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Posted by Sanket Patel
July 13, 2016
ECommerce is continually growing in popularity around the globe. It’s very common for the online vendors to think that by simply listing thousands of products on their ecommerce store, they’ll be able to roll in the search engine traffic. But, it seems that is far from the reality.
As 45% of the online buyers start their shopping process through a search engine, it is quintessential to optimize the ecommerce website to have a steady flow of the targeted traffic. But the sad thing is that, optimizing an ecommerce website for SEO is much harder than it is for a 5 page website or the blogs. Having lots of product pages and constantly shuffling them on and off the site may evoke number of problems that make SEO difficult for the ecommerce websites.
Besides email marketing, social media and other avenues of digital marketing, SEO is the most effective tool for ecommerce retention and acquisition, So ensure that SEO is not neglected on your ecommerce website which will lead to missing opportunities for an easy traffic. And, here are seven common SEO mistakes that most of the ecommerce site owners make and affect their online business:
Even a search engine marketer can make this common mistake. While researching the keywords, most of the businesses spend much time on finding the relevant keywords which are actually searched by the targeted audience.
The brainstorming keywords should be based on the specific questions your audience might type into the search. These keywords are often the long-tail keywords which are quite easy to rank as they have very less competition than the general keywords.
For example,
– Nike women’s Hiking backpack
– Free Trade Arabica roasted coffee beans
And, once you have these keywords, target them in your product pages or create relevant blog posts adding them to your content marketing efforts.
In recent years, Google’s algorithms have gone through some major changes like making keyword stuffing SEO tactic obsolete. So, if you’re unnaturally stuffing your URLs, meta tags, product descriptions and other content with the keywords, this can lead to a drop in your site’s ranking instead of boosting up.
Also, this is a bad practice in terms of user experience (UX). Even if you have enough keywords on your page to get the first page ranking, you still need to make a sale once somebody clicks your link. This can be easily accomplished by the valuable, unique content than with the paragraphs stuffed with spammy keywords.
So, if you’re packing your web pages full of spam and garbage, some searchers might take a look and bounce back – which can also affect your ranking.
Google has admitted that the major priority for them is indexing and displaying web pages with unique and valuable information and to have every link on the first page of search results lead back to the same content. That’s why they’re continuously making efforts to weed out the content that is deliberately duplicated across various domains. Now, there are some absolutely legitimate reasons why your website should be having duplicate content; but still, its going to create problems for SEO.
So, while it’s enticing to use manufacturer’s product description on your website, don’t do that. Don’t give Google a reason to think your site is purposely duplicating content. The bottom line is that even if you’ve structured your site and still end up with duplicate content, use 301 redirects to let the Google-bots know where to go.
This error is usually made by the online gift stores and the clothing shops. Unfortunately, lack of complete information about the product leads user to switch to other site and virtually ends the chances of the page to rank in the top 10 of a search engine query. So, make sure you add a description to the item card; avoid killing your page’s chances to dazzle on the search results.
SEO is not all about getting your links in the search, once people click your link you need to convince them to buy from your site. And, the most powerful way is the product reviews. User refers to the product reviews before making a purchase and the reviews can drive them to spend. So, its sensible to have them on your site.
Moreover, review pages also serve as the fresh content; which is liked by Google. Product reviews give you an opportunity to rank for a new set of long-tail keywords by adding “product review” to your target keyword list.
This is a big mistake often ignored, but it means a lot for search. Keywords found in urls help the search engines know what the page is all about. Not only that, it helps users search your result than selecting other options. So, the url of each page should be a ‘speaking url’ that clearly describes what the page is about.
For example, ecommerce sites with lots of pages, often opt for the non-descriptive urls including the product numbers and model numbers which are unintelligible for the people. For example,
– mywebsite.com/product/5678345
But, actually it should be like:
– mywebsite.com/product/nike-womens-hiking-backpack
If your site is powered by WordPress, you can simply add a custom url structure. Just click “Settings” and go to “Permalinks” and change the url structure.
This is another big SEO problem particularly found in ecommerce sites. The fancy features, cool graphics and elements make your site load slower and highly affects your search engine rankings. That’s pretty bad, especially when it is considered that 60% of the online visitors abandon the site if it takes more than three seconds to load. This results in higher bounce rate that directly affects your site’s ranking.
There are various tools to check your site’s speed and page speed insights and these tools also provide advice on how to improve it.
Google is always seeking to provide a better usability to its users, so you should make your online store easy to use and navigate. To enhance your ecommerce website’s performance in terms of SEO, avoiding these seven mistakes can take you a long way. Lastly, staying up-to-date and adapting the latest changes made by Google is vitally important for all the motivated online sellers. Ultimately, the more good and unique your site is for users, it’s more good for Google!
Do you know any other search engine optimization error or mistakes that ecommerce sellers make? Leave them in the comments below.
