Demandware SEO Strategies: Creating A SEO Strategy To Optimise Salesforce Commerce Cloud For Online Sales

Why SEO Strategies for Demandware/Commerce Cloud are so important

When Demandware was purchased by Salesforce in 2016, it opened the door for a new wave of SEO strategies.

The opportunities Salesforce gave businesses struggling with CRM, are now available through Demandware to those same businesses who want to improve their SEO.

After all, what is the point of creating a seamless customer experience, perfectly personalised for their needs, if nobody is visiting the site in the first place.

We have already spoken about specific technical SEO challenges Demandware/Commerce Cloud can fix. This post will examine the usefulness and importance of creating a separate SEO strategy for Demandware/ Commerce Cloud.

What is Demandware/Commerce Cloud?

Demandware’s software specialises in streamlining eCommerce sites’ offerings to its website visitors. It’s core selling point is helping businesses improve their native merchandising to customers, through data and insights gleamed from the platform.  

Some of the other offerings and solutions Demandware/Commerce Cloud can bring to a site include:

• Page Designing for templates and content
• 1:1 level personalisation and machine learning
• Managing intricate product catalogues
• Omnichannel features
• An in-built A/B testing function
• Internationalisation and multi deliverables e.g. currency and language.

This has made Demandware/Commerce Cloud the go to software for huge brands in retail and fashion such as Adidas, Gap, Lacoste and L’Oreal.

Why SEO is so important on Demandware

Any site with such a large scope for change, is vulnerable to seeing their organic traffic experience gradually decline, or experience a mass drop, depending on the latest rollout.

After all, what is the point of creating a seamless customer experience, perfectly personalised for their needs if nobody is visiting the site in the first place.

Demandware / Commerce Cloud is almost exclusively meant to be used for online shopping websites. The core features used to improve customer experiences will be the website’s greatest threat to its SEO, if they are not addressed by professionals.

The sheer number of pages which can be crawled, indexed and displayed on large eCommerce sites, in search results, is enormous. Add in the customisable elements customers expect on online shopping sites – which inevitably create new pages and URLS – and this number increases yet again. If there are any errors affecting the structure of the site, these will be multiplied across every page of your site. This will drastically damage your overall site’s technical health.

And the more pages you have on the site with an almost infinite amount of customisation Demandware/Commerce Cloud offers, there is an inevitable increased risk of the following technical SEO factors.

• URL duplications
• URL with parameters
• Cannibalised keywords
• Internal link structures
• Crawling and indexing
• 404 errors
• Canonical pages

The Importance of a SEO strategy

The good news is the level of programmability Demandware/Commerce Cloud offers, can be applied to traditional optimisation methods SEO professionals use, on a granular/page level.

Specific tactics can now be efficiently rolled out across a website on a wider scale. Landing pages can be optimised, and the technical issues mentioned above, can be resolved faster, all without the potentially costly and slow development work by other stakeholders.

This will allow SEO professionals to turnaround traditional “quick wins” faster and develop holistic optimisation tactics, instead, of focusing on individual pages or categories one at a time.

SEO is still in its infant stage with exploring the capabilities of Demandware/Commerce Cloud. Luckily, MediaVision’s SEO department already has experience with working with online platforms which use Demandware/Commerce Cloud. We have since developed strategies unique to this platform and solutions to overcome the challenges of some of the issues mentioned above.

If you have use Salesforce Commerce Cloud/Demandware and would like to improve your site’s organic visibility, get in touch with MediaVision today.