SEO for SAP Commerce: Top 5 Checkpoints

By Reid Bandremer
Category

There are a huge number of SEO checkpoints and considerations when building a new website. This article highlights the top SEO checkpoints specific to SAP Commerce Cloud. 

SAP Commerce Cloud usually covers the important bases for search engine optimization for your ecommerce website. That said, there are some configuration options you’ll want to take advantage of, and there are often a few areas where we may recommend custom development if SEO drives significant revenue for the business (or has the potential to do so). 

Note that the specifics of SEO functionality differ depending on the level of customization of your storefront and if you use Accelerators or Composable Storefront (formerly SAP Spartacus). If you use Accelerators and/or Composable Storefront, there’s a lot more built-in SEO support you can leverage versus a fully custom-built application. 

(We will also note that Accelerators are no longer receiving new features, but Composable Storefront is continuing to evolve and receive updates.)

#1 – Ensure JS Content is SEO-readable  

If you use Composable Storefront (AKA Spartacus), it is critical to enable server-side rendering (SSR).  

Without SSR enabled, search engines will not be able to read most of your website content, which is essential for baseline SEO performance. Composable Storefront / Spartacus is single-page-application (SPA) based in client-side Angular. Current versions are not SEO-friendly unless you enable SSR, which will provide the full HTML render that search engines crawlers require. (We have heard that future versions will have SSR by default.) For more info, see the following documentation: SSR main page, SSR Coding Guidelines, and Controlling SSR. 

For Accelerator-based storefronts, the primary content is usually already rendered server-side and thus SEO-readable. This is still a vital QA checkpoint for SEO for any new site build regardless of platform. 

#2 – Customize Title Tags 

The page title, specifically the <title> tag in the head of the HTML, is critical for the SEO performance of a page. 

Standard SAP Commerce implementations automatically populate the SEO title tag. However, we frequently recommend some customizations: 

  • Updating the logic that populates the default title tags, especially for category pages and product detail pages (PDPs) 
  • Individual customizations for high-priority SEO pages. (We often add customization functionality for all category pages so the default logic can be over-ridden for individual category pages as warranted.) 

When customizing the logic for default title tags, Composable Storefront has some native support developers can leverage. For content pages, SmartEdit should allow business users to easily customize SEO titles of individual pages. When additional customization of title tags is warranted, custom development may be required. 

Related SAP Help resources: 

#3 – Configure SEO-friendly URLs 

A good, SEO-friendly URL describes the page while remaining concise and clean (search engines like URLs that are human-friendly.) In SAP, the default URLs are often not ideal. 

Fortunately, SAP Commerce Cloud supports configurable URLs, which we recommend leveraging. For example, the default URL structure for PDPs is yourstorefront.com/product/1234. We typically recommend configuring the URL to also include the product name in it. 

For Accelerator, the default URLs for PDPs and categories often include the full category structure of all category names in the breadcrumb/hierarchy. This often makes for some long and unwieldy URLs. We typically like to remove the parent categories, at least from PDPs. We also like to enforce lowercase and often clean up the URLs in other ways, like removing html encoded special characters. 

Related resources: 

#4 – Avoid Duplicate Content 

In SEO, duplicate content refers to text that’s identical to content that appears on another page of your website; it frequently occurs when a single page has multiple versions of URLs in use. Large amounts of duplicate content can negatively impact SEO performance. 

Duplicate content issues are combatted with canonicalization. A canonical URL is the definitive URL. Often, there may be several very similar URLs permitted for the same page, but the canonical URL is the original URL that represents the rest.  

SAP Commerce doesn’t have inherent problems with duplicate content; in fact, it combats it “out of the box” with automatic redirects and rel=“canonical”. However, we’ve seen many implementations with duplicate content issues (note that URL customizations increase the likelihood). To prevent these issues, check the following elements to make sure they all reference the same canonical version of URLs: 

  1. Check rel=“canonical”. The rel=“canonical” link element is an HTML tag that specifies the same canonical URL for a given page, even when there are duplicate URLs for that page. SAP automatically populates rel=“canonical”, but you will want to doublecheck that it always uses the correct canonical URL. 
  2. Ensure hyperlinks go to the canonical URL. Make sure system links (especially in navigation and on product listings) point directly to the canonical URL version. 
  3. Ensure other areas that reference URLs use the canonical version. This includes: 
    • Redirects (especially SAP’s built-in automatic URL rewrites for PDPs and categories) 
    • XML sitemap 
    • Product feeds 

#5 – Schema.org markup 

Schema.org markup is a type of structured data specifically used by search engines. Having the right schema.org markup on PDPs is highly beneficial to SEO. The 3 most important types of schema for Google are Product, Offer, and aggregateRating (if you have reviews). 

Schema.org markup will need to be built by your developers. If you’re on Composable Storefront, there is native support you’ll want to leverage; see this Structured Data doc. 

Additional SAP SEO Checkpoints 

Below are several other areas of SEO you’ll want to investigate as you plan your SAP Commerce development roadmap.  

1) Google Shopping Product Feed: 

A presence in Google Shopping is vital for strong ecommerce SEO. Inclusion in the free listings for Google Shopping requires setting up Google Merchant Center, plus one of two things:  

  • Building and submitting a dedicated shopping feed file (not native to SAP; requires custom development) 

 OR

Having both will produce the strongest SEO results, but a feed is not necessary if SEO is your only concern. Note that if you want to run Google Shopping Ads, the Google product feed is required for inclusion to the paid listings in Google Shopping. 

2) XML Sitemap:

An XML sitemap helps ensure search engines are discovering your pages. For Composable Storefront, custom development may still be required. However, there’s native support for Sitemap Configuration in Accelerator you’ll want to utilize; just double-check it includes all your pages (there’s a bug we’ve seen a few times where the sitemap only lists 1,024 pages). 

3) Meta description:

The meta description tag is often used by search engines in the description of search engine listings. While it is far less important than the SEO title tag, customization of meta descriptions can be handled in SAP the same way as customization of title tags. 

4) Pagination:

For product listing pages that have pagination, use href links to proper URLs, and make sure to use the right URL for rel=“canonical”, per Google best practices. 

5) Robots meta tags and robots.txt:

To ensure you are not blocking the crawling and indexing of pages that you want included in search engines, check your robots.txt file, and check that your pages don’t unintentionally have the meta noindex tag.