Ensure your URL looks more like this: www.yoursite.com/sports/running-shoes/
- You can add your keywords to the URL, which makes it more relevant and enables it to rank easily on search engines.
Fixing technical SEO issues is easy
Most of the changes mentioned above are things you can do easily. And once you take care of these things, youāre going to see positive changes for your site.
If these tips seem too complex, not to worry: Verboliaās experts are here to assist you. We offer custom ecommerce SEO services and have helped plenty of retailers get higher rankings. We can optimize your siteās landing pages in no time.
Check our case studies and discover how we help major brands with their SEO strategy.
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