Demandware SEO What You Need to Know in 2020

 

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud – recently known as Demandware and still alluded to like that more frequently than Salesforce may like – is the Internet foundation of decision for a few

the world's most popular web-based business brands, including style and sports forces to be reckoned with Adidas, Lacoste, and Puma. retailers who are looking for a better e-commerce solution in general.

From purely an SEO standpoint, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud/Demandware has a reputation for being a platform that is easier to optimize than many others and easier to keep free of potentially harmful to SEO technical errors. It can also boast great uptime – crucial to the success of any retailer who offers an online e-commerce option – and can be maintained without the need for very pricey additional development work.

In 2020 for many retailers their online operations – even when they also have bricks and mortar stores – are more important than ever. COVID-19 related lockdowns and restrictions have seen the numbers of people shopping in physical stores plummet and even an easing of restrictions in some places has not resulted in people flooding back into the shops and stores.

On the other hand, in both the UK and the US, and across a range of retail niches, online sales are flourishing, especially of ‘non-essential’ items. This is not surprising. Mainly confined to home here else are you going to shop? Not to mention the fact that a number of industry reports have highlighted the fact that sheer boredom – combined with having additional cash available not being spent on travel expenses etc. – is driving many consumers to spend more online than usual.

All this is great for retailers with a good online presence, but it also means, in many cases, that competition in the SERPs is increasing. This means that a brand’s SEO has to be better than ever if they want to get a larger share of its target audience’s shopping budget.

If you are making use of Demandware as an e-commerce platform – or are considering doing so – you are in a decent place already. But what experienced, up to date SEO teams know is that even using Demandware actively working on your SEO can make it even better.

In addition, there are some SEO services challenges unique to the platform that should be addressed in order for your site to perform as well in the SERPs for your target keywords and key phrases as possible.

To get started, here is a look at some of those issues and what you can – and should – do about them:

Search Refinement Functionality and Duplicate Content Issues

Commerce Cloud/Demandware category landing pages allow users to refine the selection of the product displayed according to different search refinements, e.g. size, color. Which is great from a UX point of view, but not so great from an SEO standpoint.

This is because when users select one or more refinements, they add additional strings to URLs, potentially adding almost endless new Google URLs to site indexes and creating duplicate content that damages valuable SERPs rankings and, to be frank, wastes money. waste budget.

A simple way to solve this issue is to prevent Google by using the robots.txt file from accessing search refinement URLs. When doing so you do need to be careful, however, making sure that you do not also block Google from indexing the URLs you do want them to see. This means that having a technical SEO expert do the work is something of a must.

Effectively using Web Meta Tag Rules

The newest version of Commerce Cloud allows the application of meta tag rules to a wide number of pages with no manual page-by-page editing. The meta tags that you can use the rule feature include:

Page Title

Meta Description

Robots

Open Graph

You could also extend these to various pages, for example, the home page, product listing pages, product category pages and search results pages (individual product pages). Why so useful? When they are used correctly the page meta tag rules let you do the following:

a) Target color variations on product category pages for search

When people search for things that have color variations they often include that color in their search terms, e.g blue v neck jumper and not just a v neck jumper. This means that you may actually want some of those color variant URLs indexed after all, but not so many that you start creating the duplicate content we have already discussed.

In the Commerce Cloud/Demandware platform this is possible, but it takes a little work. Let’s say that you have the color variant pages you do want to be indexed sorted onto a list. You can then create a special rule that adds the appropriate color to the front of every category page title when it is selected.

e.g. x.com/product-category/blue

Handy and a great way to get more targeted search traffic to your e-commerce site, But again, not always easy to implement if you are not a code person and something most will need help with to get right.

Removing Unnecessary Pages from the SERPs With Robots Tag

Let’s imagine that you discover – maybe thanks to a site link audit (something that should be performed regularly by the way) – that there are indeed URLs appearing in the SERPs that you would prefer did not.

One advantage Demandware users have over others is that the platform allows you to specify new rules that place a noindex tag automatically on pages that share certain similar characteristics.

Another example when this could be helpful is in the case of the ‘filter’ type pages discussed earlier that may still be indexed even when added to a robots file. Making good use of these special meta tag rules, you can specify that any page with a particular filter/search refinement is automatically given a noindex tag by default.

This is especially handy right now, as in 2019 Google announced that they were changing things up in regards to noindex in general in a pretty big way. Now they – or rather their search bots – no longer automatically respect noindex directives, meaning that these need to be replaced with a noindex robots tags on an individual page by page basis. This makes Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s metatag rule functions even more potentially useful.

Head spinning yet? It’s very technical we know. And actually just the tip of the iceberg. As good as Demandware can be for retail SEO services in Lahore it is also often prone to fall victim to some other, very common SEO problems that can affect any site, no matter what it’s purpose is and what platform it’s based on. These include:

Broken links. Even in a more expensive platform like Commerce Cloud there’s no automatic link checker in place)

Poorly optimized 404 rules and 404 pages. By this we mean for products that you no longer carry that have been removed from your site but are probably still linked to elsewhere across the Internet)

Keyword over-optimization, as a result of repetitive product descriptions.

Duplicate content issues in relation to product descriptions that are repeated rather than rewritten.

Badly written product descriptions that contain spelling errors and/or poor grammar. These are bad for both SEO and brand image and will adversely affect the page’s overall performance in the SERPs.

Badly optimized product images. No, Demandware/Commerce Cloud does not do this automatically for you, although far too many people do not realize this.

Poorly optimized images slow your site considerably, and speed is a big factor in SERPs placement in 2020, especially when it comes to mobile.

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does your in-house SEO team get the best knowledge, training and ongoing support?

Image
In recent years, many medium-sized and large companies have chosen to expand their in-house marketing team's expertise in, among other things, SEO, keyword ads, social media marketing, and email. A few smaller companies have also jumped on the bandwagon - especially those where SEO has a high strategic priority. And I actually think that's a really wise decision. On the one hand, with the increasing importance of these channels, it is very important that there is a solid internal anchoring and on the other hand, there are a number of tasks that are either handled better or cheaper by own employees than external consultants. But what remains, for most, after all, are some challenges. The internal teams must be kept up to date with the latest knowledge, complicated technical and strategic challenges can be difficult to deal with, and there may be practical tasks that they are not equipped for or have the capacity to solve. In this post, I will take a closer l...
Read more

7 things SEO texts need to contain

Image
  This is one of the most common questions a customer or newly arrived LIA usually wonders. To understand how to write a good SEO text, you first need to understand that a good text is basically about writing relevant and informative content. Here are 7 things that web editors and writers for digital channels should keep in mind to write better texts that have extra good prospects for search engines. 1. Clear structure The basis of a good text is structure. This is something that both your visitors and Google will appreciate. By having a clear structure, the text will be easier to read and it will be easier to find in the text, if your visitors are only looking for answers to a specific question. But how do you create a clear structure? Here are some tricks. An interesting main headline Dedicate the main heading to your page, not two, one. It may sound obvious but the fact is that many websites out there sometimes contain several headlines witho...
Read more

Get a free lecture on SEO and local companies' digital challenges

Image
  I have put together a really good talk on the strategic and technical challenges most small and local businesses face in the global digital world. The lecture is offered to selected organizers completely free of charge. If you are a member of an organization, ERFA group, municipal entrepreneur group, or similar and would like to offer this lecture to your members or local companies, Below you can read a little more about the lecture and why we offer to hold it for free.  The lecture In this lecture, I take you on a journey that starts based on the challenges companies have always had when they have to market and sell their products, what principles are the basis for it, and how the same principles in many ways still apply Today. But, of course, manifests itself in a completely different way.  I will talk about both the opportunities that exist today and about the opportunities that are just up the stairs, and which I expect will have a great signifi...
Read more