When it comes to an e-commerce site, with the help of SEO you can have a steady flow of targeted traffic. People who search on these sites want to buy some products, so they are looking for product-related terms. This makes conversion process much easier. On these sites, SEO is often neglected, which leads to missing and wasting opportunities for some easy traffic. Whether you are a client of our Tampa SEO Company, or you are doing in-house SEO to optimize your site for the search engines, you should avoid the following common mistakes
1) Lack of Keyword Research
Before you set up your site do some keyword research, as it is important to do it before, and not after, setting up the site. If there are some errors you can fix them later, but you should construct your site based on that research. The data of the research should give you information about most relevant search terms for each product, combined with some general terms that you can use for category pages or homepage. You should never set up multiple pages based on the same search terms because it could lead to confusion and conflict when deciding which of these pages is most relevant.
2) Lack of Mobile Optimization
More and more people these days are using their mobile devices when searching for products. It is not enough to be just computer optimized; people don’t want to look at sites that are hard to read and navigate when searching on mobile. Every site should have mobile option or responsive design, which is used to adapt to the screen size, have readable text, clickable buttons, and optimized images, in other words, to have the same function as it has when on a desktop computer.
3) Site Hierarchy Is Poor
This is also a consequence of bad planning. Hierarchy means that you should place pages of individual products within some broader categories, so visitors, customers, and search engines can navigate through the site without hassle. You can do this by combining keyword research and your common sense. If the hierarchy is hard to understand and complicated, it will be considered as a bad user experience by the search engines.
4) No Product Descriptions
Not only the product descriptions are helpful to visitors when deciding whether to buy the product or not, but they are also of great significance for SEO. With the help of product descriptions search engines can define what that page is about and this text can help you rank for a variety of keywords. Also, if you include more text, a visitor will stay on your page longer. Also, avoid using the manufacturer description when selling common products, because if you use it, your SEO can suffer from duplicate text issues.
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5) Lack of Security Encryption
Data is encrypted by HTTPS, which uses an SSL certificate over the HTTP protocol. It is very important to put customer security first when it comes to e-commerce sites, because of all the transactions that will take place on these sites. Besides HTTPS that is important for Google, there are also now ramifications for SEO, from which both your customers and search rankings can benefit.
6) Error Pages
Ecommerce stores have a habit of deleting pages when a particular product is no longer stocked. With more and more deleted pages visitors and search engines will run into some pages that return errors when landing on the site. Usually, there is still an internal link to the page, which makes the error prominent. These error pages have a negative effect on SEO, so you should ensure that they are cleaned up. When landing on these pages, visitors should be taken to an active page related to that searched error page, by adding a 301 permanent redirect.
7) Complicated URL Structure
You should create a standardized URL structure from the product name and make sure that it is readable for visitors. URL should be clear and consistent. E-commerce site usually uses URL extension that is the full product name. Problematic URL is, for example, a product reference number, with a string of numbers and letter used for identifying the item.
8) Title Tags That Are Not Helpful
In the search ranking algorithm, the title tag is very important. The title of a particular page is less important than it was before, but it still holds weight. When a person searches for products the title is the first thing that this person will see, so it should be relevant and enticing. Even if your product is in the first position, people will be encouraged to visit the lower positioned product if it has a better title than yours.
9) Lack of or Minimal Product Reviews
Product reviews are very helpful when selling the product because customers and visitors usually take a look at these reviews when trying to make a final decision whether to buy that product or not. Besides that, product reviews are also helpful for SEO purposes. They can help to add additional text to the product that is relevant, and help with ranking for related keyword terms. Also, search engines can include star ratings within the search results, which would help with increasing the click-through rate.
For e-commerce owners, SEO represents an excellent traffic opportunity if all these mistakes are avoided. You shouldn’t rely only on search engine traffic, but it provides a large proportion of your daily visitors. Besides backlinks, press releases and social media, cutting out these errors is very important. SEO is mostly about giving the search engines and your visitors what they need, so you should make sure your site it as user-friendly as possible.