Everyone in the eCommerce industry understands the difficulty of attracting website traffic. One way to solve this challenge is to ensure search engines can find your business online. Why is this important? About 40% of people who shop online begin their buying journey by searching for products in search engines. If your site doesn’t show up in their search results, they can’t discover your brand.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is one of the most robust eCommerce platforms in today’s market. This eCommerce platform streamlines the analytics and reporting of large and medium-scale businesses. SFCC helps to generate new clicks for online businesses by ranking them on top of search engines. It helps you build a search strategy that will maximize your rankings in search engines in order to boost organic ranking and sales. This is why SFCC is known as the go-to solution for large organizations in the retail space. It has helped many leading retail brands to build online sites and provide their customers with a superior shopping experience from a comprehensive digital platform.
Advantages of Salesforce Commerce Cloud SEO
- Improves your online traffic
- Ranks your business at the top of search engines
- Boosts ROI of your business by acquiring customers organically
- Provides targeted customers from search engines which will increase your conversion
- Assists you in creating SEO friendly URLs to defining your products and attributes
Key Features Of SFCC To Boost Your SEO
Developing a proper SEO strategy for digital commerce can be complicated, especially when big organizations feature large product catalogs with hundreds or thousands of available products. Salesforce Commerce Cloud SEO functionality empowers merchants to maximize their rankings in search engine results. While the platform offers its retailers various capabilities, there are a few key SEO considerations that affect how product pages, brand pages, and category pages rank in search results. Here is a list of top tips you can use to ensure your SFCC store outranks your competitors in organic search.
File Compression
Website speed and usability are other major factors that affect your SEO ranking. To avoid this, the first thing to consider is compressing your HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. This removes unnecessary white spaces and helps pages load faster. By compressing these files, you can ensure a better load time for your website that the website crawlers will prefer. Note: compressing these files is not always a sure fix. Be sure you test them in staging before deploying them to your production site. You can use PageSpeed Insights to test your website’s load time.
XML Sitemaps Segmentation
SFCC provides you with the option to segment your XML sitemap files by type of content (e.g. product, brand, category, or content). This way, you can prioritize with Google as to which part of content needs to be crawled often. For instance, you might want your product pages crawled more often than your About Us page, and if so, you’ll want to prioritize a sitemap that’s segmented for product URLs. You can do the same even for your images or video content.
Custom URLs
Similar to many other content management systems, SFCC allows you to set clean, SEO-friendly URLs that are unique and easy to remember by customers. You can use the business manager’s URL module to define precisely how you want your category, sub-category, brand, pipeline, and product detail page URLs to resolve. You can set URLs with different variables according to your products and catalogs with this platform. In addition, SFCC notifies you when you have duplicate URLs and automatically redirects to its preferred structure.
Custom Metadata
When it comes to SEO, it’s a standard best practice to customize title tags and meta descriptions. SFCC lets you go one step further with rule-based meta tags which provide search engine crawlers with even more unique data. SFCC’s SEO support for titles and descriptions makes it easier to edit and monitor the problematic pages within your catalog. Furthermore, SFCC makes it easier to generate custom URLs that inherit the parent page’s custom data.
Internal Linking
Internal linking helps Google bots navigate easily to your deeply hidden pages. Internal links can generally be found through your web page’s header or footer section. You can also provide image links. It’s always better to have a more refined strategy you can put in place for internal linking. Make sure you play safe with anchor text and try to stay away from generic anchors like “click here,” etc. It’s a great idea to link your product pages to brand pages using long-form descriptions.
Customizable 404 pages
404 pages are bad for site traffic, as users tend to bounce away from them. SFCC lets you customize your 404 pages, analyze broken links, configure ALT tabs, optimize digital image servicing and more. SFCC lets you build an optimal SEO strategy that grows your ranking on search engines.
Leveraging Canonical tagging
Canonical tagging resolves the issue of multiple or duplicate content showing on different URLs. This tag helps in knowing a specific URL that represents the main copy of the page. SFCC helps you build custom storefront URLs that define product attributes and descriptions.
Redirects
Redirects are necessary for letting search engines know when a prior page had been relocated to a new home. Thousands of pages might need to be redirected, an event that is most common in eCommerce websites. SFCC offers options for one-to-one 301 redirect mapping or batch redirects to handle page transfers efficiently.
By leveraging all of these features, you can maximize your website’s SEO and win more organic traffic. While SFCC helps in all of the above, it can be a little robust and complex. Ziffity offers Salesforce Managed Services to streamline the complexity. Our team is composed of SEO development and UI experts who can implement best practices and utilize SFCC capabilities to the maximum.
Benefits Of SFCC SEO Tools
Building a solid SEO strategy has long been essential to compete with other brands. When it comes to online shopping, faster navigation and easy checkout is what every customer looks for. If you want your customers to stay on your website for longer without getting frustrated, a robust SEO-optimized website is critical. This will help reduce your bounce rate – and boost your website ranking.
SFCC helps you build an optimized storefront for your customers and search engines to navigate. It also lets you develop a high-performing SEO strategy to increase your organic traffic, boosts sales, click-through rates, and help in faster page loading time.
With SFCC SEO tools, you can also easily improve your website’s page ranking. This will help create better brand awareness and improve traffic to your website. With the help of these SEO tools, the website will be updated and optimized, providing easy navigation.
