How to improve SEO with Salesforce B2C Commerce

How search drove change in digital commerce. 

These days, when a consumer wants to purchase something, 81%* of the time their search starts online. Whether it’s on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine, data is easily and quickly accessible with a click of the button.

Almost 90%* of internet users visit an eCommerce website, out of which 76.8%* convert to sales through an online purchase. Across a long list of pages and websites to choose from, there is always a dominant winner ranking at the very top, gaining higher visibility and signaling relevance to the consumer.

Many businesses wonder, “What makes those sites so special? How can we get a top search rank? And how does Salesforce B2C Commerce fit in?”

Why Search Engine Optimization 

When a user clicks on a search result, it generates unpaid traffic. The more clicks a website gets, the more traffic it receives, hence elevating page rank and generating higher sales.  

To go back to the questions, what makes some websites special and better than the competition that they always seem to rank on top, well, it is a fact that they have optimized their code and content for search engines. This technique is known as Search Engine Optimization – the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic using the right methods and practices when creating or revamping a website.  

How can large businesses balance a good SEO strategy with a high number of pages and products? The key is to set up and optimize the website to resemble a seamless journey for users to navigate through easily.  

This is where Salesforce B2C commerce comes in, to provide businesses with rich architecture, and the appropriate SEO tools to give them an advantage over their competition.

How are Salesforce B2C and SEO related? 

By implementing a good mix of SEO strategies within a rich architecture such as Salesforce, search engines can crawl and index sites more easily and positively.  

Let’s take a look at the features in Salesforce B2C commerce that help with SEO. 

• Hostname aliases 
• SEO URLs 
• XML sitemaps 
• SEO meta tags 
• Redirecting and Mapping 
• Integrating Pardot 

Hostname aliases: 

The hostname is the original name of the website. Hostname aliases on the other hand are created by adding extensions that redirect to different subsites of the main website, without having the customer enter it manually. SEO business manager helps customers create such meaningful hostname aliases which help index them easily through external site engines. 

SEO URLs: 

B2C commerce helps create custom URLs that define product attributes, description, geography etc. Through Salesforce’s business manager tool, businesses can now define the rules and condense URL length, to create optimized and SEO-friendly URLs.  

XML sitemaps: 

XML sitemaps are files that contain information about the website, mainly a list of URLs that are available for indexing to know when a page was last updated, how relevant is a page, the frequency of page updates, and the elements of the page such as images. Through Google reports, businesses can now track their page visibility, traffic, and know how crawlers index each page, helping them improve their site’s visibility.   

SEO meta tags: 

Meta tags are small pieces of information that describe a page’s content. Both the meta-title and meta-description are visible to search engines which give a summary of the page and its content. Salesforce B2C Commerce provides a solution to generate and manage website content by adding clear, concise, and relevant meta titles and descriptions to the HTML head sections of every product detail page.  

Redirecting and Mapping: 

Migrating websites tend to fall into the drawbacks of errors and broken links. Through customized URL mapping, businesses can now enter the details of the source and the destination of the new URL in the “redirect section” of the business manager, without worrying about the redirecting process and coding.  

Integrating Pardot: 

Since many companies are already using Salesforce, integrating Pardot can also help with SEO. Pardot helps track both the company and their competitors’ keywords and content using the Object Manager in Pardot. Other advantages of using Pardot include information on Google ranking, monthly volume, Cost Per Click, ranking difficulty and much more, all of which indicate how easy or difficult it is to rank higher using specific keywords.  

Several SEO tools within the B2C commerce cloud helps businesses generate new clicks, target actively looking shoppers, acquire new traffic via organic search, etc. Businesses can now maximize their ranking and improve organic traffic, resulting in higher sales and ROI. 

Achieve more with Salesforce B2C Commerce 

Utilize the strength of SEO to its full potential by upgrading with sophisticated SEO tools for Salesforce B2C commerce. Create an optimized SEO strategy, that can deliver an immediate response from customers, increase brand presence, and grow traffic.  

If you’ve got questions about building or implementing SEO tools within your Salesforce B2C platform, we’d love to connect. Please contact us for a no-cost, no-commitment consultation, and a member of our Salesforce team will contact you shortly.  

*Statistics were taken from the Digital 2021 Global Overview Report by Hootsuite.