As an ecommerce store, your survival depends on one thing: traffic.
Not just any type of traffic, but the right traffic. People who are interested in your products and are ready to make a purchase. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this, and one way that’s very effective is ecommerce SEO.
SEO is critical for your business because your customers begin the buying process with an online search. You want your site to be positioned to get those shoppers to your site. They’ll research products and then decide to buy.
Yet, too many ecommerce sites get ecommerce SEO wrong. Read on to discover the most common mistakes that ecommerce stores make and how you can get your site to the top of search results.
1. Poor Website Structure
There are many factors that search engines take into account when they rank pages. These factors can be broken down into two camps – onsite SEO and offsite SEO.
Onsite SEO is somewhat technical, but it serves as the foundation of your SEO strategy. It refers to everything on your site that influences SEO. These are things that you can easily control.
For example, having your site on https instead of http, making it load fast, and ready for mobile traffic are important factors. Other factors like category pages, filling in meta descriptions and title tags are also important factors in ecommerce SEO.
2. Use Old Methods to Rank Product Pages
One mistake that you’ll see on some ecommerce sites is that they use very old methods to rank their pages. These old methods no longer work, and they can actually result in your ecommerce store being penalized.
Keyword stuffing and using a lot of low-quality backlinks are two of the most common mistakes that are made. The thing to remember is that search engines have become much more sophisticated since 2010.
Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithm each year. You need to keep up with these changes and evolve your SEO strategy accordingly.
3. Copy and Paste Product Descriptions
Does your ecommerce store have a lot of product pages? You really don’t want to fill in the product descriptions for every single page on your site, do you?
The easiest solution would be to copy and paste your product descriptions and make minor changes where needed.
With this solution, you’re missing a massive opportunity to improve your search rankings. Not only that, when you have duplicate content on your site, search engines won’t know which page is more important and those pages won’t rank well.
Plus, copying and pasting product descriptions won’t entice visitors to make a purchase. Instead, your product pages should have compelling and creative product descriptions that have the appropriate keywords.
4. No Product Reviews
You could be missing out on an opportunity to increase your site’s conversion rate and improve your rankings without product reviews.
Your potential customers rely on product reviews to make a buying decision. Search engines want to provide the best results to their users, and they will take product reviews into account.
You want to make sure that you prioritize asking your customers for product reviews as part of your customer service and marketing strategy.
5. Deleted Product Pages
As an ecommerce store, you have to deal with a lot of things, such as products being out of stock or discontinued.
You don’t want to completely delete those product pages. Over time, those pages build up credibility in search engines and you can lose that credibility when you delete a page and have a 404 page set up for that link.
What you should do instead is use a redirect to another product page. That can be for a new version of the same product or a product that is a close match.
6. Lack of Valuable Content
When you’re targeting potential customers through SEO, you need to understand that they go through different stages before they make a purchase.
You want to leverage SEO to get your site in front of searchers during each stage. The best way to do that would be through quality content.
An example would be a site that sells boots. In the early stages of the buying process, someone might search for “what are the best boots for winter.” You can have an in-depth blog post that addresses this question.
Later on, you can have posts that compare two specific boot brands to capture searchers who have narrowed down the process between a couple of options.
7. Your Site Doesn’t Capture Leads
Did you know that only a small percentage of your site’s visitors are ready to make a purchase when they first get to your site? In other words, you can lose the vast majority of your site’s visitors for good if you don’t have a way to capture their information.
There are a couple of ways to make sure your ecommerce store stays in front of potential customers when during the buying process. The first is by having an opt-in on your site, where customers can sign up to your email list.
The second way is through retargeting. This is where a tracking code is placed on your site that lets you target site visitors with advertising on Facebook or display ads.
This will help increase your sales and brand visibility. When a searcher recognizes your brand, they’re more likely to click on your links in search results. That will increase your clickthrough rate.
Ecommerce SEO Is Essential for Success
Your customers and potential customers begin researching products online before they make a purchase. Your ecommerce store needs to be front and center in those search results to have a chance of getting those people to buy from your store.
That’s why ecommerce SEO is a critical part of your marketing strategy. Yet, many people make mistakes when trying to rank their product pages.
You can avoid those mistakes by learning SEO yourself or by working with a team of professionals who specialize in ecommerce SEO. Contact us today to find out how we can get your store to rank higher in search engines.