Technical SEO for eCommerce: What is it, Why do it, and Tips
More often than not, technical SEO is looked at as a chore. Something that doesn't have a great impact on an eCommerce website's performance.
And, honestly, if you think that, you couldn’t be any more wrong.
Technical SEO, although it lurks in the background, can impact crawlability, indexability, search traffic, CTR, bounce rates, rankings, and, most importantly, conversions.
This blog unpacks the core components of Technical SEO for eCommerce, and explains why it's critical to driving scalable, sustainable online growth.
You'll get practical insights on how to tighten up your site's technical foundations to boost visibility, rankings, and conversions. We'll cover these quick tips:
- Do a Technical Audit
- Prioritise Fixes
- Always Optimise for Site Speed
- Focus on Mobile-First
- Use Structured Data
- Consider Canonical Tags
- Follow a Technical SEO Checklist
What is eCommerce Technical SEO?
eCommerce Technical SEO refers to optimising technical elements on an online store to improve search visibility, crawlability, and user experience. It helps search search engines access your website efficiently, allowing them to access, understand, and index product pages.
Why is a Technical eCommerce SEO Strategy Important?
There are two main reasons why a technical SEO strategy is important: search engines and users.
Search engines rely on technical SEO to crawl, index, and rank websites. Simply, the better structure a website has (regarding HMTL, structured data, XML sitemaps, Robot.txt, etc.), the easier search engines can analyse it.
The easier the search engine can analyse it, the higher the chance they’ll understand the structure and relevance of product pages, allowing them to appear in the search results.
For users, technical SEO directly affects site experience, usability, and trust, all of which impact on-page time, bonus rates, and conversions. Some technical features that improve the user experience are site speed, SSL certificate, breadcrumb navigation, clean URLs, etc.
And it impacts users much more than you think. Site speed, for instance, 53% of users leave a web page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, this loss in traffic results in billions in lost sales yearly.
Key Elements of eCommerce Technical SEO
| Key Element | Description |
| Site Architecture | Defines how pages are structured and interlinked to enhance navigation and crawlability. |
| Site Speed | Ensures fast loading times, reducing bounce rates and improving search rankings. |
| Mobile Friendliness | Enhances user experience by making the site accessible across different devices. |
| Security (HTTPS) | Protects customer data and builds trust, influencing rankings and conversions. |
| Faced Navigation Optimisation | Refines product searches with filters while preventing SEO issues like duplicate content. |
| Structured Data | Provides additional data to search engines for improved visibility and rich search results. |
Technical SEO Tips for eCommerce Businesses
Now you know a little more about technical SEO for eCommerce businesses, let’s go over some tips on how you can do it effectively.
1. Do a Technical Audit
Before anything, you need to start with a technical audit. This helps identify and resolve issues that are affecting your website's technical performance.
To perform an audit, you’ll need some tools. Most SEOs use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog. The reason they use these is that they all integrate into Screaming Frog. You can also use Siteliner for duplicate content.
While performing the audit, you can look at a million and one things; this is a “deep” technical audit. We recommend you do this every quarter at least (depending on performance and the size of your website).
Some of the areas you can look at consist of redirect issues (i.g., redirect chains), 400-429 error problems, poor URL structure, broken structured data, bad crawl depth, etc. This is just a short list of the different areas.
Alongside the quarter technical review, you can also have shorter reviews focusing on really important areas, for example, reviewing site speed every month or mobile compatibility, etc.
2. Prioritise Fixes (High Priority, Low Priority)
As you now know, a full eCommerce technical SEO audit can generate a long list of problems you need to fix.However, honestly, for something like an eCommerce store, which can have hundreds and thousands of web pages, you’ll never be able to fix them all. Because of this, you need to prioritise fixes from high priority to low priority.
For example, some high-priority technical SEO fixes consist of:
- 400 to 429 errors
- Poor navigation
- Crawling issues
- Indexing issues
- Duplicate Content
- Canonical errors
- Structured data issues
- Broken Links
- More than one H1
- Remove meta keywords
Therefore, if you’re stuck for time and want to act on high-impact activities to improve your online visibility, you’ll want to focus on the high-priority fixes.
3. Always Optimise for Site Speed
Site speed and eCommerce SEO go hand-in-hand. There’s just so much data on an online shop, so it isn’t uncommon that they become slow, even unintentionally.
Though it’s often shrugged off, having a slow website impacts you massively. Even a 3-second or more load time can increase bounce rates and lower conversions.
This, in turn, provides a poor user experience. And once search engines identify that you’re providing a poor experience, oh boy, they’ll start lowering your search rank and maybe even unindex pages.
To see whether your website is fast enough or not, use a tool like Google's PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Either will tell you the current speed of your website, both on mobile and desktop, as well as tell you how to improve your site speed for SEO.
Reference: Google PageSpeed Insight Example Report
4. Focus on Mobile-First
Back in 2018, Google started migrating to a mobile-first index.
Pretty much, they now use the mobile version of your website's content, which is crawled by a smartphone agent, to index and rank your web pages.
Therefore, to do mobile SEO for eCommerce, the online store needs to be suitable for mobile devices, arguably more than desktop devices.
Luckily, most eCommerce store builders, like Shopify, have plenty of responsive design templates to choose from, easing the process of creating mobile-optimised platforms. This makes them mobile-optimised for eCommerce SEO.
Still, consider things such as images, videos, etc., as these usually appear poorly on mobile devices when compared to desktops.
5. Use Structured Data
Back in the day, structured data used to be considered “advanced SEO for eCommerce”, however, nowadays, it’s very accessible.
For those wondering, structured data (otherwise known as Schema) is data that is organised into a standard format. Or, in SEO terms, it helps Google effortlessly understand the contents of a page in a language the crawlers understand.
Not only this, but it gives you a chance to appear on enriched search results, allowing you to gain more search real estate.
There are tons of different enriched results for eCommerce, with the main ones being images, ratings, prices, availability, delivery details, and sometimes, user-generated content (UGC).
Reference: Product Schema on SERPs
But why should you care? Well, it increases performance. Rotten Tomatoes implemented structured data to 100,000 different pages, generating a 25% higher CTR, which, without question, is impressive.
6. Consider Canonical Tags
A key part of SEO optimisation for online stores is canonical tags. These tags help search engines identify the primary version of pages with duplicate or near-identical content.
This, for eCommerce, is actually very important as they often have duplicate URLs and, therefore, content because of variations (e.g., sizes and colours), filtered navigation, or session IDs.
However, when you place a canonical tag on the “main” page, it signals to search engines the preferred version you’d like indexed rather than trying to index them all.
This benefits your eCommerce store in several ways. It improves crawlability, increases indexing speed, and helps with PageRank consolidation, so link equity from duplicate or near-duplicate pages flows to the canonical URL, making it more authoritative.
7. Follow a Technical SEO Checklist
When wanting to improve your search engine rankings for eCommerce via SEO, you COULD focus on millions of different things. However, who has the time for that?
Because of this, we recommend that you build and follow a technical SEO checklist. The checklist you follow should depend on what action means the most to your online shop.
For example, improving site speed for SEO may be an important area for you. In that case, do a site speed audit weekly or monthly. Or, perhaps you see really good results with structured data. In that case, review and optimise structured data weekly or monthly.
Personally, we recommend that you build out this technical SEO checklist based on data. Review what actions provide you with the best performance and check it regularly so it isn’t lost.
Final Word
As you can see, technical SEO for eCommerce has a far greater impact on your websites and business’s performance than you may think.
It doesn’t only help search engines crawl, index, and rank content. Alongside this, it improves the user experience, reducing bounce rates, enhancing CTR, and increasing conversions.
Therefore, if you haven’t been, we recommend you perform a full technical SEO audit to see where you stand.
From here, you can start prioritising the problems and see which ones you need to act on first. Or you can ignore them and let chaos reign—your call. Start with a proper technical SEO audit.
