Basics Of JavaScript SEO For Ecommerce: What You Need To Know

Leverage JavaScript in the most effective way possible while upholding your site’s ranking in the SERPs.

JavaScript (JS) is extremely popular in the ecommerce world because it helps create a seamless and user-friendly experience for shoppers.

Take, for instance, loading items on category pages, or dynamically updating products on the site using JS.

While this is great news for ecommerce sites, JavaScript poses several challenges for SEO pros.

Google is consistently working on improving its search engine, and a big part of its effort is dedicated to making sure its crawlers can access JavaScript content.

But, ensuring that Google seamlessly crawls JS sites isn’t easy.

In this post, I’ll share everything you need to know about JS SEO for ecommerce and how you can improve your organic performance.

Let’s begin!

How JavaScript Works For Ecommerce Sites

When building an ecommerce site, developers use HTML for content and organization, CSS for design, and JavaScript for interaction with backend servers.

JavaScript plays three prominent roles within ecommerce websites.

1. Adding Interactivity To A Web Page

The objective of adding interactivity is to allow users to see changes based on their actions, like scrolling or filling out forms.

For instance: a product image changes when the shopper hovers the mouse over it. Or hovering the mouse makes the image rotate 360 degrees, allowing the shopper to get a better view of the product.

All of this enhances user experience (UX) and helps buyers decide on their purchases.

JavaScript adds such interactivity to sites, allowing marketers to engage visitors and drive sales.

2. Connecting To Backend Servers

JavaScript allows better backend integration using Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).

It allows web applications to send and retrieve data from the server asynchronously while upholding UX.

In other words, the process doesn’t interfere with the display or behavior of the page.

Otherwise, if visitors wanted to load another page, they would have to wait for the server to respond with a new page. This is annoying and can cause shoppers to leave the site.

So, JavaScript allows dynamic, backend-supported interactions – like updating an item and seeing it updated in the cart – right away.

Similarly, it powers the ability to drag and drop elements on a web page.

3. Web Tracking And Analytics

JavaScript offers real-time tracking of page views and heatmaps that tell you how far down people are reading your content.

For instance, it can tell you where their mouse is or what they clicked (click tracking).

This is how JS powers tracking user behavior and interaction on webpages.

How Do Search Bots Process JS?

Google processes JS in three stages, namely: crawling, rendering, and indexing.

As you can see in this image, Google’s bots put the pages in the queue for crawling and rendering. During this phase, the bots scan the pages to assess new content.

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When a URL is retrieved from the crawl queue by sending an HTTP request, it first accesses your robots.txt file to check if you’ve permitted Google to crawl the page.

If it’s disallowed, the bots will ignore it and not send an HTTP request.

In the second stage, rendering, the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are processed and transformed into a format that can be easily indexed by Google.

In the final stage, indexing, the rendered content is added to Google’s index, allowing it to appear in the SERPs.

Common JavaScript SEO Challenges With Ecommerce Sites

JavaScript crawling is a lot more complex than traditional HTML sites. The process is quicker in the case of the latter.