This article was written in collaboration with Aqib Khan, Product Manager at Constructor.
From crafting effective product descriptions to ensuring mobile responsiveness and packing keywords into meta descriptions, there are many tactics to improving your ecommerce SEO. But did you know that beyond these factors, there’s a strong connection between ecommerce SEO and site search?
Join along as we cover the basics of ecommerce SEO, followed by discussing how to leverage a product search and discovery platform like Constructor to help position your ecommerce site near the top of search results on major search engines.
First, let’s briefly explore key factors that can impact your site’s visibility. They are broken down into on-page and off-page factors.
On-page factors that Google can consider when ranking your ecommerce website are:
What happens in the back-end of your site is just as important as the front-end:
Google is constantly changing the factors that they consider most important when ranking sites. And a recent API leak proves that what they publicly give out during core update announcements doesn’t always align with how their search algorithms actually work.
If you’re interested in learning more about the leak and how to update your on- and off-page SEO strategy accordingly, check out 20 SEOs’ takeaways from the recent leak.
If you’re interested in learning more about the crucial role your product search and discovery vendor can play in helping you elevate not only your SEO, but also your overall site experience, continue on.
Constructor's AI-first holistic solutions are tuned to not only make your site perform better, but also delight customers by making products more discoverable.
Constructor can help you improve your SEO strategy via optimizing page load speed and index response, UX, and content quality and relevance. First-party clickstream data also plays a role in improving ecommerce site performance and SEO.
Constructor’s API-first, composable, and headless framework ensures a rapid response to every interaction on your site. This helps to reduce the page weight and load time, enhancing your SEO.
Constructor is also a platform purpose-built for enterprise ecommerce, with deep expertise in search, advanced AI and machine learning (ML), and data science. Constructor solutions are powered by clickstream data and large language models (LLMs) to handle complex queries, including product grouping, inventory filtering, dynamic pricing, social proofing, dynamic facets, geolocation boosting, and much more.
All of these functionalities can be performed in milliseconds in our multi-tenant infrastructure, meaning that complex catalog search will never affect search speed. The blazing fast index responses ensure that your site has reduced load time, boosting your ecommerce SEO.
UX is affected heavily by product discoverability on ecommerce sites. With the right solutions, companies can not only improve product rankings, but also enhance ecommerce SEO.
Customers that don’t easily find what they’re looking for will abandon your site for a competitor’s — or worse, just head to Amazon. Metrics that reflect this poor discoverability experience — i.e., bounce rate and time-on-site — are generally key indicators of your ecommerce’s UX and SEO performance.
Constructor’s holistic suite of tools work together in harmony with clickstream technology to make your platform smarter with every user interaction. This means your customers get real-time, personalized 1:1 experiences across your entire ecommerce site, and you positively impact UX metrics — alongside SEO.
Product catalogs play a major role in how you surface products on-site.
A catalog with complete, accurate product data enhances product discovery as it enables users to find products they want and may need faster. Catalogs with incomplete or poor product data can worsen product discoverability. Unfortunately, ecommerce teams are often burdened with dealing with the latter.
With Constructor, merchandisers can enhance catalog data and enrich attributes at the speed of AI. This makes products more discoverable, decreases manual workloads, and improves UX and overall ecommerce SEO.
Content quality and relevance is of equal importance when it comes to ecommerce SEO. Note: Many of the following factors are closely intertwined with UX, yet still deserve a separate callout.
Constructor provides dynamic, just-for-you recommendations based on attractiveness, which helps users browse and discover related products easily. This not only improves UX, but also decreases the bounce rate and improves cross-linking and SEO ranking by increasing dwell time.
Constructor's contextual and personalized ecommerce search and discovery results based on user behavior help to provide attractive results to users. This enhances the content quality and relevance and helps boost shoppers’ engagement, pushes up time-on-site, and translates directly to improved SEO ranking.
Another way Constructor helps to increase user engagement is by reducing broken experiences on your site. Instead of returning zero results, which results in a high bounce rate, Constructor's advanced AI understands the user's intent and returns attractive results for all queries. This improves content quality and relevance, positively impacting SEO.
While site performance and UX are important factors in SEO ranking, search engines like Google still rely on keywords to rank results. And having access to user journeys can help you understand how users are interacting with your site so you can generate relevant keywords that would boost your site's ranking.
Since Constructor's glassbox AI relies on clickstream data and user behavior for a holistic product discovery experience, you can access the complete user journey through our dashboard. Our analytics dashboard provides metrics such as top searches, browse pages, and conversions, which you can use to generate Collection pages and index them to boost your SEO.
Looking into trending searches within the Constructor dashboard can help you capitalize on customer demand.
Gone are the days where merchandisers need to manually browse through thousands of products and categorize them into a collection page.
Via Constructor's glassbox AI, merchandisers can understand what is trending and frequently searched for. Then, they can easily key in these popular terms to automatically generate Collections pages, which can be used as landing pages for search engines to index.
With the upcoming holiday, grocery merchandisers may see “fourth of july” as a trending keyword. This phrase can then be used to have AI automatically generate a Collections page within the Constructor dashboard.
By adding headers and meta descriptions in the Collection pages, merchandisers can further increase page relevance for search engines and rank their site higher.
Not only does analyzing and understanding your clickstream data inform you of customer searches and subsequent actions, it also allows you to add keywords as attributes on the product level page. This helps with product discoverability and enhances keyword relevancy for search engines, helping to boost SEO.
Constructor offers Open Source UI that’s mobile friendly, which you can use to easily integrate with the platform. This would help Google crawler prioritize your website in the ranking.
While mastering the basics of ecommerce SEO will provide you with a strong foundation, you can significantly improve your site’s visibility by creating a holistic plan that includes optimizing your ecommerce tech, specifically your product search and discovery platform.
Using a platform like Constructor is like killing two birds with one stone: not only will you improve your site’s ranking on search engines, but you’ll also hit important business goals.
Learn exactly how our holistic suite of product discovery tools empower merchandisers and product managers to consistently create personalized shopping experiences that don't just convert, but drive KPIs.