SEO and Uptime: How Downtime Can Affect Your E-commerce Store’s Search Ranking
A top priority for any e-commerce business is optimizing their website to rank higher in search engines like Google. But those SEO efforts can quickly be undermined if your site suffers from frequent downtime.
In this guide, we’ll explore the major impacts website uptime has on search engine optimization. We’ll also cover tips to monitor availability so you can avoid costly SEO declines.
How Search Engines Measure Website Reliability
Search engines want to provide users with the best experience which means indexing and ranking sites that are consistently online. To assess this, they employ various checks:
- Ping Tests: Search engine bots regularly ping URLs to check if the site is up or down. Frequent failures indicate an unreliable site.
- Crawling Attempts: Failures when Googlebot or Bingbot try to crawl a site also factor into rankings.
- Real User Data: Search engines incorporate browser extensions and user data to detect when real visitors encounter errors.
- Speed Metrics: Slow page load times and performance are interpreted as availability issues impacting users.
High uptime and speed are strong signals of site quality and authority to search algorithms.
Impacts of Downtime on E-commerce SEO
When monitoring reveals frequent downtime and availability issues, it directly damages key SEO areas:
Lower Crawl Rate
The less search bots can access your site, the fewer pages get indexed, reducing discoverability. Downtime also limits fresh content creation which further stagnates crawl rates.
Loss of Rankings
Google has explicitly stated sites with lower uptime will be passed over for ranking updates in favor of more available sites. Availability is a direct factor in search authority.
Reduced Organic Traffic
With lower indexation and poorer rankings, the amount of organic traffic referred from search engines inevitably declines. This harms revenue and new customer acquisition.
Missed SEO Opportunities
Downtime means lost chances to implement SEO best practices like optimizing page speed, improving site architecture through redirects, creating fresh link-worthy content, etc.
Penalties for Major Outages
Prolonged downtime or frequent errors can trigger manual review and penalties by Google including complete removal from the index. This devastates brands reliant on SEO.
Clearly, uptime is inextricably tied to search visibility. E-commerce sites must monitor availability to sustain SEO success.
Best Practices for Monitoring E-commerce Uptime
Tools like Network Notification make it easy to implement robust monitoring. Here are tips to optimize:
Set Up Redundant Monitoring
Site, user, and performance metrics each provide unique insights. Blending tools gives you overlapping visibility into outages.
Check from Multiple Locations
The monitoring locations you use play a big role. Test availability from where your users and target SEO rankings are.
Monitor Continuously
Frequent checks every 1-5 minutes are essential to detecting issues before Google. Monthly or even hourly monitoring leaves dangerous gaps.
Compare Competitor Uptime
See how your availability stacks up against leaders in your space. Outpace competitors here to gain an SEO edge.
Review Stats Regularly
Analyze weekly and monthly uptime trends to diagnose systemic issues versus one-off incidents.
Optimize Proactively
Use data to identify and upgrade unreliable code, servers, hosts, etc before they trigger more downtime.
With robust monitoring powering decisions, you can deflect the damaging SEO impacts of downtime and outcompete others in search.
Real-World Examples of Uptime Impacting E-commerce SEO
The relationship between uptime and organic performance holds true across brands:
- Leesa: Just 3-4 hours of downtime hurt their rankings for key mattress-related keywords. It took months to fully recover the lost visibility.
- Slickdeals: A 2-day outage due to server issues caused their organic traffic to plummet by over 35%. They saw rankings drop for even their most authoritative pages.
- Saucey: When recurring downtime problems hit, Saucey’s organic traffic took a hit. Google suspended crawling, costing them new customer acquisition until issues were fixed.
- Pepper.com: By optimizing their uptime from 92% to 99.9%, Pepper.com increased organic conversions by 150%. Their revenue from SEO is now predicted to grow by $15 million annually.
Start Monitoring Your E-commerce Uptime Today
Simply put, without consistent uptime you leave money and new customers on the table through lost SEO visibility. Leverage monitoring tools like Network Notification to master availability. Sign up for its free 7-day trial today to experience fully-featured website and server monitoring starting at just $19.99/month.
Don’t let unpredictable downtime sabotage your e-commerce SEO. Take control and commit to maximizing uptime to sustain organic growth and profits.
