SAP Hybris eCommerce SEO  A Step-by-Step Guide To Success

An increase in product innovations and enhanced marketing are leading to enterprise-level organizations migrating to e-commerce SEO, ERP and CRM solutions. As part of this endeavour moving the front-end website to the SAP hybris SEO platform is considered to be part of the deal of ease of integration along with the back-end systems.

The larger e-commerce SEO migrations can be fretted with problems due to enormous SKU catalogues. The cause is that none of the internal integrators had external experience or in-house SEO teams. According to our observations, there is a dearth of platform documentation or knowledge in the SEO modules..

Once you move away from other platforms to Hybris you are expected to leave behind the familiarity of the business manager and other CMS entering the realm of Smart Edit, Cockpit and Back office. With SAP Hybris SEO cockpits, it is formulated to make your life easier, with product catalogues and more management for the store managers. Automated templates along with drag-and-drop functionalities can provide users with a false sense of security when it comes to SEO.

Reliable examples of this knowledge gap include SAP hybris forums discussing where they can incorporate meta keywords at a category level. This is as recent as 2018 and the official documentation allows users to develop user URLs.

The common SEO SAP Hybris issues

When you think out of the box SAP hybris is no better or worse in comparison to a majority of enterprise-level capabilities when it comes to SEO capabilities. The popular SAP hybris SEO issues may not be unique to the platform, but taking into consideration that it is restricted they may be resolved as part of the standard integration. Some of the common issues are

• Crawl wastage and index bloating emerging from the parameter management on faceted triangulation channels
• Pagination-centric crawl issues
• Canonical issues emerging from the canonical tag that is rule-based by the order
• Dynamic XML site map operating on a Charon. It is an issue as updates emerge once in 24 hours as the file name is updated forcing the previous XTML sitemap to 404.
• Canonicalization problems along with conflicts arising with product landing pages be it parameter usage.

There are also reported issues when it comes to JS usage and considering how mobile indexing works. There is no need to have a hybris storefront for SAP SEO using Java in a crawlable or be it SEO-friendly manner. This may lead to issues with performance or post-migration traffic drops.

Working hand in glove with Hybris integrators

Most of the major platforms tend to have an in-house team and experience showcases indicate that the expertise levels of the team may vary. Their consultation turns out to be part of the given SLA or agreement with SAP-certified partners/ SAP Hybris in developing the new Hybris stack.

Overcoming these e-commerce SEO issues and complying with a smooth migration is essential to maintain performance. It is also expected to prevent a sudden decline in organic traffic.

When it comes to SAP SEO it is suggested that you should work with an external vendor. As advised earlier in house integrator teams should abide closely to the platform documentation that is not always correct or take into account real-world variables. Even the best practices are not taken into account.

The common school of thought is to avoid all the common issues with SAP Hybris. Though this does not work out to be the case always.

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