Why Your E-Commerce SEO Services Should Focus On Site Structure

Looking into e-commerce SEO services? You’re not alone. On average, UK customers spend more than $1600 per year online, and ensuring you connect with those customers willing to buy online is an absolute must. Many e-commerce SEO companies will offer you an entire list of things they’ll focus on when you work with them, but if site structure isn’t near the top of the list, you may want to find another team. Wondering why? Take a look.

The Importance of Site Structure

The goal of any site should be to create a user friendly experience that encourages  a purchase. The best website architectures help to organise and prioritise content both for search engines and customers alike. That will not only help people easily find their way around your site, but it will also help you rank better for important keywords within your vertical.

Most ecommerce sites make use of a flat website architecture that ensures everything is just a few clicks from the homepage. That helps users to find product pages easily and ensures that your PageRank is high for individual pages. To build this out, you’ll want to make a list of everything  you have on the site, organize that into topics, then sort topics from broad to narrow. Keep in mind that customers don’t shop online the way they might in your store. For example, in the store, you may keep bed and bathroom supplies together. Online, though, it’s okay to separate commonly used categories like those.

Once you’ve decided what goes where, there are a couple of things that have to happen for a search engine to understand your structure. The first is to help build a better URL. Your URL is literally the address for each page of your site, and it’s what signals the search engines which pages are most important and how they’re related to each other. You’ll want to organize your URLs according to the structure of your site. As a result, bigger category pages first, then smaller. For example, maybe your site has bedding before bed sheets. In that URL structure, you’d want /bedding/sheets instead of /sheets/bedding.

Breadcrumbs are just as important as URLs are. They serve three essential purposes. The first one is that they help users understand where they are on a given website. The second is that they help users easily navigate back to the home page. Finally, though, they offer search engines a bit of information. Your breadcrumbs should actually reflect your URL. So, instead of changing titles, you might just want to go Bedding | Sheets instead of Bedroom Supplies |Twin Bed Sheets.

Internal links are just as important as both URLs and breadcrumbs. They help search engines see which topics on your site are relevant to each other and which ones need to be connected. There are a number of things you can do to make your internal linking strategy as strong as possible. First, ensure your home page has enough content to describe the goal of your store and anything users need to know while they shop. Then create strong category pages to generally direct shoppers to the right place. Finally, build out unique product pages that target specific keywords so visitors who are ready to buy land exactly on those pages.

Working with an E-commerce SEO Team To Develop Better Site Structure

If you’re not sure your site structure is quite where it needs to be, you may want to address that with an e-commerce SEO company before you ever sign a contract. Site architecture isn’t always part of traditional service packages, so you’ll want to consider whether you need help in this area before you connect with a team that can help. You may even want them to audit your current site structure to help you evaluate whether it’s strong enough to put you on page one. After all, the goal of SEO is to attract more potential customers who are ready to buy, and if your site isn’t quite ready to receive those customers, that’s certainly something that should be addressed before any other concerns are even considered.