The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
There are plenty of impressive tactics or metrics that aren’t often discussed, not necessarily because they aren't important, but because it's easy to get locked into the rhythm of simply reporting on traffic and sales.
To change things up, let's look into some other areas we can optimize to improve the organic performance of e-commerce websites, and some underrated but useful metrics that can help you report on that performance.
Tactics to optimize and measure your e-commerce website performance
Data scraping for SEO and analytics
Data scraping is very useful when you want to retrieve, or scrape, elements from a page for further analysis or optimization.
Most people know that you can scrape common webpage elements such as publication date, author name, or price, but what about more specific aspects of e-commerce websites, and what can we use them for? Product pages have unique attributes that you can scrape, such as “add to basket” type buttons or even product schema; below, I’ll talk about how you can scrape breadcrumb data.
Scraping the breadcrumbs
In short, breadcrumbs are a trail that shows users where they are in the structure of a website, and they are especially useful for navigation and internal linking.
By using crawling tools to scrape data from the breadcrumbs, you can have a more complete view of the site as a whole, and it allows you to identify any trends.
Below, you can see that it's possible to extract breadcrumb data as a series of values by using XPath, and setting this up as a custom field. This allows you to see the data as a separate field once a crawl is finished.
