Rise at Seven x Oncrawl: The eCommerce SEO Audit that your Competitors Can't Beat

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Public The e-commerce SEO audit that your competitors can't beat 2022 February

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On the menu ● What makes an unbeatable audit ● Techniques ○ Scraping ○ Segmenting templates ○ Structured data ○ Crawl budget ○ Stock status ○ Site speed ○ URL parameters ● Focus: Category pages ● Common mistakes

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Speaking today Nikki Halliwell Senior Technical SEO Manager @Rise at Seven Sophie Gibson Senior Technical SEO Manager @Rise at Seven Janaina Barreto-Romero Customer Success Manager @Oncrawl

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What makes an unbeatable audit?

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Underused Scrapable data for e-commerce

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Public WHAT’S DATA SCRAPING? ⛏

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Public SCRAPING THE BREADCRUMBS FOR SEGMENTATIONS

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Public BREADCRUMBS SEGMENTATION

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Public TEMPLATES

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Public ● Home Page ● Information pages ○ e.g. about us, delivery info, t's & c's ● Product Pages ● Category Pages ● Navigational Landing Pages ● Blogs / Guides ● Payment / Cart pages ● Help / Support area TYPICAL PAGE TEMPLATES FOR E-COMMERCE

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Public HOW DO YOU SEGMENT THESE PAGES?

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Public ● CMS URL Patterns eg. ○ Salesforce - end in .html ○ Shopify - containing /product/ ● Scraping unique template attributes ○ Has 'add to basket' button ○ Has product schema PRODUCT PAGES

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Public ● CMS URL Patterns eg. ○ Shopify - containing /category/ ○ Kibo - /shop/ ● Scraping unique template attributes ○ Has X product results ○ Has ﬁlter section ○ Has product sorting option CATEGORY PAGES

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Public INSIGHTS FROM SEGMENTATION Number of products in category By cross referencing the number of products in a category vs sessions, you can see what category pages might need retiring (or merchandised) - or alternatively, what categories have hundreds of products, and could be split into subcategories

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Public CATEGORY PAGES: TOP CONTENT BLOCKS

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Public CATEGORY PAGES: TOP CONTENT BLOCKS

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Public CATEGORY PAGES: TOP CONTENT BLOCKS

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Public CATEGORY PAGES: TOP CONTENT BLOCKS X CHARACTER LENGTH

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Public DATA MARKUP

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Public SCRAPING STRUCTURED DATA ON PRODUCT PAGES

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Public SEGMENTATION FOR @PRODUCT

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Public SEGMENTATION X SEO SESSIONS

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Public Product markup is important as it provides more information about your products directly in the SERP before a customer lands on your page.

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Public The more positive reviews you have the more likely customers are to visit your website and buy your products, especially when compared against your competitors. MAKE USE OF STAR RATINGS

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Public MONITOR STRUCTURED DATA IN ONCRAWL

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Public CRAWL BUDGET Does it make sense to index everything?

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Public We are in control of how Google crawls and indexes our websites.

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Public WHAT NOT TO DO ❌ Indexing everything ❌ No-Indexing huge chunks of the website

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Public WITH A FAMILY HOLIDAY WEBSITE There are several ways that users can search for holidays…

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Public ● Accommodation type, ● Holiday parks near their location, ● Pet friendliness, ● Filter by month of arrival, exact arrival date, length of stay, ● And more…, USERS CAN SEARCH BY:

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Public Thankfully, Oncrawl allows you to segment URLs with parameters Or you can segment by those that are spider traps, which can help a lot when looking to optimise your crawl budget. SEGMENT BY PARAMETERS

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Public METHODOLOGY As a result of the segmentation and data gathering, we were left with the most meaningful data on our family holiday website. We thought like the users of the family holiday website, and focused on providing the best search experience.

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Public We decided to disallow /search/ and /book-your-holiday/ pages in the robots.txt ﬁle. This meant much fewer pages were being crawled, and more crawl budget was being spent on the most valuable pages on the site. THE RESULT

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Public Sitemaps should not include noindex pages Takes months to ﬂush out of Google’s index Report WoW and MoM changes to stakeholders REMEMBER WHEN OPTIMISING CRAWL BUDGET

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Public Common ways parameters are used in e-commerce ● Faceted navigation ● Product sorting In an audit, it's useful to see how many of those pages Google is serving to searchers - ignoring robots.txt rules and affecting crawl budget > May not have unique on-page content > Missing out on trafﬁc from relevant keywords URL PARAMETERS & LOST POTENTIAL

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Public SEGMENTING BY PARAMETERS

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Public STOCK STATUS

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Public SEGMENTING PRODUCTS BY STOCK STATUS Segmenting product pages based on whether the item is in stock or not can give additional insights for audits > How much trafﬁc is going to out of stock products > Whether out of stock products are affecting product conversion rates > Granular view of engagement metrics

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Public SEGMENTATION VIA ON-PAGE ELEMENTS Capturing this data can be done with on-page elements such as Missing Prices and Unavailable / Out of Stock messaging on page

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Public SEGMENTATION VIA PRODUCT SCHEMA

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Public PRODUCT STOCK X WITH LOGS

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Public WHY PRODUCTS GO OUT OF STOCK There can be many reasons why a product is out of stock, yet the page is still on an e-commerce site including: > Seasonality > Limited releases > Awaiting more stock

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Public PRODUCTS OUT OF STOCK

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Public PRODUCTS IN TOTAL

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Public THE EFFECT:

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Public INSIGHTS: SHOWING THE VALUE This indicated the client needed an out-of-stock product management system putting in place. To further enhance this audit action, we can bring in additional metrics and calculate the value of this trafﬁc SESSIONS x AVG. ORDER VALUE x CONVERSION RATE = VALUE

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Public USING THE DATA: OOS MONITORING You can create a Data Studio dashboard to monitor products showing as out of stock, so the client has ongoing visibility of this.

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Public SITE SPEED ACROSS PAGE TEMPLATES

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Public ● Homepage ● Informational pages e.g. About us, delivery info ● Top category pages ● Sample of products from each category ● Blogs and guides ● Contact and signup pages etc. START BY TESTING ACROSS MULTIPLE PAGE TEMPLATES

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Public CHOOSE YOUR TESTING LOCATION

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Public WHERE YOU’RE TESTING FROM MATTERS ● It’s important to test your site from a location close to where your data center is located, as well as one that is further away. ● If you have a CDN, this allows you to see how much of an impact the CDN is having on your website. ● You can also get an idea of how your customers are experiencing your store. Be consistent with the locations you choose for data reliability.

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Public YOU NEED TO TEST SITE SPEED MORE THAN ONCE

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Public YOUR CACHE CAN AFFECT YOUR RESULTS ● By only testing your website once, you wont get accurate results, as the pages may not be loading over the cache yet. Once it does, your results will likely be a lot faster. ● Always test more than once for each device and calculate the average.

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Public ONCRAWL TAKES CARE OF THIS

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Public Find slow pages on the site Average load time across the site Monitor page weight See how this changes based on crawl depth MONITORING SITE SPEED IN ONCRAWL

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Crawl Strategies for e-commerce

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Public HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHAT CONSTITUTES A "REPRESENTATIVE" SECTION?

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Public BIG CRAWL: HOW OFTEN AND WHY 📅 Site size Crawl frequency < 100k Bi weekly or 1x/month 100 - 600K pages 1x/month > 600K pages Every 3 months

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Public ECOMMERCE WEBSITE MISTAKES … and how to avoid them

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Public FACETED NAV SHOULD BE EASY TO USE The navigation should be easy to navigate, with sensible menus and navigation options that clearly tells visitors what they will see when they click.

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Public GOOD ARCHITECTURE MATTERS

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Public ● Make it simple and scalable ● No important pages should be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage ● Use keyword research to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories HOW TO CREATE GOOD SITE ARCHITECTURE

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Public PRODUCT PAGE DESIGN MUST BE CLEAR Boohoo SilverCross Apple Garmin Gym Shark

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Public INCLUDE ENOUGH INFORMATION ON PRODUCT PAGES ✅ 50-100 word introduction - what does the product do and who needs it ✅ List the most important features in bullet format. ✅ Detailed product description, with use cases, relevant awards, beneﬁts of the product, images in use, FAQs. Utilise user generated content such as customer photos, and reviews. ✅ 50-100 word conclusion - summarise the product and use a call to action

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Public ENSURE YOU MAKE USE OF FAQ CONTENT People have questions about your products. If customers can’t ﬁnd the answers they need on your website, they’re likely to search elsewhere. When they ﬁnd the answers, they’re likely to buy from that website instead.

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Public Nikki Halliwell Technical SEO Manager @NikkiRHalliwell /nikkiroseh/ Sophie Gibson Senior Technical SEO Manager @sophiegibson /sophie-a-gibson/ Janaina Barreto-Romero Customer Success Manager @Oncrawl /janaina-br/ @JanainaBRomero

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