Technical SEO Role Models for E-Commerce Websites

When it comes to SEO, everybody can understand what makes a page look good and why certain keywords matter more than others. However, technical SEO is a barrier for many aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs. That’s where you make your site appealing to Google’s crawling and indexing systems, which requires more backend knowledge. It’s dull but important work, and we’re here to help with this short guide full of technical SEO role models.

Starting With Site Architecture

Let’s start with the basics, the fundamental architecture of your site. There are many giant websites out there which need to have all their pages neatly ordered so that Google indexes and displays it correctly for ranking. Your e-commerce store is no different, so let’s see who does this best.

Try to think of a site that has many pages with moving parts but ranks highly in SERPs. Perhaps some of the best examples are iGaming websites. These are sites that offer hundreds of online slot games, all with different themes from the epic Monsters Unchained to the quaint Fox Mayhem. All of them are categorized and highly ranked by search algorithms, which hinges on things like a clear URL structure and a direct-to-game click menu on the homepage, cutting their bounce rate down. These sites are also great at UI, displaying their slot games like items in a shop window and ensuring menus are easily navigable.

So, keep these three things in mind when building your e-commerce store. It needs to have a clear UI, especially with your checkout provider, and a sensible URL structure that doesn’t have a lot of numbers and symbols. This means your store should have URLs like ‘Site Name/Store’ with shirts in that store appearing at ‘Site Name/Store/Shirts.’ Lastly, customers should get to where they want in a minimum of four clicks, something we call click depth.

Building A Site Map

Next, building a site map is a good idea. This translates your site into a format that is easily digestible for search engines – either XML or HTML. The process of creating one also identifies many standard technical SEO mishaps like disconnected pages or broken hyperlinks. These are caught using a site auditing tool.

For a look at good site maps, you’ll want to find bigger domains. News publication sites tend to have the best site maps that are itemized by year, month, and day, with every article page listed. Historic papers like the New York Times have a site map from 2023 to the 1800s. Yours doesn’t need to go so deep, of course, but it shows that site maps provide intense technical SEO value for algorithms and for the curious people who’ll click through them.

Adding Breadcrumbs

Lastly, you should add breadcrumbs to your e-commerce pages. If you’re unaware of what they are, we’ve come close to discussing them already when talking about URL structure. If your store has different categories, that’s represented in the URL structure, but you should also make sure the click pathway is represented on-page.

This is a technical SEO hack that is unique to retail sites. Your last role model is Amazon, if it wasn’t already. Find any product and look at the top left of the page, just above the images. You should see three to five categories that feed into one another before arriving at your page. These breadcrumbs let the algorithm know that your pages are arranged in a hierarchy. They’re also internal links, which is another good technical SEO strategy, and they also help convert users to category pages which can help boost them.