As a BigCommerce seller, you know that having a well-structured ecommerce website is vital for engaging shoppers and closing sales. But did you know it’s also an essential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) component, helping Google and other search engines understand and rank your site?
Discover ways to help Google understand your online store, stand out in search results, and get found by more customers. Let’s explore how Google interprets your ecommerce website structure and share some tips for enhancing it to improve your search engine rankings.
How Google Reads and Ranks Ecommerce Websites
Google and other search engines are in the business to help users find what they’re looking for—fast. They must be able to scan or “crawl” your site to understand the value of its content to determine a match between what your online store offers and what shoppers are searching for.
Search engines rely on bots called “crawlers” or “spiders” to scan the web and index website pages. The bots analyze the indexed results to understand each page’s content and determine the most relevant results for each user’s search query.
Search engines then present page results in a ranked format, giving preference to higher results that are deemed to be more relevant based on the user’s search. You can read more in-depth about How Google Search Works.
Tips to Help Google Crawl Your Ecommerce Site
There are steps you can take to improve your website’s navigation structure and help search engines find and rank your pages. Follow these best practices.
- Check and fix site errors. Broken links, missing pages, and other site errors can prevent search engine spiders from properly indexing your site. Ensure that your site is easily crawlable by regularly checking your ecommerce site for errors and fixing any issues that arise.
- Make site navigation crawler-friendly. Google examines how pages are linked to each other to determine the relative importance of each page. You can help search engines find and understand page significance by adding links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and from sub-category pages to all product pages.
- Submit your sitemap to Google. A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, outlining the structure and the relationships between its various pages. Sitemaps help search engines find and index your website’s content. BigCommerce store owners can follow these instructions to locate their sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.
- Include structured data (schema markup). Structured data, or schema markup, is code that provides more context about your website’s content. It helps search engines understand your content’s purpose, such as price, product descriptions, and reviews. Most BigCommerce stores come with product schema data by default. You can test your pages with this Rich Results Test to see which structured data is present in results and which issues need resolved to perform better.
- Promote your best products and categories. nclude prominent links to your best-performing products or categories to help search engines crawl your most valuable content. The custom Mega Menu for BigCommerce add-on is a great feature to highlight your store’s most valuable offerings with eye-catching visuals and CTAs.
Get Your Online Business Get Noticed by Search Engines
The best way to ensure Google and other search engines can crawl your site effectively is to have the right design and structure in place. Our team of BigCommerce experts knows what it takes to design well-structured, profitable ecommerce websites and can help your online store attract attention from shoppers and search engines.
We also offer BigCommerce support and optimization services to address any issues holding your site back from appearing in search results. With our help, you can ensure that your site is performing its best and driving the results you need to succeed online.
Send us a message or call us at 866-901-4650 to discuss how we can help your business succeed online.
