Why your e-commerce site is hidden from your customers


What factors are impacting your organic search performance?

There are many factors that go into ensuring your website is 'rankable', but one of the most important issues for an e-commerce website is how well the search engine bots can understand the products on your site and how they relate to each other and the wider website. Through this article I’m going to explain some of the most common issues retail sites face in making their products accessible to, and easily understood by, the search engine bots.

Internal linking


There are several points on a website that allow for natural linking that can benefit both your customers and the search engine bots. Make sure you have well-considered main navigation elements, breadcrumbs and an HTML sitemap.

Slow load times



Schema mark-up

One common technical issue for retail sites is not utilising product or review “mark-up” or, implementing it incorrectly. Review schema mark-up, a bit of code that “labels” your reviews as such can enable your search listing to pull through a star rating which makes your website stand out in comparison to others featured alongside you in the SERPs. Similarly product mark-up can allow for the price and stock levels to pull through.

Image optimisation


Google decides where an image should rank in a related search through a number of factors including the HTML “alt=” attribute, the image caption and the image file name. Other than that, the standard SEO rules apply; the more authoritative the webpage is that features the image, the more likely it is to rank.

Faceted navigation

Technical SEO advice for e-commerce sites simply would not be complete without mentioning faceted navigation. At Avenue this is one of the most common SEO issues we find ourselves advising on with retail sites. Faceted navigation is the process of using filters on your site to narrow down the content visitors want to find. Typically, you would see faceted navigation in play on an e-commerce site when you are greeted with a list of products. For instance, you may have a clothing site with a landing page for “women’s clothes”. From there you could select size, colour and brand filters which would narrow down the list of products you are shown. The issue with faceted navigation, if not set-up correctly, is that it can create a lot of very similar thin quality pages that are crawlable and indexable by the search engines.


The easy way to see if your site’s faceted navigation is creating indexable URLs that you would rather weren’t cluttering up your website is to perform a site: search. Simply go to your search engine of choice, type in ‘site:[your website domain here]’ and look through the pages that are listed. If you see ones with a ‘?’ and a string of numbers and letters then your faceted navigation created pages are likely being indexed. Just click on a few of these and see what pages you are presented with.



Helen Pollitt is head of SEO at Avenue Digital

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