Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a necessity for any business who wants to compete in the online marketplace, and improve their visibility within the search engine results page.
Enterprise sites deal with thousands upon thousands of customers each day, meaning that both on and off-page SEO best practices are mandatory to ensure that you’re achieving your sales goals and holding your market share.
As Google rolls out updates throughout the year, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of the fundamentals to ensure your site doesn’t lose visibility.
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How does Google crawl my site?
Google crawls pages by following links from the navigation of your site and internal links from page to page. Google works out the importance of a page by how many links are pointing to it and how many clicks it is away from your homepage.
The larger your website, the deeper your pages will get within the website architecture and the harder they are for a crawler (and a user) to find. If you’re finding this to be the case, it may be time to rethink your IA or navigational structure.
What navigation options are there?
You don’t want to overwhelm your users with a huge navigational menu, containing too many categories and subcategories. Instead, your website navigation should ideally allow someone to land on any page within your site within 3 clicks.
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Sidebars
This navigation doesn’t always have to be at the top of your website, it can also be included in a sidebar. Sidebars are a common addition to many websites and can be included to the left or the right of the main content.
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Footers
Another option is to include links within the footer of your site. Footers with many links to important pages and content on your site are known as ‘fat footers’. This allows for more links that aren’t included in the main navigation, and gives a better user experience.
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Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb navigation is also a good option for increasing your site’s crawlability and user experience. These tend to appear at the top of the page and are hierarchical navigation links that tell you where the page is found within the architecture.
How do I make my site easy to crawl?
In order to ensure that no pages on your site are missed, it’s extremely important to follow SEO best practices.
- Add links from your website’s navigation menu to category pages and subsequently sub-category pages
- Link your best selling products or most important pages from your homepage. It can also help to link to deeper pages to reduce their click-depth. However, remember that the more links there are on a page - the less equity passes to them so choose carefully!
- Ensure that all pages are included in your sitemap or Google Merchant Center, especially if it’s not possible to link to every page.
- Include relevant structured data by using schema to markup fields that already exist within the product - such as the name and URL.
- Make sure your URLs are easy to understand, with canonicalised product variants to avoid duplicate content issues
- Use individual URLs where possible, which allows users to see where they are within the site architecture and are easy to understand.
- Ensure each paginated URL is unique
- Use descriptive keywords within your URLs
How can CTI help?
We can improve your website architecture by improving your site’s navigation and continually auditing the site to identify any crawlability pitfalls.
We can also ensure we are maintaining your site’s visibility by conducting keyword research projects and using them to improve your on-page SEO, whilst also making any fixes behind the scenes.
McGraw Hill Education
One of our clients, McGraw Hill Education, operates a multi-national online platform consisting of over 60,000 titles available in over 50 languages.With our help at CTI, we ensured that their business was equipped to migrate across multiple websites with a unified codebase.
We ensured that localised SEO was in place as they operate in over 50 languages, to ensure that they were achieving rankings in prospective countries.
Quick Results
- 250,000 visitors in 4 months trading
- 150% over sales targets in first 3 months
- 399% increase in monthly revenue in Australia
High Street TV
High Street TV is one of the largest omnichannel retailers in the UK, operating 24 hour shopping channels. As they own multiple shopping channels, their direct to site traffic was higher than the industry average, meaning that there were a lot of customers we could potentially lose when migrating the site to Magento 2.
Quick Results
- With our help, High Street TV managed to achieve:
- 64% increase in transactions YOY
- 42% increase in revenue YOY
- 186% increase in mobile users YOY
- 62% increase in mobile revenue YOY
