5 Essential SEO Features for E-Commerce Platform
It has been estimated that by 2030, most people will be using smartphones. So marketers need to be online and target their fastest-growing audience online rather than offline. In the coming year, it has also been estimated that the entire movie releases, songs & products will be launched online on OTT Platforms
When we talk about consumers, target audiences, etc. How we can forget about e-commerce, one of the fastest-growing online businesses in India. This is the first part of the picture, and the second part is one of the most important aspects of eCommerce, especially for the marketers at the time of building and marketing their online store.
When choosing an e-commerce builder or custom-made e-commerce website to build your online store, marketers need to consider SEO – Search Engine Optimization, one of the most important and cost-effective marketing techniques.
Though you have an experienced team that is handling SEO for your e-commerce, it doesn’t matter, if your e-commerce store lacks the essential SEO features that can help your store rank well on search engines on your website, you will end up with empty hands.
Being an SEO Company, we know, what are the issues marketers face with their e-commerce store; here we have listed the top 5 Essential SEO Features for e-commerce builders or custom-made e-commerce platforms. We hope this post will help and make it easier for marketers to choose whether to go with the e-commerce builder or develop their website.
Robots.txt File:
The most important file for an e-commerce website, the Robots.txt file allows all the search engine bots to crawl your website properly. It tells bots, which pages and directories to be crawled and the ones not to crawl. However, most of the SEOs feel that robots.txt file is not as important. Simply you can put “allow all” and this will solve the issue, but this is not the case.
When it comes to e-commerce, there are lot many pages that are important to track Goals / Conversions like Add to Cart, Thank You Page, Check Out, etc. But when we have a default robots.txt file, which allows the search engine bots to crawl every page, then these conversion pages also get indexed in the search engine. So it is difficult to track the actual users who have completed the whole process instead of visiting the page directly from the search engine.
So either you can ask your e-commerce builder solution provider to provide a solution for this problem or either you can develop your custom-made ecommerce website.
Independent Page Titles and URLs:
For an e-commerce store, it is important to have an independent Meta tag element for each Category, Sub-Category, and Product. Some of the e-commerce platforms lack this function and don’t allow you to control Meta tags for each category & sub-category & product, which means you will have a common title for every page on your website. This will pull you back to your website to rank your products effectively.
Another problem with the e-commerce platform is URL Structure. Most commonly you will find the URLs like Women-Dresses-catid-1112720-page-1.html instead of /women-dresses.
For SEO, you need to have proper keywords, which need to be targeted on a specific page. If you don’t have a free hand to put Meta tags for each category, sub-category, and product, you will be not able to reach your target group.
If you are using an e-commerce platform, then you need to make sure that they have Independent Page Titles and URL features built.
The best solution to overcome this problem permanently is to build your e-commerce website, which will be custom-made. Though it will be costlier but can be very useful for the Long Term. Spending building your e-commerce website is a good idea.
The platforms you can choose for building your e-commerce websites are Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Zen Cart, Drupal, etc.
Internal Blog:
Having an e-commerce website and competing with the ocean level of competition is not an easy task. Normally, an e-commerce website lacks text content, thus it is difficult to provide unique and informative content. Even so, this issue can be resolved with an Integrated Blog within your store. Blogging can be your best tactic for marketing. Businesses that blog 11 or more times per month receive two to three times the traffic compared to those who blog less often or not at all.
It can be difficult to have an Internal Blog on an e-commerce platform but some great providers have these features. You need to make sure the one you have selected does have this feature or not.
Secondly, for Custom e-commerce website features you should add your website with a customized design, the same look and feel as your website. Here, WordPress works best for the same simply you can create a directory as /blog install a WordPress in it, and start editing and posting your valuable content on your website to boost your rankings.
Canonical Tags:
Canonical Tags are the best buddies of the URL’s. It helps you to re-publish your content on any third-party website without creating a Duplicate Content Issue. A canonical tag tells the search engine bots that the content that is published on the third-party website is for syndication, and the actual URL for the content is here (The URL where the content has been published first time on the web).
Canonical tags are useful for avoiding duplicate page issues which normally an e-commerce website faces. Like the different colors of the same product. E.g. Black, T-shirts can be found in the t-shirt category, formal shirts category, and casual category too. Here we can make use of the rel=canonical tag to avoid duplication.
This feature is normally absent from the e-commerce website builder platforms. For this, you need to have a custom-made e-commerce store.
Fan of WordPress, then WooCommerce (Free Plugin) is an e-commerce platform that converts your WordPress website into a full-fledged e-commerce website with all these in-built features that support canonical URLs.
Automatic URL Redirects Feature:
This is one of the most important features that an e-commerce website must have. We strongly recommend for e-commerce website, especially to have these features in-build. As an e-commerce product keeps on updating it is important to change the product and create a different SEO Friendly URL for the newly added product. However, in this process, the URL or the product that we removed gets completely removed from the website, here the page is already indexed in the search engine, which starts giving a 404 error page. You can find this in your GSC – Google Search Console and solving this issue manually is really a TDS job.
Figuring out these redirects can be very hectic and time-consuming for this your website should have a redirect management, which will automate this job for you.
There are e-commerce website platforms, which offer this feature as in-built like BigCommerce and Shopify. It will automatically redirect users to your primary domain.
Conclusions:
Here we tried to show you how these Five Essential SEO Features your website should have. And also we have discussed the difference between e-commerce platforms; website builders & custom-made e-commerce website development. It depends on your budget and what platform you would like to go for but for the long run, having your e-commerce website will be beneficial. At last, what you choose totally depends on you, but you need to have a platform that supports SEO, if it’s not doing so, then unfortunately your website will lack visibility and there is no point in setting up an online store.
