Does it seem difficult to attract new customers lately?
E-commerce is filled with many amazing opportunities, but there is a lot of competition.
The good news – we know it’s possible to thrive!
Big ecommerce sites do it – you’ve seen the proof.
Large, successful e-commerce companies approach SEO in a way that allows them to grow, even with higher customer acquisition costs.
Now, you can thrive too.
On March 9, I moderated a webinar hosted by Jessica Flaro, Director of SEO and Personalization at Barnes & Noble, and Christophe Frenet, Chief Product Officer at Botify.
They provided comprehensive insights for scaling your ecommerce SEO efforts.
Here is a quick summary of the webinar. To access the entire presentation, Complete the application.
What counts as a large e-commerce website?
Large e-commerce sites are defined as sites with more than a million URLs.
BN.com has 9 million URLs, while the largest e-commerce sites in the world have over 250 million URLs.
Because there are many pages, those large sites can no longer manually optimize each page.
This means that large e-commerce sites need to automate a lot.
This is one task you can start today to help scale your SEO efforts.
[Learn how Barnes & Noble leverages automation for SEO] Instant access to the webinar →
Why do search engines and big websites struggle
Search engines have to go through hundreds of billions of pages on the web.
Due to limited resources, search engines have to decide how much time you will spend on each website.
This means that not every page of a large website is noticed or indexed by search engines.
This is the place Crawl budgets Enter.
What is a crawl budget?
Crawl budget is the amount of attention your site receives from search bots: the number of pages crawled in a given timeframe.
The larger your website, the greater the chances that crawl budget restrictions will affect your website.
In short, there is a good chance that your entire site will not be crawled by the search bot.
If you have a large number of URLs, your crawl budget may be used up before all of your pages are seen.
Crawl budget limits
Based on Botify’s analysis of 6.2 billion Googlebot requests across 413 million web pages, 77% of large website pages get no traffic from search engines.
why is that?
Search engines have a hard time finding every page on your site simply because the web is so big.
[Discover how to get the most out of your limited crawl budget] Instant access to the webinar →
How to balance user experience and crawl budget
To optimize your crawl budget, you need to consider user experience and bots.
Barnes & Noble recommends working with product engineering to resolve this issue.
start with:
- Including the impact of revenue on project requests.
- Educate the team about SEO.
- Implementation of automation to manage large websites.
Barnes & Noble also maintains its focus on revenue impact as it improves search.
[Find out how they do it easily with automation] Instant access to the webinar →
Understand the search engine optimization path
These days, it’s not enough to just focus on your website’s crawl budget and its visibility in search.
Understanding the SEO path will help you improve your crawl budget and overall domain strategy.
You also need to consider the following as you scale your strategy:
You can probably imagine that this means that you have to do a lot of optimization on your websites.
[Find out how to easily optimize each step] Instant access to the webinar →
How do large Ecommcere companies handle SEO scale?
When it comes to smart and scalable SEO fundamentals and strategies, the big ecommerce companies:
- Focus on the top of the funnel. Larger sites tend to benefit from heavier technical SEOs at the top of the funnel. In this way, these improvements affect the overall discoverability of the site and serve as the basis for all other SEO initiatives.
- Use more technical resources. Larger sites work closely with product engineering to implement improvements. Large e-commerce companies know that if you want to implement changes without huge development resources, automation is vital.
- Use multifaceted navigation. An effective way to help you and bots navigate and within the website.
Potevi, March 2022[Find out how Faceted Navigation can help your site] Instant access to the webinar →
Barnes & Noble deals with SEO broadly in terms of:
- Website performance management.
- Multifaceted navigation.
- Sort pages by priority.
Learn SEO strategies to scale
The following SEO strategies will help you in enterprise e-commerce:
Potevi, March 2022[Get the strategy now] Instant access to an on-demand webinar →
SEO practices essential for e-commerce success in 2022
- Always invest in the essentials, like bug fixes and keyword tracking.
- Monitor site speed and its impact on user experience.
- Make sure your content is unique.
[Slides] SEO at scale: What large e-commerce sites do differently
Here is the presentation:
Join us for our next educational webinar!
Enterprise SEO: 7 Use Cases to Elevate Website Optimization with Website Intelligence
Ali Habibzadeh, Chief Technology Officer of Lomar, and Ashley Berman Hill, Vice President of Professional Services for Lomar, will discuss innovative ways to help your website succeed in search, while giving your visitors a first-class user experience.
Reserve my seat
Image credits
Featured Image: Paolo Bobetta/Search Engine Magazine
