Understanding SEO in WebShop
Purpose and scope
Do you want your products to be more visible in a crowded online marketplace? Do you want to increase your brand awareness and increase your competitive advantage? Do you want to display content in the language of your key customers? If you’ve answered Yes to some or all of these questions, then you need to understand search engine optimization (SEO) and how you can use it to maximize your sales opportunities. SEO is a method of attracting more organic traffic to your website (in this case, WebShop) by ensuring it is indexed and ranked highly (preferably on the first page) on search engine result pages.
As standard, WebShop comes with a host of tools and features that you can use to optimize your SEO. These include SEO data controls on content, category and product pages, automatically generated sitemaps, functionality to create URLs that are human and computer-readable and HTML attributes that display content in the correct language.
The purpose of this article is to explain how SEO works, and how our standard features can be used to improve your SEO.
Benefits
Key benefits of optimizing your search results are that:
Your WebShop is more visible in a crowded online marketplace, which in turn
Leads to more sales opportunities and
Builds brand awareness.
Introducing terms and concepts used in this article
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
Category | a class that contains one or more products from your product listing. |
Category tree | a hierarchy containing your product listings consisting of parent and child categories. |
Search engine optimization | (SEO), a method of attracting more organic traffic to your website (in this case, WebShop) by making it appear higher on search engine results pages. |
Search engine result page | (SERP), a list of ranked results which are returned based on search terms you enter into a search engine. |
Sitemap | a file containing a list of the key pages in your WebShop, used by search engines to find products and content. |
Uniform resource locator | (URL), the address of a website. |
URL shortening | a process by which a long URL is shortened to allow for ease of use. |
How it fits together
A search engine is software that locates and displays information in response to a keyword that you have entered. Typically, a search consists of software (known as ‘crawlers’) searching the Internet looking for new content and sites. When found, this new content is indexed based on a number of factors, such as page language, usability of the page, the locale of the content and so on. When you enter a search term, the search engine matches your query with an index of matching pages. The results are ranked and displayed on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a method of attracting more organic traffic to your website (in this case, WebShop) by ensuring it is indexed and ranked highly (preferably on the first page) on SERPs.
To increase the probability of the content and products in your WebShop being found and ranked highly on SERPs, WebShop supports:
Page level meta data
At a page, category or product level, include your site name on every page title (for example: My Page - My Company), and customize your page title, product / category or page name (relates to the H1 HTML tag). The page title is what is returned on the SERP. Additionally, you can use our SEO controls to add more meta data (meta page title, meta keywords and meta descriptions) to further describe what each page is about. Finally, we automatically include structured data of key WebShop data, such as company information, breadcrumbs and product data. This improves SEO by making it easier for ‘crawlers’ to identify and index different pages.
Flexible category management
To increase the possibility of product pages being returned when your customers search for a particular product, we recommend that you structure your category tree in line with best practice and standards provided by Google1. Also, we suggest that you configure your URLs for each product page, using the two URL types that we provide, which work together to provide the best experience for both your customers and the search engine ‘crawlers’. Read How are URLs set up in WebShop?for more information.
Automatically generated sitemaps
A number of sitemaps are automatically generated when your WebShop is created. A sitemap is a file containing a list of the key pages in your WebShop. Once a sitemap is generated, it can be submitted to Google. This tells Google and other search engines where to find the sitemap, so that it, can crawl and index the pages on your WebShop. View the sitemap on Web Settings in Management Interface.
URL redirects
Our Redirect feature manages migrations from older sites, for creating shortened URLs and for removing broken page links. The redirects screen is found under Web Settings in Management Interface.
Canonical URLs
Search engines attempt to remove duplicate content from results displayed on their SERPs. Given a number of similar looking URLs, the search engine determines which is the canonical (or main) URL for a particular page. In many WebShops, there many be products that have similar URLs because they are similar but not identical products, which may be excluded from being displayed due to how search engines determine the main URL.
Multi-lingual support and multi-domain set up
When you have a multi-lingual or multi-domain WebShop, HTML attributes (specifically the hreflang attribute to specify what language to display in a particular locale, and the x-default attribute to specify the default language for the WebShop) are automatically included in the HTML of each page when the WebShops are linked. This improves SEO because the results returned are in the correct language for your customers.
Multi-region set up
We support multi-regional WebShops. These are WebShops that may have specific product offerings for different countries or regions. There are two ways that we support linking WebShops that are multi-region: either a full translation of each WebShop where each WebShop has its own domain name / URL or product display in different regions based on product code. This improves SEO because relevant country-specific product data is displayed on SERPs.
Want more information?
Technical set up
Page level meta data
How do I set up SEO for my WebShop content?
How do I improve the SEO of my products?
How do I improve the SEO of my categories?
Flexible category management
How do I structure my category tree?
Automatically generated sitemaps
How do I use sitemaps to improve SEO?
URL redirects
How can I ensure that my indexes are migrated correctly when I move to my new WebShop?
Canonical URLs
How are URLs set up in WebShop?
Related content
Link building tips for eCommerce websites
Technical SEO tips for eCommerce sites
On-Page SEO for eCommerce websites
References
1 Consolidate duplicate URLs - from Google Help Center