Search engines play an important role in the success of a Merchant’s e-Commerce website. Merchants are responsible for the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of their own websites, including the ones they create with Upscale. The first and foremost task of any SEO strategy is to make sure the pages of your website can be found by web crawlers. To do this for Google Search, Merchants create these two files and submit them to Google Console to request their site be crawled:
- sitemap.xml – a list of every page on your website that you'd like Consumers to find in Google Search results
- robots.txt – a list of every page on your website that you'd like the web crawler to ignore (for example if web pages violate a web crawler's best practices you can avoid a ranking penalty by listing them here)
Once a web crawler can find the Merchant’s web pages, it is worthwhile for the Merchant to follow a search engine's best practices for improving the search results ranking of those pages by using:
- SEO-friendly URLs
- SEO-friendly metadata
SEO-friendly URL for Product pages in Upscale PWA
Merchants can configure an SEO-friendly URL slug for every Product page in Upscale. This is a string persisted on the Product which is used by the PWA when rendering a URL for that Product page. The slug is just part of the URL and it is "SEO-friendly" if it helps both humans and web crawlers understand what the destination page is about, and thereby it can improve the page's rank in search results. The Merchant edits this directly on the Product in Upscale Workbench or may import this value in the Product Import scheduled job. Upscale Product URLs will appear in the Google Search results as: https:// [domain] / [path] / [URL slug] / [product id]
SEO-friendly Title + Description metadata for Product pages in Upscale PWA
Merchants can configure SEO-friendly “title” and “description” metadata about each Product page in Upscale. These key-value pairs are persisted on the Product and used in the display of that Product in search results (as shown in the screenshot above). This metadata is SEO-friendly if it helps both the humans and the web crawlers understand what the destination page is about, and thereby it can improve its rank. The Merchant edits this directly on the Product in Upscale Workbench or may import this value in the Product Import scheduled job.
Canonical URL for Product pages in Upscale PWA
Merchants can advise web crawlers that the crawlability of their Upscale product pages should not penalize the ranking of other websites they maintain which have the same products. When web crawlers find multiple links to the same product (content), all links will fall in search results ranking unless one of them has been tagged as "canonical". The canonical one will be given the higher rank. The Merchant edits this directly on the Product in Upscale Workbench or may import this value in the Product Import scheduled job.
Product List Page in Upscale Workbench
Import-Product Scheduled Job in Upscale Workbench
