Many online businesses believe that by simply listing numerous products on their e-commerce website, customers will start coming in droves via search engines. It is far from the truth.
Unfortunately, optimizing an e-commerce website for SEO is more difficult compared to blogs. Since there are tons of products constantly being offered on and off-site, there will be plenty of problems arising, making it challenging to apply SEO on e-commerce websites.
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This article discusses common SEO mistakes of online stores, what to do about them, and why an eCommerce SEO agency can help.
- No product descriptions
Your e-commerce website may either have no product descriptions or thin product descriptions. These descriptions are critical to the performance of your website. The absence of quality description and a credible copy will result in your website never making it to the top rankings.
Your site’s performance may not even be successful for less-trafficked terms. It is vital to write high-quality product descriptions. This task can be outsourced to an eCommerce SEO agency. If you are concerned about this expenditure, factor in how much you will be making from organic searches after placing product descriptions. Keep in mind that search engines cannot understand images you have posted on your product pages unless there are text descriptions.
It is also crucial to provide actionable content such as clothing size charts and where the products were manufactured. These vital details will help convince the shopper but also get you indexed. It is a win-win investment.
- No product reviews
Your website may have no product reviews. Or, you may have an inadequate representation of product reviews as well as no semantic markup to display those reviews to search engines.
Reviews are an effortless way of injecting a massive amount of content into your product page. Amazon is successful at facilitating reviews on an enormous scale. It has seen drastic results because of this. When you set up your system to judge and represent the reviews logically, it will help convince your users very quickly and help them progress into the buying journey.
- Keyword stuffing on your product pages
Stuffing your product descriptions with mindless keywords instead of focusing on actionable content can potentially turn off Google as well as users.
Only apply keywords meaningfully. It would help if you balanced between a good strategy and providing actionable content to help the user. Avoid stuffing them with loads of spammy words and phrases just to stand out. Keyword stuffing may result in bounce rates.
- No image alt text
Having no image alt text can be self-sabotaging, but many e-commerce websites miss this area. There is too much to be gained from alt image text for them to be ignored.
Your images are one of the vital content pieces on your website. Although optimizing your images will require a lot of work, it is an effortless way to target specific search terms and provide search engines better context on how everything adds up on your website.
- Insufficient search engine optimization and user-friendly URLs
This issue affects products displayed in categories. URLs that are user-friendly help consumers in navigating a website. It also helps search engines know what your website is all about. It is critical to optimize these areas.
The technical aspect of your e-commerce SEO may fall behind the competition because of your lack of knowledge or inability to keep up with the trends. It may also be a result of neglect. But applying efficient and effective e-commerce SEO is known to be tricky and requires an investment of time and effort. But in the end, all this housekeeping will pay off since you will have an organized and attractive site to both users and Google.
Author bio:
Ester Adams is a farmer of words in the field of creativity. She is an experienced independent content writer with a demonstrated history of working in the writing and editing industry. She is a multi-niche content chef who loves cooking new things.
