Visibility is an essential factor that decides the development of a business unit in the online ecosystem. If your business is faring poorly regarding online search rankings, you need to pay immediate attention towards your site to avoid severe consequences. This is because if people are unable to locate your business in the top search results, there are fewer chances that they will contact you to avail your services or products.
The situation is no different for any eCommerce site as they also need proper visibility on search engine results for getting maximum customer attention, conversion rates, and sales. Crawlers play a vital role in deciding the online presence and visibility of a website on major search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Google and such others.
If you are not competent to get your eCommerce site indexed, here are the few fundamental tips that can positively assist you out from this crunch situation.
1) Get A Clear Insight About The Inside Of Your Website
It is important to perform a complete autopsy on your website to get a detailed idea about the status of your web pages. You need to discover which pages are in good health, which pages are missing or broken with the intention of facilitating an effective ranking of your eCommerce site. Apart from this, you need to check out your product category closely to keep track of your obsolete products, out- of- stock products, popular products and other such information for proper management of your eCommerce site.
2) Locate The Crawl Blocks For Your Site
You need to check out the output file of your crawlers to get a clear idea about where does your crawler have able to reach on your site. In the case of missing pages on your site, the web crawler will not be able to access them and will show up an error message. By getting information about crawl blocks on your site, you can easily determine the nature of blocks based on the missing pages of the site. If you are experiencing missing color, style, and size filter pages, it could be the presence of a common search engine optimization issue.
There are examples that AJAX filters that narrow downs and refreshes the product that are displayed on a screen without changing the URL are not working accurately. You also need to check if a certain combination of letters is missing in your URL or not. It could be possible that the robots.txt file is disallowing more than it needs to disallow. This could even make your entire site as missing during the indexing process. With the purpose of eliminating this scenario, you need to check for a global overrule in a Meta robots NOINDEX command and the robots.txt.
3) Understand Which URLs Are Not Allowed
There are various crawlers that can provide specific information about which pages are eligible to be crawled but are blocked due to a robots.txt disallow. With the presence of this feature, locating and rectifying the problematic file becomes much easier which were earlier disallowed.
4) Check Out The Canonical Tags
Due to limited information about canonical tags, they are often used incorrectly by numerous business entities. Many sites use canonical tags on every page which refers to the content on that particular page. This not only causes data duplication but also affects the search engine rankings to a great extent. You need to review the canonical tags for the duplicate content to ensure that the duplicate version of the content is referring to a single canonical page.
5) Locate 404 Errors On Your Site
Experiencing 404 errors on an eCommerce website is a common occurrence and happens because of multiple reasons. These error messages are useful for clienteles but be inclined to affect the complete online rankings of a website as they are accidentally crawled by the search engine bots. Due to this wrong indexing of 404 error page, the search engine penalizes the site which has 404 error pages which in turn affects the conversion rates and online visibility. To resolve this issue, various analysis tools can provide clear information about 404 error pages to facilitate effective resolution of the error page for better rankings.
6) Identification Of Site Redirects
Besides identifying the 404 error pages, crawlers are also skilled in recognizing the 302 redirects. If you have any 302 redirects on your site, you need to take required steps to convert them into 301 redirects. It is important to keep track on the redirect activity to have a clear idea about how many redirects are required before actually landing on the "real" page. Check out when do you get a 200 OK page for your site and whether that page is the right page or not. As per the search engine optimization report of Google, every 301 redirect loses about 15 percent of the link authority which it transfers to the receiving page. It is important to minimize the number of redirect attempts on your site for getting optimum site rankings.
7) Check Out For Poor Meta Data
Web crawlers are equally good at locating the metadata like title, descriptions, keywords and other such content that are having duplicate information. It can provide you crucial insight about which areas of your Metadata requires your immediate attention for getting better online rankings on major search engines. There are Meta tags like the robots no index which guides search engine not to index a particular page can have severe consequences if that nonindexed page consists of any duplicate Metadata.
8) Utilize The Services Of Analytics Tool
There are some of the web crawlers that can gather data from analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and others. Besides this, they can report the same data for each page that is crawled by the web crawlers. This single step can save a lot of your search engine optimization effort and time for improving the overall rankings of your site.
If you can implement all these important indexing tips for your site, you will surely experience a tremendous improvement in your site rankings. These efforts are worth giving a try as it can have an adequate impact on conversion rates, sales and customer engagement potential of your site.
