3 Ways Edge SEO Can Improve the Enterprise Ecommerce Experience

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Aug 26, 2021

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Working with and optimizing large ecommerce websites comes with two major challenges: acquiring users through organic search, then converting those visitors.

While conversion might not strictly fall into the realms of SEO, unless the traffic we bring to the client’s website converts and helps them meet their objectives, it may as well not exist.

This is why it’s important that we don’t just look at traffic and keywords, but also the search experience from SERP to achieving their goal/endpoint on the client site.

Edge SEO uses edge computing technologies to create new SEO implementation, testing, and research processes outside of our current parameters.

In this column, you’ll learn about how edge SEO can help you automate and scale a number of optimization activities, to not only attract more traffic but generate more qualified traffic that converts and supports your business goals, as well.

Why Enterprise Ecommerce Needs Edge SEO

SEO can be uniquely challenging for enterprise ecommerce websites with large product catalogs and high levels of product turnover and rotation.

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Managing the search experience and maintaining consistent rankings and traffic levels can be problematic with ever-changing content and user value propositions of great scale.

This is then made more complicated with the expectation of organic “growth.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of edge SEO, I shared a primer here that you’ll want to check out.

In this piece, we’ll explore some of those capabilities and learn how they can be implemented through Cloudflare Workers, Akamai EdgeWorkers, various AWS and Lambda services/combinations, and Fastly’s Compute@Edge.

How Edge SEO Works at the Enterprise Level

The principles of implementing edge changes are relatively the same, and there are three processing phases in which you can modify your underlying (origin) content:

• Incoming – During this phase, you can change the request URL (e.g., a redirect), or add authorization headers and tokens.
• Outgoing – In this phase, you can inject elements, such as Hreflang and canonicals, security headers, and additional code elements.
• Response Body – Modifying existing body content, such as canonicals, meta robots, page headers, div classes, and title tags.

Depending on the change you want to initiate, you will need to modify the request/response at different stages. Here are three specific ways you can use edge SEO for enterprise ecommerce.