
Working with a Demandware SEO expert can significantly improve online store visibility. By leveraging their expertise, businesses can increase their online presence and drive more sales.
A Demandware SEO expert can help improve website rankings by optimizing product pages for relevant keywords. This is crucial for e-commerce businesses, as it directly impacts their bottom line.
With the right optimization strategies, businesses can attract more organic traffic and reduce their reliance on paid advertising. By doing so, they can save costs and increase their return on investment.
By focusing on high-traffic keywords and phrases, Demandware SEO experts can help businesses target the right audience and increase conversions.
Demandware SEO Expert Services
As a Demandware expert, I can help support your SFCC SEO program by discovering areas where I can assist.
With over 10 years of consulting services and Demandware experience in the digital space, we are experts at solving your company’s issues with our technical SEO consulting services.
Demandware SEO requires a deep understanding of the platform and its capabilities.
Our team of experts has extensive experience working with Demandware, allowing us to provide tailored solutions for your business.
We can help you optimize your Demandware store for better search engine rankings and improved online visibility.
Our technical SEO consulting services can help identify and fix issues that may be hindering your website's performance.
HTML and Meta Tags
Semantic HTML is crucial for standing out in search engines, as it ensures your SEO markup is streamlined and easily understood by search engines. Our specialists will thoroughly review your current Demandware HTML layout to optimize it for search engines.
Proper semantic HTML data checking is essential to prevent search engines from stifling your traffic. We audit your semantic HTML data to ensure it's correctly written for search engines.
In Business Manager, you can create tags and rules to dynamically insert category, product, or content attributes into tag text. These tags can be used on homepages, products, categories, folders, and content assets.
Here are some examples of rules you could create:
- "Buy $SearchTerm for $RefinementPrice at $SiteName!"
- "IF $RefinementColor (noindex,nofollow) ELSE (index,nofollow)"
- "Shop our site for ${Category.displayName} and receive Free Shipping over $100 | ${Site.displayName}"
If there's a discrepancy between staging and live, making changes becomes much more difficult. This is why it's essential to match titles and tags across both environments.
Bulk uploading PLP copy and H1s is possible, but it would require discussion with your developers, as there is no built-in function for this in SFCC.
On-Page Optimizations
On-page Optimizations are crucial for a great user experience and search engine rankings.
Captivating customers with improved on-page optimizations can be achieved by enhancing site relevancy on your Commerce Cloud site.
We verify that your product pages are optimized, ensuring search engines don't prevent your products from reaching their targeted audience, which increases overall user experience.
Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is crucial to ensure search engines don't hide you from your competitors. We identify the best keywords to make sure that search engines aren’t hiding you from your competitors.
To start, let's talk about root and long-tail keywords. They're essential for making your content discoverable. Root and long-tail keywords can help you rank higher in search engine results.
Captivating customers with improved on-page optimizations is key, and that includes enhanced site relevancy on your Commerce Cloud site. This is where on-page optimizations come into play, making your site more relevant to search engines.
On-page optimizations can help improve your site's visibility, and that's what we're aiming for. By optimizing your site, you can increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.
By identifying the best keywords and optimizing your site, you can attract more customers and boost your online presence. This is a win-win for your business.
Optimize Page Load Time
A slow-loading page can be a major turn-off for users.
Considering page load time is a major effector of user experience and an official ranking factor, improving it should be a focus.
Compressing CSS files and minifying JS are two popular ways to speed up your page load time.
Building pages with AMP is another effective solution.
There are many more ways to improve page load time, but these are some of the most popular and effective methods.
Internal Links and Website Structure
Internal links are crucial for a website's overall structure and functionality. They help users navigate through your site, but they also play a significant role in search engine optimization (SEO).
Properly functioning internal links are essential for a seamless user experience. If a link is broken, it can lead to frustration and even drive users away from your site.
A website's architecture, including silos, is critical for organizing content and making it easily accessible to users. Silos help group related content together, making it easier for users to find what they're looking for.
Bad default URL linking can deplete link equity among your pages. This means that the value of your links is being spread out, rather than being concentrated on the most important pages.
It's essential to verify the optimization of your website's architecture and internal links to ensure they're working properly. This includes checking for broken links and ensuring that default URLs are linking to the absolute URL of their internal links.
Product Pages and Catalogs
Your Product Pages will be verified for optimization, that way search engines aren’t preventing your products from reaching its targeted audience. And it will increase overall user experience.
To avoid duplicate content issues, it's essential to manage your catalog URLs effectively. According to Demandware, product page duplication can occur when a user clicks a product on your category page, causing duplicate URLs with parameters like "start=2" or "start=3".
To mitigate this issue, you can use canonical URLs to root product pages. This can be done by adding a self-referencing canonical to the product page, minus the parameter. For example, https://onlinestore.com/sneakers/adidas-neo?start=1 would have a canonical pointing to https://onlinestore.com/sneakers/adidas-neo.
To manage catalog URLs in Salesforce, you can access the Location of Catalog URLs in Merchant Tools > SEO > URL Rules > Catalog URLs. Here, you can configure settings like Locale Mapping, Character Replacement Settings, and White-Space to optimize your URLs.
Product Pages
Product pages are a crucial part of your online store, and optimizing them is essential for search engines to reach your targeted audience. This means your product pages should be verified for optimization to avoid being blocked by search engines.
A well-optimized product page will increase overall user experience, making it easier for customers to find what they're looking for. This is especially important if you have a large product catalog.
To prevent duplicate content issues, it's essential to manage your product URLs correctly. This includes canonical URLs to root product pages, which can solve the problem of duplicate content issues.
Here are some key points to consider when managing your product URLs:
By implementing these solutions, you can ensure that your product pages are optimized and free from duplicate content issues, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your products.
Product Page Duplication
Product Page Duplication is a common issue on Demandware sites. It can occur when a user clicks on a product in a category page, and Demandware automatically adds parameters like "start=2" or "start=3" to the URL.
This creates duplicate content issues and exhausts valuable crawl budget. This can be solved by using canonical URLs to root product pages.
Demandware also generates multiple product URLs with parameters like "?start=1" or "?start=2" due to product grid layouts. Simply blocking "?start*" in robots.txt won't solve the problem.
A long-term fix is to make product pages not require parameters. In the short term, adding a self-referencing canonical to the product page, minus the parameter, can mitigate the issue. For example, a canonical tag can point from https://onlinestore.com/sneakers/adidas-neo?start=1 to https://onlinestore.com/sneakers/adidas-neo.
Redirects and Sitemaps
Redirects and Sitemaps are crucial for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. XML Sitemaps can be used to supplement search engine crawling, advising them of good-quality pages to index.
Historically, search engines found out about pages only by following links, but XML sitemaps can help with this process.
To utilize sitemaps for hreflang requirements, use the Alternate URLs section, which allows you to connect all your sites together, targeting specific markets and reducing cannibalization.
URL Redirects are also essential, especially when retiring pages or creating short 'vanity' URLs. Set up source and destinations as object type (e.g. category, product) and ID rather than URL path to prevent errors.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a crucial area for any website, especially for multisite corporations. XML sitemaps can be used to supplement the process of search engines finding pages on a site by following links.
Historically, search engines have only found pages on a site by following links. XML sitemaps can advise search engines that the links within the sitemap files are good-quality pages that should be indexed.
The search engine may still decide not to index a page even if it's in the sitemap and may still index pages not in the sitemap that it has found through crawling. This means sitemaps aren't a guarantee of indexing.
To create a sitemap, go to Production > Merchant Tools > SEO > Sitemaps. The sitemap is also a critical area for multisite corporations, where the out-of-the-box functionality doesn't allow for large level hreflang tags without complex customisation.
Canonical for Duplicate Content
You can use the canonical tag to prevent Google from indexing the wrong page when two pages are identical or near-identical and they have different URLs. This is particularly helpful on Demandware sites, where duplicate content is a pervasive SEO issue.
Demandware will automatically add parameters to URLs when users click "show all" on a category page, creating duplicate content. This can be controlled with canonical tags that point to the root category page.
Canonical URLs to root product pages can solve duplicate content issues caused by Demandware adding start=2 or start=3, etc. to the URL when a user clicks a product in a category page.
Disallowing and noindexing /demandware-{}/ directories can prevent duplicate content from staging domains, product variations, and login pages from being crawled.
Demandware will automatically add a character string to the end of the URL when users sort products by size, color, brand, etc, creating duplicate content. You can block these parameters from being crawled with robots.txt or control which you want Google to crawl with Google Search Console.
Redirects
Redirects are a crucial aspect of a well-maintained website. Demandware defaults to 301 or 302 redirects when a page is not found, but best practices dictate that users should be delivered to a 404.
To set up URL redirects, head to Merchant Tools > SEO > URL Redirects. This is where you can create redirects for retired pages or short "vanity" URLs for use in print advertising.
Source and destinations should be set up as object type (e.g. category, product) and ID rather than URL path to prevent errors and minimize redirect loops. This will also enable identification of invalid destinations via Advanced Search.
Copy Source Parameters is set to "yes" as default, which can be managed via Merchant Tools > Site Preferences > Storefront URLs. This ensures that source parameters are copied to the destination URL.
The Find Invalid Redirects function in Merchant Tools > SEO > URL Redirects > Advanced can quickly highlight redirects configured to destinations that no longer exist, such as a retired category.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Demandware called now?
Demandware is now known as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The company was rebranded after Salesforce acquired it in 2016.
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