Technical SEO for E-Commerce: What to Fix, What Not to Fix? That Is the E-Commerce SEO Question

Hamlet had a probing question about life and existence—to be, or not to be?—but managing your e-commerce brand’s technical SEO hinges on knowing the answer to a different query: To fix, or not to fix? Now that’s the question.

Which issues are critical and need urgent attention? Which are minor, but still impactful on technical SEO strategies for B2B e-commerce brands? Learn how to triage technical SEO issues to develop a game plan for targeting the issues that influence your search rank and revenue.

Critical SEO Issues: What You NEED to Fix

What are the most important technical SEO issues to fix? Crawling, indexing, and sitemap errors are the most critical technical SEO issues to watch for. These are major red flags that demand your immediate response to avoid penalizing your e-commerce site with reduced visibility, traffic, and sales.

Crawling Errors

When you grab a new book, you might read the title and summary and skim the content to learn what it’s about. That’s what search engines do when they crawl your e-commerce site. Web crawlers ensure your pages are added to a search engine’s index so users can easily find and visit your site. Crawling errors lead to drops in traffic and visibility—two e-commerce conversion killers.

How do you fix crawlability issues? Make sure crawlers can access your pages by checking the robot.txt file. Adding internal links and fixing bad site architecture can also help you solve crawlability errors and get back on track in SERPs.

Indexing Errors

Your B2B SEO solutions toolkit should be outfitted to target and fix indexing errors when they occur. Indexing is how search engines find and organize site content to show the information to users. Indexation errors are bad news for e-commerce sites. Content that doesn’t get indexed by search engines can’t rank in search results. If your customers run into a 404 error or a loop of redirects, 73% leave and never return.

Common indexing errors include:

• Broken URLs (404)
• Blocked due to unauthorized request (401) or access forbidden (403)
• Redirect or duplicate content errors

Sitemap Errors

Sitemap errors prevent Google from finding page URLs on your site. This means some pages and products won’t be indexed and won’t appear in customer search results. Sitemap errors tell you Google is having trouble finding one or more of your sitemaps, sometimes because of typos, incomplete URLs, or improperly configured sitemaps. These critical errors can cause traffic and sales to plummet.

Technical SEO: Errors, Issues, and Warnings

Less threatening than the three critical technical SEO errors but still highly influential on your brand’s revenue and visibility in search are site speed, page performance, and internal linking issues. While these “orange flag” issues won’t prevent search engines from indexing and finding your website, they do make your pages and products harder to find. It’s worth paying attention to these errors to implement the right B2B SEO solutions.

Site Speed

Ever left a restaurant because the wait was too long? You understand why site speed is integral to user experience. Slow-loading websites frustrate consumers and directly impact revenue and visibility.

Your website speed encompasses site-wide loading times and how they affect your traffic distribution and site performance. Almost 70% of users say site speed factors into their willingness to buy from a retailer. Your search ranking is decided in part by site speed, one of the top 8 Google Ranking Factors. So is it worth addressing? You bet.

Page Performance

Page performance and speed are part of your overall site speed. How quickly pages load for users makes a powerful impression on your visitors—even determining whether they’ll buy from you.

• Around 40% of online shoppers abandon the page if it doesn’t load within three seconds.
• The top 10 e-commerce sites have a 1.96-second average page load time.
• Page load speed is one of the top 20 Google Ranking Factors.

Notice the trend from the statistics above? Shoppers value e-commerce websites with pages that load faster. They won’t settle for slow-loading pages and would rather shop with a competitor than wait more than three seconds for loading.

Internal Linking

Internal linking issues can be highly problematic for e-commerce brands. Common internal linking issues that negatively affect site SEO include:

• Orphaned pages that lead nowhere
• Too many internal links on a page
• Pages restricted by nofollow/noindex tags or robots.txt files

It’s important to address these problems when they arise to make sure customers find your site easy to use and help search engines accurately index pages deep within your sitemap.

Technical SEO Optimization: Building a Better Site

If critical issues are red flags and key issues are orange flags, it’s good to know the less-pivotal yellow flag issues. If you’re serious about optimization, pay attention to all three.

Unoptimized Meta Tags

Meta tags give search engines and users information about pages on your website that translate into your ranking position and traffic. Unoptimized meta tags leave a lot of meat on the bone, but optimized meta tags help boost your site in search results to garner more clicks and sales.

Mobile-Friendliness

How mobile-friendly is your site? Google rewards mobile-friendly sites with better search results rankings. When 66% of consumers shop on mobile devices, you can’t afford to only focus on the desktop user experience.

Schema

Schema helps search engines understand your content and boost your pages in search results. Your site content should contain updated schema codes to make sure sites like Google can categorize and display your content in features like AI Overview and Map Pack (generating more clicks and sales).

Take Actionable Steps For a Stronger Foundation

Should you fix all technical issues that show up in an audit? Not necessarily—that’s why learning how to triage errors and issues is so important. You don’t have to address every issue and error, but taking care of the most critical (crawlability, indexability, and sitemap) issues is a great place to start. Technical SEO problems can be complex and require meticulous research through the backend of your site, so many e-commerce brands bring SEO services in to resolve the issues quickly and reverse the traffic and sales nose-dive.

If you need outside expertise to help you get started, a technical SEO audit is a smart way to get a read on your site’s ability to rank and find any issues like crawling, indexing, or sitemap errors that may be holding it back. These audits check your site’s technical SEO elements like meta titles and descriptions, header tags, crawlability, and indexability to resolve any errors.

Fix Critical Technical SEO Issues & Give Your E-Commerce Site a Rankings Boost

It’s no secret that technical SEO is crucial to achieving better rank, visibility, and sales in the e-commerce space. When you know the issues to fix—and what not to fret over—you can create technical SEO strategies that level the digital playing field for your brand.

At CSP, we specialize in helping e-commerce brands with technical SEO strategies and guidance that make a measurable impact on traffic and sales. Let our SEO experts help you build a stronger, more professional website.