Doing SEO for an e-commerce website is different than doing it for your average website. Follow these 5 technical SEO tips to make sure your e-commerce website gets optimized effectively.

Pagination

Getting your products indexed is vital. Using pagination on an e-commerce website ensures that all products are indexed.
To do this the right way, you need to add a pagination element to the URL (ex. https://www.sitename.com/category/?page=2) so when a visitor scrolls down all products on that category page are crawled. Another way to do this is adding pagination tags in the section which allows search engines to access those pages without showing them in the URL. These methods place an anchor on the products that are lower, thus allowing them to be indexed.

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation filters and/or sorts results on a web page by specific characteristics that aren’t necessarily relatable. The problems with faceted navigation is it can create too much duplicate content and eat up crawl budget and send Google wrong information. Remove and prevent duplicate content issues and make products for visitors filterable by using canonical tags (robots.txt, rules and noindex).

Product Options

Avoid creating different product pages for different product options. Which means don’t create pages for each color or type of a product. Instead, present all the types on one page to avoid duplicate content and poor SEO ranking.

Out-Of-Stock

It’s important to handle out of stock products correctly to not affect the website’s SEO. Always keep pages of out of stock products live and make sure they are shown as so. If unable to keep a page live, use a 301 redirect for products that will never be back in stock and 302 redirect for products that will possibly come back in stock. Same applies for product category pages.

Refreshing Seasonal Products

The correct way to refresh products every season (if your business is seasonal) is by removing all of one season’s products and replacing them with the new season’s products. Keep the category pages alive to keep the SEO ranking for the keywords of the past season. Also avoid adding the year or season to the url of categories because it will impact ranking and traffic.