Ecommerce SEO Guide: New Documentation from Google
Table of Contents
- Where the Content may appear on Google
- Share your Products data with Google
- The URL structure for Ecommerce sites
- Make your Ecommerce site navigation Google crawler-friendly
- Why we Care
With COVID forcing more retailers to go online, there are more ecommerce options than ever before. The Google Search Center recently released new developer guidelines to help increase search visibility on ecommerce sites. “When you share ecommerce data with site design with Google, Google can easily find and analyze your content, allowing your content to appear on Google Search and other Google platforms. This can help consumers find your website and products,” Google said in the guide.
The guide has seven pages and covers the following topics:
1. Where the Content may appear on Google
The guide says that ecommerce content could actually emerge from more results than traditional search. This includes Google Search, Photos, Lens, Shopping Tags, Google My Business, and Maps. “Product data is the most obvious type of ecommerce-related content, but other types of information are also helpful to consumers at different stages of the shopping trip,” says the guide. Google recommends promoting content such as product reviews, offers, customer contact locations, and live streaming.
2. Adding Product Details
The built-in data can also help your ecommerce products appear in Google search engines. The guide recommends displaying your products on Google in the following ways:
- Enter structured data into product pages for your website
- By uploading a feed to the Google Merchant Center, you tell Google exactly what products you want to show on Google
3. The URL structure for ecommerce website
“A good URL structure helps Google crawl and index your site,” says the guide. However, incorrect URL design can cause confusion, leading to content loss, frequently found content, and crawlers thinking your site has unlimited pages (or more!). The guide includes suggestions to help search engines better understand your content and the URL structure of your pages:
- Try limiting the number of different URLs that return the same content to prevent Google from making other requests to your site.
- If a web server handles capital letters and lowercase letters in the same URL, please convert all text to the same case so that Google can easily find the URL referring to the same page.
- Make sure that each page in the specified results has a unique URL.
- Enter descriptive words in the URL path. Text in the URL can help Google better understand the page.
4. Make your website navigation ecommerce easier for Google pages
Both buyers and search engines need to be able to easily understand what is going on on your website and where to go to find what they are looking for. What are the best ways to navigate through ecommerce? “For example, add links from the menu to the category page, from the category page to the sub-category page, and finally from the sub-category page to all product pages.”
Why we care:
Many businesses have established ecommerce sites for the first time in the last year. This guide can help ensure that they follow the best ways to see their products in the various search experiences offered by Google. It also allows SEO-focused ecommerce texts to present their recommendations to their customers and stakeholders to help them make better use of ecommerce SEO.
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
