Due to the large number of pages involved, ecommerce sites can see striking SEO improvements when errors on those pages are addressed. Let’s talk about what you need to do in order to keep your ecommerce site error free, starting with some tools, then walking you through some processes.
Monitoring and crawling tools
Monitoring and crawling tools are necessary in order to identify technical SEO errors. I consider the following tools essential:
- ScreamingFrog[1]: This is, hands down, one of the best SEO spider available out there for most uses. You will need this, or something very similar, to handle most of the errors we will be discussing in this post.
- Google Search Console[2]: Make sure you set up an account here for your domain, since it will notify you of errors that crawlers won’t necessarily be able to find.
- Google Analytics[3]: Check your analytics regularly for unexpected drops in organic search traffic, since these can point you to errors that you won’t necessarily find otherwise.
I also recommend using these tools to check for SEO various issues:
- W3C Validator[4]: Use this to validate the code on your homepage and page templates. You want to ensure your HTML is valid so the search engines can read it properly. Use it to validate your XML sitemaps as well.
- WebPageTest[5]: Use it to test how fast your pages are loading and which elements on your pages contribute the most to slowing down the site load.
- MxToolBox DNS Check[6]: Check for any DNS issues and talk to your host about any errors you find here.
- Pingdom[7]: Monitors your site uptime so