Common Pitfalls of E-commerce SEO – Key Takeaways from #BrightonSEO

We’ve just got back from an awesome trip to BrightonSEO where Dave opened the conference with a talk on Common E-commerce Pitfalls. I thought it would be nice to summarise some of his key takeaways from the presentation.

Facets

One of the biggest takeaways was on Faceted navigation, get this right and you’ll be a happy bunny, get it wrong and you’ll be in a whole world of pain.

So how should you design your facets? Basing them on user intent would be a good start. If you understand what makes sense to the user and how they search for your product, you can design your facets around them and optimise them for relevant search terms; think about brand, size, colour etc.

You also want to ensure your facets are correctly configured, we recommend key/value pairs with ampersand delimiters for multiples.

A good example of this in this case would be:

www.example.com/product?colour=blue&size=large

Canonicals

Canonical attributes are an awesome, highly important and powerful tool we can use, but we see time and time again, companies using them incorrectly – Be sure you are always using canonicals correctly, and again, think about your customers and what makes most sense to them.

The example in Dave’s slides with UnderArmour pointing their canonical attribution from the ‘Compression’ page to the ‘Short Sleeve’ page is a poor user experience; a user is expecting compression shirts to be rankings but they are taken to the short sleeve shirts page. Oops*.

(*they could be trying to piggyback authority of this page but unlikely and either way, it’s still poor UX and likely losing them sales).

The takeaway here is, understand how canonicals work and use them wisely.

HTTPS

This one’s a real issue we see with many sites, and honestly, I feel there is still a lot of confusion with many SEO’s not taking a switch seriously or forgetting/not considering even redirecting from http to https.

Dave’s takeaway here was to treat the switch to a https as a rebrand and ensure you have all safety protocols in place; making sure you have pre and post switch checks in place.

So, that’s the top 3 but there are plenty of other nuggets in there with lots of example, check out the slides below and if you have any questions, drop us an email for a chat.

Check out the slides from our talk on Common E-commerce Pitfalls https://t.co/sF2ksKYmGB #BrightonSEO

— Bronco (@Bronco) September 2, 2016