E-commerce continues to grow in popularity around the world because 44% of online shoppers begin their shopping process in a search engine.
And since it is such an important purchasing channel, you might think that e-commerce companies are carrying out an SEO strategy and/or hiring the services of an SEO Agency as part of their global digital marketing strategy, but this is not always the case.
SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing tools when it comes to customer acquisition and retention in e-commerce. Social networks and email marketing are other effective means for this task.
There are a number of common e-commerce SEO mistakes. Let's see what they are:
Common SEO mistakes for e-commerce
Forgetting your target audience in keyword research
This is one of the common e-commerce SEO mistakes that happen to any online store owner.
When it comes to keyword research, many eCommerce businesses spend a lot of time searching for keywords that are relevant to their products and forget to focus on the keywords that their target audience is actually searching for.
Keyword brainstorming should be based on the unique responses your target audience might type into the search engine. These are often long-tail keywords, which are actually easier to rank for because they have less competition than generalized keywords.
Here are some examples of long-tail keywords for eCommerce:
- Red patent leather shoes for women
- Running shoes for men
- Black dress shoes for men
Once we have the keywords, the goal of these is to create relevant blog posts as part of your content marketing strategy.
Spam content on your website
In recent years, Google's algorithms have gone through some major changes, so some tactics of the past such as keyword repetition have become obsolete.
If your e-commerce is over-optimized for filler keywords, meta tags, URLs, product descriptions, and other content with the same keyword, this can lead to a drop in ranking positions.
At the same time, this has a negative impact on the user experience (UX). Even if you have managed to rank on the first page of search results, you will still need the user to convert once they have accessed your website, and this is much easier to do with useful and valuable content than with filler text and spam.
Duplicate content
Google admits that indexing and displaying pages with different information is a very important priority for them. The last thing they want is for every link on the first page of results to lead to the same content.
Hence, they are making continuous efforts to remove content that has been deliberately duplicated by other websites.
There are some completely legitimate reasons why your site might contain duplicate content, however, it would still create some SEO problems.
We know it's tempting to use the manufacturer's product description on your website but don't. Well, it is best not to give Google any reason to think that content is being deliberately duplicated.
You should also avoid repeating your own content across the various pages of your website. If you've structured your site and end up with some duplicate content or cannibalization, use the 301 redirect to tell the Googlebot where to go.
Lack of product reviews
As we have said before, SEO is not only about getting the user to access your website. Once he's signed in, you have to convince him to buy.
One of the most effective ways to do this is through reviews. 61% of consumers will consult the reviews before making the purchase, so it makes sense to have them on your website
Reviews can also serve as fresh content, something that Google really likes. Look at reviews as an opportunity to rank for a new set of long-tail keywords by adding " product review " to your normal keyword set.
Don't optimize URLs
This is one of the big common e-commerce SEO mistakes that mean a lot to search. Well, the keywords found in the URLs can help search engines understand what the page is about.
Ecommerce websites with a large number of pages often go for the non-descriptive URL, those that include a product number, or even something more unintelligible to people:
yourdomain.com/product/3475869
When in reality it would have to be like this:
yourdomain.com/product/red-shoes
ALT attribute
When Google bots crawl your website, all they read is HTML. Therefore, even the images on your website must have some HTML (in this case, an ALT tag is incorporated ), in this way Google will be able to define what they are.
Make sure you get it right, that all your images contain the most appropriate ALT tags. These should not be optimized with keywords unless the keyword in question is really relevant to the image you are dealing with.
Slow charge speed
Another major problem that arises in SEO is the loading speed of the site. If your website has a lot of graphic elements, this will make your website take longer to load, which in turn will affect search engine rankings. This seems to be a big problem, particularly for e-commerce sites.
This is quite detrimental, especially considering that 40% of website visitors will leave the website if it takes more than three seconds to load, which will result in a higher bounce rate that will hurt your ranking.
Take a look at Google Page Speed Insights to check your site's loading speed. Google's tool also offers tips on how to improve it.
Forget internal linking
Google likes to see new content that links to other quality content, something that e-businesses can take advantage of for their websites.
If you have a blog, make sure your content pieces include internal links to other high-quality content and relevant sites.
In the same way, using relevant keywords as part of your anchor text will help Google determine what the content is about. You just have to make sure to avoid the abuse of the same keywords in your anchor texts; as this could harm the SEO of your e-commerce.
Linking to other relevant content on your website will not only help SEO, but it will also give visitors more opportunities to find useful related content within your site. This will also reduce the dropout rate.
Obsessed with classification
Ecommerce SEO is not about ranking on the first page of search results, it is about getting traffic that converts.
Even with more keywords ranking, it doesn't mean that those efforts will pay off financially.
SEO efforts in e-commerce need to be balanced against efforts in other areas of marketing, such as social media and content marketing. Less content marketing effort (such as a lack of calls to action) can render your SEO actions useless.
Factors like site structure, keyword density, and links are just one part of SEO. Google uses hundreds of ranking factors to determine the value of your business in search results, such as social signals.
This is why it is important to think of SEO as the term for broader marketing efforts.
Not having security encryption
Last but not least, lacking security encryption is one of the big common e-commerce SEO mistakes that many e-commerce businesses often make, although very few realize that this affects SEO.
Security encryption (HTTPS that encrypts data using an SSL certificate) protects your customers' information when they make transactions on your website.
This is very important for the customer experience, and you can prevent your business from hacker attacks. Most customers will probably not make purchases on your website again if they lose their information.
Google wants to provide users with results that are relevant, accurate, and secure, so using HTTPS will give you a boost in ranking.
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