Top 5 E-Commerce SEO KPIs

1st March 2017Elizabeth

Generally speaking, the structure of an E-Commerce site brings with it a distinct set of useful KPIs to add to the foundation of technical SEO metrics.

First and foremost, it’s important to identify which are the most strategic pages and areas of your site, from an SEO perspective. For online retailers, these are Sections, Categories, and Product page segments. These are the pages most like to drive organic traffic and most likely to generate online revenue (if properly optimized).

How do you know which segments are most important to optimize? See which sections of your site are driving the most organic traffic, even if the pages represent a small proportion of your total site structure.

1. HTML Tags

Content isn’t the only thing that’s easy to duplicate. With hundreds or thousands of Product Pages, Title Tags can easily be repeated across multiple distinct pages. Imagine you offer the same product in multiple colors – does each page have a unique Title Tag?

Monitoring the number of Duplicate Title Tags for strategic segments is a valuable part of optimizing your site.

2. Number of Words

Thin Content is never a good thing, but for strategic Product Pages, it’s damaging. With content length topping out at less than 250 words, you’re putting Google’s perception of your page quality at risk.

Ensure your most important pages have adequate content by monitoring average content length for your strategic segments.

3. Duplicate Content

In an E-Commerce site, your Product Pages are your bread and butter. However, at Enterprise scale, it’s easy to find that with many pages for many similar products, the content begins to overlap.

Content Quality Analysis is a critical step to ensuring that your Product Pages remain unique, minimizing duplicate content including pages with high levels of similarity.

4. Number of Inlinks

How many links are your Category Pages receiving, on average?

Google’s impressions of your site and its pages is heavily influenced by linking, as a high amount of inlinks to a page suggests to Google that the content is important.

Therefore, monitoring the average number of Inlinks (internal links) received Category Pages is a valuable metric. Though there’s no “magic number” to strive for, you can correlate your Active Pages with Inlinks data to see where the sweet spot lies for your pages.

5. PageRank Dilution on Non-indexable Pages

Many retail websites use Faceted Navigation, which can generate a lot of non-indexable Pages (due to canonical tags or noindex tags).

Watch the percentage of the internal PageRank diluted on non-indexable Pages to decide if you should delete these pages from your structure.

Advanced E-Commerce SEO Metrics

Global KPIs provide the baseline for your SEO analysis. Understanding the basics of which pages are being crawled, indexed, and receiving organic traffic is the first step. For E-Commerce websites, the next step is to monitor and analyze key indicators that impact the particularities of online retailers, to ensure Product and Category page segments are optimized to reach their full SEO potential.

What are your advanced SEO KPIs?