Large Ecommerce Websites: Avoid These 5 Technical SEO Issues

The more pages a website has, the more complicated optimization becomes. If you are an ecommerce business, how do you avoid this problem?

A technical SEO agency applies many techniques to uncover issues and customize solutions. To learn more about the topic, this blog post covers the following:

• The top three most common technical search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes of enterprise ecommerce sites
• Practical strategies to overcome these issues
• A technical optimization case study of Amazon, one of the world’s biggest electronic  retailers (etailers)

Read the article below if you are ready to scale your business site error-free. Let’s go!

Watch this video to learn how Digital Authority Partners tackles Technical SEO!

1. Improper Site Indexing

Two of the fundamental principles of sound technical SEO are crawlability and indexability. Search engines should be able to do the following:

• Visit your website
• Analyze your pages for keyword relevance
• Understand the context of your content
• Index or store your pages in their massive database

Otherwise, Internet users will never find you. You will have little to no chance of converting your target market. 

Improper site indexing happens when you cannot discover your site or pages in the search results. Search engines have indexed your website for the wrong keywords or search queries, in certain situations. The causes can vary:

• Query parameter URLs create duplicate content issues.
• Search engine spiders spend too much time crawling through unnecessary pages instead of focusing on those that help businesses.
• The sitemap is outdated or missing.

Regardless of the reason, indexing issues hurt your marketing strategies and bottom line with lost traffic and sales, poor user experience (UX), decreased online visibility, and even inaccurate data analytics. 

Fix improper indexing with these tips:

• Consolidate product-variant pages into single main-product pages and use canonical tags to point to the primary version.
• Set up a robot.txt file for pages you do not want to be indexed.
• Create 301 redirects from old URLs to relevant new ones.
• Make and update XML sitemaps.

Although Google no longer displays FAQ and how-to-rich results on mobile devices, it still pays to use schema or structured data. It helps search engines better understand your site’s content. 

2. Slow Page-Load Speed

Ecommerce websites are also prone to slow page-load speeds for various reasons, including the following:

• They run heavy assets such as themes, icons, images, and videos.
• You or your visitors must send multiple requests to a web server (HTTP requests) to make one connection to retrieve all elements of the page. 
• The site’s code contains many unnecessary characters, bulky frameworks, or outdated libraries.
• Users must download the same resources every time they visit a page.      
• The server response time is slow. 
• The page runs many ads. 
• An external server hosts the embedded media. 
• The database needs more maintenance or a better structure. 
• Page access leads to multiple redirects. 

Because more people today have shorter attention spans, your site’s slow speed negatively affects their user experience (UX) and makes them click away. Before you can even display your gorgeous product photos, they have moved on to your competitors. As UX declines, metrics such as bounce and click-through rates and dwell time decrease. 

A technical SEO agency corrects the problem by striving to hit a speed of three seconds or below. Effective techniques to achieve this include the following:

• Compress the file size of images without compromising quality.
• Combine multiple CSS or JS files into a single file to reduce HTTP requests.
• Distribute content across multiple geographically dispersed servers to reduce latency.
• Load essential content first, so users can start interacting with the page.
• Limit the number of different fonts.
• Upgrade to better hosting if needed.
• Design the site for mobile with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) where appropriate.
• Clean up old or redundant data.

3. Website Migration Challenges

Whether you want more features, lower operating costs, or to enhance your site’s performance, you might decide to migrate or move your website from one system or host to another. Like any other move, it presents many challenges: 

• The transfer can corrupt or lose data, such as customer profiles or order histories.
• The site can lose its good search engine ranking. 
• Migration often requires downtime, which means no sales and poor productivity during this period. 
• It might change design elements, which could contribute to poor UX.
• Migration projects can become more expensive when you do not anticipate changes in scope.
• Your existing platforms might not be compatible with the new system or host. 
• Unexpected errors and glitches can pop up after migration, requiring additional troubleshooting.

Many factors are beyond your control during migration. Those that you can manage require careful planning, clear communication among stakeholders, and even assistance from professionals specializing in such transitions. 

You can also mitigate the risks with proper pre-migration audits, thorough testing environments, and phased rollouts.

A Case Study on Amazon

Amazon, a retail giant, is not exempt from technical issues. Like most enterprises, it also does not reveal its marketing strategies, including site optimization. However, it remains a perfect case study to understand how good technical SEO works.

• The website is meticulously organized, with categories, subcategories, and individual product pages. This hierarchy is clear for both users and search engines.
• The URLs, which include keywords related to the product, are clean and descriptive. This makes it easier for search engines to understand the content.
• The company invests heavily in building infrastructure. One example is CloudFront, which delivers static and dynamic web content using edge locations. 
• Amazon uses structured data to provide search engines with additional information about product listings, reviews, ratings, and more.
• Product recommendations, category listings, and related products all contribute to a dense network of internal links. It aids in site crawls and page authority distribution.
• Amazon uses HTTPS across its entire site, providing a secure browsing environment.
• Reviews and Q&A sections add fresh content to product pages regularly. This enhances user trust and provides fresh content for search engines.

Summing Up

Ecommerce sites are often huge, making technical optimization difficult and susceptible to mistakes. Fortunately, most have effective solutions. 

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) manages complex sites such as yours. As an award-winning technical SEO agency with nearly 10 years of experience, we have already helped increase a fashion retailer’s revenue by 23%. We also grew a national chain’s ecommerce search volume by 10%. 

We combine accurate, relevant data, best practices, and market knowledge to address the most pressing problems preventing you from maximizing your profits. Contact us to learn more.