Posted by Carlos Munoa, Principal, Ecommerce Marketing, NetSuite
You’ve developed your SEO strategy. You’ve deployed best practices to optimize your ecommerce(opens in new tab) site for search engines. Now, you’re ready to launch. But hold on. Will all of your hard work generate the traffic, and hopefully the revenue, you anticipated?
This go-live checklist is the final article in the NetSuite series, How to Execute a Successful SEO Strategy(opens in new tab). The preceding seven articles have delivered an abundance of tools, tactics and tips for the successful launch or migration of your ecommerce website. Now it’s time to confirm that all of your hard work will pay off.
Consider these final steps before going live:
- Always go live in your low selling season so all fixes and improvements to your ecommerce site are in place before your high season arrives.
- Deploy Google Search Console and a tracking system such as Google Analytics before launching or migrating your site.
- Check your site structure based on your keyword research and audience research to remove unnecessary pages, which is better for Google and for the user experience
- Submit simple sitemaps so search engines can index your entire site and not quit after a few pages.
- Once you’re done testing the user experience, change your robots.txt file or you risk preventing Google from crawling and indexing your entire site.
- Do all of your pages have unique titles, metadata and content on them? Are they compelling and enticing to the user? Have you used your most important keywords on each page?
- Do your metadata descriptions have a call to action in the Google search result? Do they stand out from the rest? Will they make people want to click your link even if it doesn’t top the search results?
- Check for tags such as rel=prev and rel=next for paginated pages.
- Check for broken links and 503s and fix them. Use Screaming Frog or Xenu’s Link Sleuth, or scan your site locally.
- Use BrowsSEO or SEOBrowser to crawl your site and check for coding irregularities and navigation issues.
- Mobile First: Use Google Search Console to confirm your ecommerce site is mobile friendly and use your smartphone to confirm the experience is equal or better than on a desktop.
- Check the different code markup with the corresponding tool: Schema.org for Google; Open Graph markup for Facebook and Twitter Cards for Twitter.
- Check for domain canonicalization, remove duplicate content or use rel canonical or 301 redirects for content that can’t be removed.
- Confirm that your 301 redirects are working on a one-to-one basis: old page to new page, old category to new category and old product to new product.
- Verify your site page load times since Google, and visitors to your site, will penalize you for pages that take more than a few of seconds to load.
- Make sure your H tags for headers and ALT tags for images are well targeted for keywords.
- Review URL structures and naming conventions for a good user experience.
This checklist will help ensure that all the planning and effort you put into launching a new site or migrating to a new site will meet your expectations, entice users and optimize your site for search engines.
Want to learn more about SEO best practices? Read the other past articles from our SEO Strategy Series:
- How to Execute a Successful SEO Strategy(opens in new tab)
- Top SEO KPIs to Track for Ecommerce Success(opens in new tab)
- Research is Fundamental to SEO Success(opens in new tab)
- SEO Efforts are Meaningless Without Quality Content(opens in new tab)
- Research is Fundamental to SEO Success(opens in new tab)
- Leveraging Multiple Channels for SEO(opens in new tab)
- Deliver a Well-Architected Ecommerce Website with Technical SEO(opens in new tab)
- Keeping Up With the Rapidly Changing SEO Landscape
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