Optimizing other SEO Settings
All SEO settings I’ve covered thus far have been more programmatic but as mentioned there are other areas where you can continue to optimize web pages at a more granular level.
You may find the programmatic approach is great for scaling but your SEO project may highly depend on customized optimizations.
This section of the guide will go over such areas of optimizations.
What’s more, as I’ve worked on website migration projects, there are other commonly requested SEO questions that arise from clients who’ve never worked on the platform. I wanted to build in some of those requests I’ve seen time and again into this post.
Let’s jump into it.
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1. Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
The more tactical elements of SEO include Page Titles and Meta Descriptions. Although you can rule via Page Meta Tag Rules, you can override those rules at a more granular level with the preferred keyword research-driven optimizations.
1.1 Categories, Products, and Content
For category, products, and content pages, you can navigate to a page’s meta data by accessing each page through Merchant Tools.
If you want to access metadata for a specific category, you’d have to navigate through “Catalogs”. For products, you’d navigate and search via “Products”. For content pages, you’d navigate through “Content Assets”.
The process for obtaining metadata across page types (categories, products, content) is similar. When editing a page type, you have to navigate to its Search Engine Optimization Support field, which looks like the below,
When you navigate to a category, you have to access the Category Attributes to edit the SEO fields.
For both Product and Content Assets, the Search Engine Optimization Support field is located under a “General” tab.
1.2 Pipeline Metadata
With Pipeline metadata, there is no OOTB solution similar to what is found for Categories, Products, and Content Assets. That is, there is no specific Search Engine Optimization Support field in Business Manager for Pipeline pages such as Account-Show, Store-Details, Contact-Us, etc.
There are solutions to include metadata on pipelines that incorporate Content Assets.
If you recall, way early on in the guide, I mentioned,
Content assets can be viewed as blocks where pages can be built upon. They…act as blocks that can be injected into areas of an existing page…
You can inject Content Assets into Pipeline pages in the form of metadata.
It’s a nifty workaround and may require you creating an SEO development ticket but it’s a means to provide more relevant content on Pipeline pages
2. URL Overrides with PageURL
As mentioned during our section on URL Rules, you are able to override the rules we’ve set in place at a page level.
The overrides occur within the Search Engine Optimization Support area of each page type (Category, Product, Content), within the PageURL attribute.
Within PageURL, you can input your values for a new URL. You can insert various folders within the field. For example, I created the below new URL in a sandbox environment.
The new value overrides the URL rule and toggles a 301 redirect to the new structure.
Please keep in mind however, if you set a new URL on a higher-level category, this will not be inherited in lower-lever categories. It’s a big of a downside but I’ve used this feature in the past to continue my optimizations more granularly.
3. Header Tags
For page types such as Content Assets, you can custom build HTML that assigns a header value (H1, H2, H3, etc.).
On categories and products, H1 tags, and sometimes H2s, would wrap around the category or product name.
I’ve seen brands who would want to customize H1 tags for SEO purposes and it’s doable but you’d have to engage with a developer to customize that feature into Commerce Cloud.
4. Sitemaps
Although you can configure general sitemap settings through the Sitemap portal we discussed above, you can also override and configure sitemap settings at the page level.
Similar to Search Engine Optimization support, there is a field that allows you to configure individual page sitemap settings, see below.
Depending on how the data is being automatically imported, you may have to revisit select pages and perform additional configurations.
5. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a site hygiene tool, that allows you to view Google organic traffic and reports. This portal is a must-have for any website. It’s free and houses powerful data.
To get access to Google Search Console, you have to verify that you own the web property. A list of ways to verify can be found here.
In Commerce Cloud, you can verify using an HTML meta tag.
You’d have to navigate through Merchant Tools > Site Preferences > Custom Site Preferences
From here, you will see a field called GoogleVerificationTag, where you can upload the meta code Google provides when attempting to verify a site.
6. Bing Webmaster Tools
Similar to Google Search Console, Bing has a site hygiene portal to monitor performance within Bing search.
However, there is no OOTB solution to verify Bing. A neat work around would be to verify using Page Meta Tag Rules.
Remember, you can define meta tag definitions, so you’ll be able to create a meta tag to pinpoint the Bing Verification code.
I won’t walk through the process because you can now verify Bing Webmaster Tools using GSC, as outlined in the Bing Verification documentation here.
7. Canonical Tags
A question I have heard from clients is whether Commerce Cloud allows canonical tag overrides.
Unfortunately, no.
SFCC is pretty good at creating canonical tags OOTB but any canonical overrides have to be done through a customization / development effort.
