The best way to attract traffic to your online store is through Google’s search results, but how do you ensure that your products appear in the shopping tab?
Here are 4 tips on how to SEO an ecommerce website:
1. Product Indexing
Googlebot can sometimes miss pages when crawling a site if there are no links to those pages on your website. On ecommerce sites, for example, some product pages are only reachable from on-site search results, or through specific promotion pages
Ensure that Google crawls all your product pages by utilising XML sitemaps and the Google Merchant Center. Creating a Merchant Center product feed will help Google discover all the products on your website.
2. Prices in Search Results
If Google incorrectly extracts pricing data from your product pages, it may list the incorrect price in search results – especially if you are discounting a product.
To accurately provide product information such as list price, discounts, and net price, it’s recommended to add structured data to your product pages and provide Google Merchant Center with structured feeds of your product data.
3. Avoid Lag
Google crawls webpages on your site according to its own schedule. That means Googlebot may not notice changes on your site until the next crawl.
These delays can lead to search results “lagging” behind site changes, such as a product going out of stock.
It is best to minimize inconsistencies in pricing and availability data between your website and Google’s understanding of your site due to timing lags. This can be achieved by utilising the Merchant Center product feeds to keep pages updated.
4. Rich Results and Enhancements
Eligibility for rich product results requires the use of product structured data.
To get the special rich product presentation format, Google recommends providing structured data( schema markup) on your product pages and a product feed in Merchant Center.
This will help ensure that Google understands how to extract product data to display rich results.
However, even with the correct structured data in place, rich results are displayed at Google’s discretion.