The Salesforce Commerce Cloud, formerly known as Demandware, is one of the more popular platforms for e-commerce sites, especially for big retailers, including Adidas, Lacoste and Puma.
As with any website, SEO is super important for your Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
There are a lot of general and do-it-yourself SEO strategies you can use, but with Salesforce there are often a lot of technical SEO issues that could negatively affect your organic traffic.
If you don’t have a background with technical SEO, these problems could be hard to spot and fix, so you may want to look into hiring a professional SEO agency.
Here are some technical issues an outsourced SEO agency can help you with.
Faceted Navigation
Faceted navigation is when you add filters to a search to narrow down results. Let’s say you’re looking for running shoes, so you go to a running store and search for running shoes. Then, you get hit with hundreds of search results, overwhelming you. But then you think, wait, I like Nike shoes. So, on the side, you check a box next to “Nike,” and then you only see Nike shoes. You can probably do this with other brands, as well as gender, color, size, type, etc.
That’s faceted navigation.
It makes things a lot easier on the user, but it can cause some SEO problems, because each filter adds a parameter to the URL, creating a duplicate page.
It can cause issues with bloating, crawl budget and duplications which will hurt your SEO.
No 404s
If a page doesn’t work, it is best in terms of SEO for it to show up as a 404 error, however, with Salesforce, it often shows up as a 301 or 302 redirect.
Long URLs
It is typically best to keep URLs as short and simple as possible. It will improve your search engine result page (SERP) ranking, increase your users’ trust and make your URL more shareable. Salesforce has a habit of making some terribly long URLs, especially for homepages.
Multiple URLs
Salesforce will add parameters to the end of your product URL based on how the product is accessed. So for example, if product A shows up in position 1 on a grid layout, it will have a different URL when clicked on than if it was in position 4.
This creates multiple URLs for the same product, which hurts your SEO
General Technical Issues
In addition to these Salesforce specific problems, there are a lot of general technical demandware SEO issues your site can run into:
- Broken links
- Keyword over-optimization, as a result of repetitive product descriptions.
- Badly written product descriptions
- Badly optimized product images
- Poorly optimized images
What To Look For
Everything so far has probably sounded pretty technical and overwhelming. That is why it could be extremely beneficial for your site and your business to hire an outsourced SEO agency because they will be able to use their expertise to help you fix these issues to keep your site running smoothly and drive organic traffic.
Be sure to look for one that has experience with e-commerce sites and, hopefully, Salesforce specifically. Because as you can see, it has some unique quarks.
One place that has a lot of expertise in technical SEO and Salesforce is Pear Lemon. They are an award-winning company that can also help you optimize your on-site content.
Disclaimer
The information contained in South Florida Reporter is for general information purposes only.
The South Florida Reporter assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in the contents of the Service.
In no event shall the South Florida Reporter be liable for any special, direct, indirect, consequential, or incidental damages or any damages whatsoever, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tort, arising out of or in connection with the use of the Service or the contents of the Service. The Company reserves the right to make additions, deletions, or modifications to the contents of the Service at any time without prior notice.
The Company does not warrant that the Service is free of viruses or other harmful components
