Technical SEO for eCommerce: The Complete Checklist
Table of Contents
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the foundation of your website. Just as a house needs strong underpinnings, your site needs a robust technical infrastructure to stand strong.
Technical SEO is the process of optimising your website’s elements to help search engines like Google and Bing effectively crawl, index, and understand your content.
While modern CMS systems like Wix and Shopify simplify building an online store, technical SEO remains crucial for ensuring your website’s visibility and success in search results.
If you’re a small hobby store with a very limited selection of products, its unlikely that you need to worry much about Technical SEO. Instead, you’re better off focusing on On-Page SEO elements and content for maximum leverage.
If you’re a mid to large ecommerce store (with hundreds or thousands of products), built on a more customisable CMS such as Woocommerce, Drupal, Magento etc., you’re more prone to Technical SEO challenges. In such a scenario, it’s crucial to identify and address technical seo pitfalls to maximise your site’s potential.
In this detailed blog post, I’ll share key technical elements for ecommerce SEO that you should be aware of, and best practices to follow.
Why Is Technical SEO Important for eCommerce?
The primary purpose of an ecommerce store is to sell products. To achieve this, Stores need to rank for their most important pages namely the Category, Sub-category and Product pages.
lf there are undetected technical issues, they will interfere with and cripple your site’s rankings. This, in turn, will have a direct impact on your organic traffic and online revenue.
Technical SEO is a way to diagnose and fix all issues that may prevent Search Engine crawlers from finding product and category pages from your store, and to help your pages rank higher.
A few tangible ways that Technical SEO can strengthen an ecommerce store:
- All products in every category are being crawled and counted towards your website’s “category-specific” search rankings.
- All products can be found by potential buyers on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for long-tail keyword searches.
- Search engines can crawl and understand your online store. For example, If a product falls into multiple categories, helping Google understand the intent without the page being marked as “duplicate content”.
- Your website stands out in Search results with proper structured data markup (also called schema markup) to enhance product listings with rich snippets, such as price, availability, and reviews.
- All important pages are indexed and appear in Google’s search results. Any old and obsolete pages have been removed from appearing in search engine results.
With the high competition ecommerce sites face today, technical SEO provides the foundation needed to maximise visibility, enhance the user experience, and improve your site ranking.
Technical SEO for Ecommerce Checklist - 16 Essential Checks
1. Robots.txt
Think of robots.txt as a guide for search engine crawlers that visit your website. This small text file mentions which website sections to crawl and which to ignore, helping search bots efficiently explore your site.
A robots.txt file is important for 3 reasons:
a. Prevent server overload
By managing bot traffic effectively, you can prevent overwhelming your server, ensuring that your site runs smoothly.
In addition to the regular search engine bots, there are many other bots out there such as ahrefsBot, YandexBot, chatgpt and so on. If you don’t want certain bots visiting your website, you can consider banning them via robots.txt.
b. Prioritise important web pages
For medium to large ecommerce sites with thousands of products (> 5,000 pages), robots.txt can ensure that crawlers focus on important transactional pages like product and category pages, rather than wasting time on less important parts of the website.
Example: Faceted navigation or filters, while helpful for users, can create duplicate content issues by generating countless URL combinations with similar content.
To prevent this, you can prioritise important filtered pages and disallow others from being crawled, ensuring efficient crawling and indexing of your site’s core content.
This strategy optimises your crawl budget and improves your site’s overall SEO.
c. Manage media files
Using the robots.txt file, you can disallow certain images, video and audio files from appearing in Google Search results.
Important Tip: Time and time again, I have seen websites use a robots.txt disallow rule to keep a web page out of Google. Robots.txt is not a way to hide pages from Google’s search results. If you want to prevent a page from being indexed, use the noindex rule instead.
2. XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap contains a list of URLs for important pages, images, videos and other files on your website.
Small ecommerce websites with less than 500 URLs are easy to crawl and do not require a sitemap.
As your website grows, it may become difficult for Search engine crawlers to discover all the pages. Having an XML sitemap ensures that Google is finding and indexing all important pages on your site.
I often find old/obsolete URLs in XML sitemaps, long after those URLs have been deleted. To prevent this from happening, set a periodic update frequency for your XML sitemaps.
Pro Tip: Make sure that new or seasonal product pages are updated in the sitemap so that they can be found and indexed correctly by search engines.
3. Site Speed
Based on a Think With Google study, a 2-second increase in page load time increases the bounce rate by 32%. Clearly, site visitors expect, no, they demand a speedy website.
An ecommerce website, optimised for speed, is also optimised for user experience. If users can browse through your products quickly and easily, they’re more likely to stay for longer and buy more products.
A few ways you can optimise site speed include:
- Image compression
- Clean and efficient code
- Server optimisation
Please note that site speed is different from Core Web Vitals.
Site speed reflects the overall time a page takes to fully load and become usable whereas Core Web Vitals describe a website’s performance from a loading, interactivity, and visual stability perspective.
In my opinion, while Speed is a must-have, all things being equal, Core Web Vitals are a good-to-have.
4. Site Structure
Site structure refers to how categories, products and other important pages are organised and interconnected.
Just as a well-organised bookshelf makes it easier to find any book, a well-organised and structured ecommerce website makes it easy for both search engine bots to crawl and users to find relevant pages.
Few tips to improve site structure:
a. Use a simple and intuitive directory structure:
- Recommended path for Category and sub-category pages: Home/Category/Subcategory
- Recommended path for Product pages: Home/Category/Product or Home/ Product
- Recommended path for Blog Articles: Home/Blog/Article
b. Choose Subdirectories over subdomains:
A subdomain (blog.examplecompany.com) is a pathway within the same website whereas a subdirectory (examplecompany.com/blog) is an independent entity.
Subdirectories are well-aligned to pass around SEO link equity whereas subdomains may not do so as efficiently.
While Google maintains that either option is fine, my vote goes to subdirectories – due to ease of implementation and for better long-term SEO ROI.
Search Central Video discussing Subdirectories Vs Subdomains:
c. Follow the rule of 3:
Plan for a lean website structure with all pages reachable within 3 clicks.
These 3 SEO tips for ecommerce site structure are more relevant for customisable platforms like Woocommerce, Drupal, and Magento. These platforms offer greater control over your website’s structure and layout.
In contrast, platforms like Shopify and Wix are easier to set up. However, they offer limited customisation options. This can make certain SEO strategies harder to implement.
5. Site URLs
URLs are the top-most site element visible in the browser search bar.
For ecommerce sites, it’s crucial that the URL path reflects the site’s hierarchy and page content. Include categories and product names in your URLs.
URL Path Examples:
- Category page: yourwebsite.com/wedding-earrings
- Product page: yourwebsite.com/silver-earrings/silver-pearl-drop-diamante-earrings
Clear URLs help visitors instantly understand where they’re going on your site, improving their browsing experience.
Learn more tips on optimising site URLs in our guide, How to Optimise SEO-Friendly URLs for Your Ecommerce Store.
6. HTTP Status Code
When someone visits your website, the server sends a code indicating the page’s status to the client (in this case, the web browser). This response is called an HTTP status code (or page response code).
In SEO, each status code tells search engines about a page’s availability and relevance. This impacts how the page is crawled and indexed.
Here are some key status codes for technical SEO:
200 (OK): This means your page is working perfectly! Search engines can easily index it. Aim for this status code across your entire site.
3XX (Redirects): These codes indicate a page has moved. For example, a 301 redirect permanently sends users and search engines to a new URL. Use 301s to redirect discontinued product pages to similar items, preserving valuable “link equity” from the old page to the new.
4XX (Client Errors): The most common is a 404 (Not Found), meaning the page is unavailable. Create a custom 404 page to guide visitors and prevent frustration. Also, fix any internal links pointing to 404 pages.
403 (Forbidden): This code means that the server understand your request but refuses to share the resource. This may likely happen due to login restrictions, incorrect file permissions, or IP address restrictions (for specific geographies).
5XX (Server Errors): These signal a problem with your server. Address these quickly to avoid disrupting access for users and search engines.
7. URL Redirection
URL redirection is simply a change of URL address from old to new. With online ecommerce stores, URL redirects are essential for various scenarios such as product discontinuation, URL restructuring, and site migration.
In all of these instances, the preferred option is a 301 permanent redirect which takes both the search engines and users to a brand new URL.
Such redirects prevent broken links and preserve 100% SEO value, including rankings and link equity.
When implementing redirects, ensure a good user experience.
Here’s a URL redirection approach that I recommend:
- Redirect the old page to a new page with very similar content. In case of a discontinued product, this should be the closest available product match. This ensures the user finds what they were looking for with minimal disruption.
- If a highly similar page isn’t available, redirect to a relevant category page. This keeps the user within the same subject areas while providing alternative options.
- If all else fails, redirect to the homepage. While not ideal, it’s better than a 404 Not Found error page.
8. Canonical Tags
Website URLs change in various ways across the web.
They’re used for Ads, social media, URL-shortening services and so much more. Each platform often adds tracking parameters, resulting in multiple copies of the original URL.
Other examples of when different URL versions may get generated:
1. A user can reach the home page of your website by typing:
- https://yoursite.com
- https://www.yoursite.com
- www.yoursite.com
As far as a user is concerned, each version is the same. However, search engines view all three as different URLs. So, it is a good idea to declare one of the three as your preferred version.
2. Applying filters on category pages may change the original category URL and generate thousands of variations without serving vastly different products. Search engines may view such pages as duplicate content.
Canonicalisation is a way to tell search engines which version of a URL you consider as the master copy. The simplest way to do this is by using the rel=”canonical” link tag on a page.
By implementing canonical tags, you consolidate your content’s signals and specify the preferred version for ranking and indexation.
For further guidance on canonicalisation, check out Google’s SEO Canonicalisation Tips.
9. Page Experience
The next important factor for technical SEO is page experience. This relates to how users experience and interact with your online store.
I’d recommend focusing on these three key aspects of page experience for ecommerce:
a. Site navigation
Think of your ecommerce site’s navigation as a helpful guide in a physical store. Just as a store uses signs and displays to direct customers, your website navigation helps visitors easily find what they need.
A clear navigation structure shows customers your product categories, available options, related products, promotions and their current location on your site, preventing confusion and enhancing their shopping experience.
Further, there are 3 types of site navigation to pay attention to:
1. Mega menu
This is the main menu, commonly found in the website header. ecommerce websites usually utilise mega menus to effectively organise categories, subcategories, and links within a comprehensive dropdown.
Since the main menu is a user’s primary tool for navigating your website and finding specific products, optimising your mega menu is crucial. Therefore, make sure that it is optimised in the following ways:
- Place your most popular or high-value categories first
- Focus on optimising navigation for the target keywords
- Keep any category or sub-category page within 2-3 clicks away, anymore will likely be a bad user experience
- Include visual elements such as icons or even small product thumbnails, if applicable
- Ensure the mega menu loads quickly. Delayed or laggy menus frustrate users
- Anywhere from 40-65% of website users come via mobile, optimise the mobile experience
2. Faceted Navigation
This is the second type of navigation on an ecommerce website.
Faceted navigation allows users to narrow down their product searches using filters like price, size, color, and brand. While this improves user experience, it can pose SEO challenges such as duplicate content issues and wasted crawl budgets.
Therefore, pay attention to the following with regard to Faceted Navigation:
- Create a rule in robots.txt to handle URLs with parameter
- Use a noindex directive if you don’t want URLs from faceted navigation to be indexed
- Use canonical tags to signal the main URL version and avoid duplicate content issues
3. Website Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb is the third type of navigation that is on every page of your website except for the Home page. This navigation element shows the path to the current page.
Breadcrumbs provide a navigational trail for users to retrace their steps and help search engines understand your site’s structure.
Here are a few tips for optimising breadcrumbs on your ecommerce website:
- Use hierarchical breadcrumbs to show a clear path from the homepage to the current page.
- Make it visible. Ideally, breadcrumbs are placed near the top of each page, below the primary navigation.
- Make them keyword-rich.
- Use breadcrumb schema markup to help search engines understand better them on your pages.
b. Mobile Friendly
With more people shopping on mobile than desktops, optimising your ecommerce site for mobile is essential. In 2023, mobile shopping generated $2.2 trillion in sales and is projected to grow to 3.4 trillion by 2027.
The main goal of mobile optimisation is to provide the best experience to users such as responsive design and fast loading speeds.
You can follow Google’s guidelines on Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices to optimise your site for mobile.
c. No Intrusive Interstitials
Google doesn’t like websites that have intrusive interstitial elements. Interstitials are site elements that obstruct a user’s view and are usually used for website promotions.
Examples of intrusive interstitials are large pop-ups or banners that cover content.
They make it difficult for search engine bots to understand your content, leading to poor search performance. Additionally, they disrupt the browsing experience, frustrating users, and leading to higher bounce rates.
10. Images and Videos
High-quality images and videos are essential visual elements for any ecommerce website.
They help customers understand your products, increase engagement, and drive more online sales. After all, would you shop at an online store with no visuals?
Plus, optimised images can also boost your visibility through Google Image Search.
Here’s our detailed Guide to Optimising your images for search.
Image optimisation quick tips:
- Use descriptive file names
- Add alt text to provide more context for search engines
- Compress images to reduce file sizes, but remember to keep the quality high
- Use the right image format e.g JPEG for standard photos, PNG for images requiring transparency, and WebP for a balance between quality and load time
Video optimisation quick tips:
- Host the video on a reliable platform e.g YouTube or Vimeo
- Add descriptive titles
- For multiple videos, create a video sitemap to help search engines discover and index your videos properly
11. Product Stock Handling
Effectively managing out-of-stock products is crucial for any ecommerce website, especially those with large product inventories.
Proper handling ensures a positive user experience and maintains SEO performance, preventing lost sales and frustrated customers.
A few best practices to handle out-of-stock product pages well:
- If a product is permanently discontinued, use a 301 redirect to the closest product or category match. This is much better than setting the out-of-stock product page to a 404 status code.
- If the item is likely to be re-stocked, keep the page live and mark it as out of stock. You can add an estimated restock date or enable a “Notify Me” option, so users can receive an alert when the product becomes available.
- If a product is discontinued and the page is removed, update your XML sitemap and remove any internal links to the product page.
12. Products in Multiple Categories
eCommerce websites often list products in multiple categories. This, in turn, can lead to duplicate content issues. To avoid this scenario, follow the following tips:
1. Select a primary category: When listing the product for the first time, determine its primary category as well as any secondary categories.
2. Category-agnostic URL format: Use a universal URL format. So, instead of a category URL with a subdirectory structure: /collection/sneakers/air-jordan, use a category-agnostic URL structure: /product/air-jordan
This allows you to add products to as many categories as needed.
3. Use canonical tags: If your products appear in multiple categories with different URLs, use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version for each product. This helps search engines understand which URL to prioritise, avoiding duplicate content issues.
13. Internal Linking
Internal linking is a process through which pages across your website are connected to other similar and related pages. In SEO, internal links allow users to discover new pages and allow search engines to crawl linked pages and distribute link equity, across the website.
A few tips and best practices for better internal linking:
- Internally link thematically relevant pages. For example, link category pages to other relevant categories, and product pages to similar or complementary items. This helps customers discover new products and creates opportunities for upselling, while also improving your site’s overall navigation and SEO.
- Add links naturally into the flow of your content, increasing engagement without disrupting a user’s experience.
- Add descriptive anchor text that accurately captures the linked page’s content. Avoid the use of generic text such as “click here”.
14. Pagination
Pagination refers to dividing large sets of items across multiple pages to make browsing easier for users.
On ecommerce sites, this is fairly common on category and sub-category pages with a large product inventory.
There are three ways to implement pagination:
- Pagination
- Load more
- Infinite scroll
Pagination not only improves user experience by making large product catalogues easier to browse, but it also boosts page performance.
Imagine a category with thousands of products – loading them all at once would take forever!
Pagination lets you control how many items appear per page, leading to faster loading times and a smoother shopping experience.
15. Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a shared vocabulary that websites across the world can use to describe their content to search engines.
Structured data or schema markup can help boost search visibility and how your website pages are displayed in search engine result pages (SERPs).
The purpose of using schema markup is to provide search engines with additional context about your pages, making it easier for them to understand and display your content accurately in search results.
For ecommerce websites, schema markup can enable rich search results such as product listings, prices, stock availability, ratings, location pins and customer reviews, directly in search results.
With schema markup, users will also be able to see relevant details from your website pages, increasing the likelihood that they will visit your website pages from search results.
16. Site Security
Security is fundamental to ecommerce. Customers need assurance that their sensitive information, like payment details and personal data, is safe before making a purchase.
Here are two key ways to optimise site security:
1. HTTPS Implementation
HTTPS is essential for all websites, but especially ecommerce. You can implement https on your website by installing an SSL certificate.
It encrypts data transmitted between users and your site, protecting sensitive information like payment details. Plus, Google uses HTTPS as a ranking factor, so it boosts your SEO too.
Visually, it is easy to identify any website with HTTPS implementation through the padlock symbol in the website address bar.
2. Secure Checkout
An easy checkout process is essential for any ecommerce store, but it must also be secure.
Secure checkouts protect customer data, build trust, and reduce cart abandonment by reassuring customers that their sensitive information is safe.
A secure checkout goes beyond SSL. It ensures that your ecommerce website’s payment processing is PCI-compliant (PCI compliance is a set of security requirements designed to ensure that all companies that process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.)
Technical SEO for Ecommerce Checklist - Additional Checks
17. JavaScript
JavaScript makes websites more interactive and dynamic. While great for user experience, JavaScript can make it difficult for search engines to understand and index your site content.
The most common issue with Javascript implementation and SEO is that search engine crawlers may not see content that is added dynamically using Javascript. This, in turn, can influence a search engine’s understanding, and hence ranking of your page.
There are two methods of implementing JavaScript on a website, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:
1. Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
Server-side rendering (SSR), as the name suggests, lets the server prepare the website content before sending it to your browser.
This is better for search engines because they can easily read and understand the complete page. It also makes the website load faster for you because there’s less work for your browser to do.
One downside of this method is that your website might feel less interactive. This is because the server does most of the work, which can also lead to more strain on the server. This approach works best for simple websites that don’t change much.
2. Client-Side Rendering (CSR)
Client-side rendering (CSR) only loads the HTML on the webpage first, then uses JavaScript to fill in all the details in your browser. This makes the website feel faster and smoother because you don’t see the page reloading every time you click something.
Though CSR can make websites feel faster and more interactive, it can sometimes make them slower to load initially. Also, search engines may have trouble understanding the content because it’s loaded later with JavaScript. This can hurt your website’s ranking in search results.
You can read further tips and advice on JavaScript SEO and website rendering to optimise your online store for Javascript SEO, without hurting your SEO performance.
18. Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are metrics used by Google to measure user experience related to loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a page.
There are 3 Core Web Vital metrics used include:
a. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It measures how quickly the main part of your page appears
b. Interaction To Next Paint (INP) – Measures how quickly your page responds when a user interacts with it.
c. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures if page elements such as buttons or images jump around when loading, making it harder to click on things. Pages with poor visual stability can be a distraction to website visitors when they’re browsing.
You can check Core Web Vitals using the PageSpeed Insights tool. Google considers Web Vitals as a minor ranking factor but improving them may not necessarily lead to better rankings. This is because other relevant factors may outweigh the impact of CWV.
19. Multilanguage eCommerce Website
There is a possibility that an ecommerce website targets customers from multiple regions or multiple languages. If that happens to your online store, then you need to pay attention to the implementation of international SEO.
The implementation of hreflang is something you need to pay attention to. Hreflang tags help search engines understand which language or regional version of a page to display to users based on their language or location preferences. This prevents duplicate content issues and improves the relevancy of search results in each target region.
If your ecommerce store targets customers in multiple regions or languages, you need to implement international SEO. This includes using hreflang tags to help search engines show users the right version of a page based on their language and location.
This avoids duplicate content issues and improves search results in each target region.
You can learn more about international SEO from Google’s guidelines about managing multi-regional and multilingual sites.
This wraps up all key issues you need to consider from an ecommerce Technical SEO perspective. However, you’ll likely run into other technical SEO challenges along the way that are beyond the scope of what I’ve covered.
If you need help with any aspects of Technical SEO for your online store, do get in touch for a 20-minute, no-charge SEO consultation.
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