Every e-commerce website has a goal to sell the products online. The goal is often simple, make more money and have a good page ranking and also the overall website security.
There are plenty of options while designing the e-commerce website but to reach the audience at the right level of rankings is a little difficult. If you want to improve the overall website quality you need to take care of the SEO as well.
A successful e-commerce website is a well maintained, well-structured and well-optimized website. Time and again, SEO has proved the results.
In this article, we will learn about the most common SEO mistakes to avoid in order to gain an overall success rate of the website.
- No Website Security:
One of the qualities of the best website is to offer security and the best user experience. Also, Google has made it mandatory to have a secure connection. A fully secured website is a must to grab the attention of the audience.
Small business owners do not invest in website security and often neglect it. Small, medium and large-sized business owners should start installing SSL certificates. SSL certificate encrypts the sensitive data that is sent through the web servers and the web browsers.
This certificate is crucial for encrypting the user information like credit card information, contact numbers and address at the time of the checkout.
There are many types SSL certificates available in market. You can choose any as per your business requirements.
For example, if you have many domains and sub domains than Multidomain Wildcard SSL Certificate is best for you. You do not need to buy single certificate for every domain. It saves money and time.
SSL certificate gets you HTTPS in the address bar as well as 256-bit key encryption, which gives your visitors a secure feeling and improve trust ratio.
2. Duplicate content:
Duplicate content is the common SEO mistake that all the e-commerce business owners make. It is high time you should know that the original and the quality content helps in getting high ranks in the Google search engines and others as well.
There are two issues if you use duplicate content. One is using the content which is already published, it will affect the page ranking of your website. The second one is the keywords get minimized and Google will just ignore your webpages.
How to fix the problem of duplicate content?
It is a little difficult to always come up with a variety of content if the same products are selling across different e-commerce websites but it is not impossible. However, it is essential to make sure that your product description always stands apart from the other content.
Moreover, having the same content reduces your website traffic and there are chances that your main and audience target keywords can be missed as Google will ignore the copied and used content.
If you are selling a product on Amazon, you can write a short description of the product, short positive reviews and also a video regarding the product that will grab the attention of the visitors.
To avoid duplicate content, you can use the no index category pages you need not worry about the content duplication and also make sure you do not publish the already available content on the search engines.
3. Lack of Content:
Lack of content is similar to duplicate content issue but you should understand that quality of content also matters to make your website rank good in the search engine result pages.
Remember, while making an SEO friendly e-commerce website all the important web pages should crawl into the search engine. This can be achieved through good and well-planned content. Having only images and videos is not enough for targeting the audience, you need content.
How to fix the problem of a lack of content?
To fix this lack of content SEO issue, unfortunately, there are no automated fixes. You need to take care of the content that is to be published on the website. You should thoroughly go through all the e-commerce websites and make sure to prepare unique content.
- Lacking Product Reviews:
As already discussed SEO is always about links all the time. If a customer, clicks a certain product page you should be able to convince them to buy.
So, to make this happen adding product reviews will help you big time. According to a report before buying a product the customers go through the product ratings and the reviews.
It is believed that almost 61 percent of the people refer to the customer reviews on the products they are willing to buy. Also, 93 percent say that positive online reviews have an impact on the business.
Including the long-tailed keyword in the product reviews and positive feedbacks will add up to your business.
5. Bad URLs, non-optimized titles and Descriptions:
Using a bad URL will screw up the SEO of the website. If the webpage product URL shows something like this
https://www.mystore.com/productid=123456?someother code/143, this is an example of a badly formatted URL and should be corrected immediately.
Example of a good page URL is
https://www.mystore.com/ladies/footwear/brownheels/-100s/
Besides this good URL, the product description, title should be unique for every webpage according to SEO guidelines.
How to fix the problem with bad URLs?
A good URL is an ultimate rank provider, changing the URL structure will give good results. If you do any URL changes, do not forget to create 301 redirects as Google should know about the changes for better rankings and for incoming links.
6. When Websites are not optimized for mobiles:
A recent study shows that around 79% of people used mobile smartphones in the last few months. Almost more than half of the revenue comes from mobile phones that you cannot ignore.
So, plan for a mobile-friendly e-commerce website though people might not end up buying from mobiles the search to buy definitely starts from the mobile phones.
Furthermore, having a mobile-friendly SEO Google will recognize the fast loading pages and improving your search results page. All the e-commerce providers offer a mobile-friendly website otherwise also you can enable it by default.
7. Google Analytics:
Google Analytics represents the customer’s behaviour, their interest, it is useful in planning the business marketing strategies. Google Analytics plays a crucial role in the success of the e-commerce website. As an online business owner, you should know that there is a free Google Analytics Software available in the market.
Because the Google Analytics set up is absolutely free and thus you can get acquainted with Google analytics.
Conclusion:
This does not mean that there are only seven of the SEO mistakes that e-commerce websites usually do. There are other factors but these discussed seven are the most important steps.
To get the good page rankings for your website, try and implement these above steps and also look for other steps as well to increase the sales and services of your website and improves your online store visibility.
It is not achieved in a single day, maintaining, and securing the website is an everyday challenge and a constant effort to boost up your traffic rates from the search engines.
