The accomplishment of e-commerce businesses profoundly depends on the skill to lure in new customers. Therefore, it is essential for e-commerce sellers to implement the right SEO practices if they want to increase traffic from organic search and attract new customers to their offerings. In this article, we have listed some of the most common SEO mistakes that e-commerce website owners must avoid.
However, several e-commerce website owners tend to make several mistakes when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is crucial for e-commerce owners to avoid common SEO mistakes if they want to stay ahead of competitors.
Unfortunately, several e-commerce business owners might not know a lot about SEO. Keep Reading to find out what you need to know.
Table of Contents
- Forgetting About Audience in Keyword Research
- Inaccessible Content
- Lack of Product Reviews
- Your Website Is Not Secure
- Having A Slow Site
- Forgetting About Internal Linking
- Not Optimizing URLs
- Missing Calls to Action
- Pop-ups and Modals
- Sending Users Away from Your Website
Forgetting About Audience in Keyword Research
Improper keyword research is one of the most common SEO mistakes that most e-commerce sellers make. Most e-commerce businesses focus on finding and using keywords, which are more related to their products.
If you are following such an approach, then you may fail to attract the right target audience to your website or store. So, instead of focusing on product-related keywords, e-commerce businesses should use words and phrases, which the target audience will use when searching for products online.
Smart e-commerce sellers generally use specific keywords like black laptop covers, brown shoes, Lenovo laptops, and more instead of using generic keywords like bags, shoes, and laptops. So, do your research and come up with specific and long-tail keywords that online shoppers will use.
Inaccessible Content
Internet users who are visiting your website expect a fine and engaging browsing experience. If they are unable to view the content on your website while browsing through mobile devices, then it will surely frustrate them or force them to exit your website.
A large percentage of online shoppers will be visiting your website through their mobile devices. If the content on your website remains inaccessible to website visitors, then it will surely hurt the site’s SEO. It is best to opt for a responsive design to prevent the chances of such issues.
Another interesting thing to note is that several e-commerce websites often use duplicate content on their website. This is one of the most common SEO mistakes people make. It is a bad strategy because copying content from other websites will not just affect your SEO or rank, but you may even get penalized by Google in some cases.
Lack of Product Reviews
Product reviews offer businesses an opportunity to share more information about their products effectively. Unfortunately, several e-commerce businesses still do not include product reviews on their website.
It is important to realize that more than 93% of customers read product reviews before purchasing a product. So, if you have not listed product reviews on your e-commerce website, online shoppers may exit your site and look for another site with product reviews.
Your Website Is Not Secure
Another huge mistake that several e-commerce business owners make is they do not pay attention to the security of their website. You will be able to see several e-commerce websites without SSL certificates on the internet.
Most internet users will prefer not to shop from e-commerce websites that do not have an SSL certificate. Moreover, this is also a red flag for SEO, which means that it is essential for e-commerce websites to buy EV SSL certificate. A website with SSL certificate could boost SEO rankings.
Having A Slow Site
The speed of your website plays a key role when it comes to user experience. Even if you have a well-designed website with over-the-top features, internet users will be reluctant to stay and shop on your website if it has a slow speed.
Moreover, slow speed or slow loading time will also harm the rank of your site on search engines. A recent study revealed that approximately 50 percent of internet users will close their tab if a webpage did not fully load in less than three seconds.
Forgetting About Internal Linking
Google loves to see content, which links back to other types of high-quality and relevant content. This is something several e-commerce website owners fail to take advantage of. It is one of the most common SEO mistakes. If your website contains a blog, you should consider adding internal links to relevant pages on your website on blog posts.
Apart from that, you should make sure to include relevant keywords as part of the anchor text. This will make it easy for Google to identify what the content is about. However, overusing the same keywords may end up hurting your website’s SEO.
Not Optimizing URLs
The URLs to the pages of your website are something that you may have overlooked in the past. It is crucial to note that URLs are an important aspect when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
If the URLs of pages on your website are not fully optimized, search spiders will find it hard to determine what the web pages are about. Internet users who are arriving at your website may also not be able to understand what the page is all about if you have not optimized the URLs.
Missing Calls to Action
Calls to Action or CTA can instantly grab the attention of customers. In fact, in some cases, an attractive and unique CTA may even encourage potential customers to check out or buy your product.
Therefore, professional online marketers advise e-commerce businesses to include CTA on all pages of their websites. You should also consider using the sidebar on posts and pages to offer a live chat option or to request customers for email signups.
Pop-ups and Modals
Most of us would have probably encountered annoying pop-ups that forced us to leave a website. If you want customers to spend more time on your website, you should be smart about pop-ups and modals.
If you are including pop-ups on your website, it is best to show the pop-up that will cover the page’s main content when users are scrolling through the page or while navigating to the page through search results. Besides, you could even use a standalone interstitial, which users will be able to dismiss before they access the main page content.
Sending Users Away from Your Website
Another of the most common SEO mistakes that several e-commerce businesses make is that they often provide links to other resources or websites. It is integral to give a reason for customers to come back to your website if you want your e-commerce business to be successful.
Instead of allowing users to download PDFs from your website, consider emailing the PDFs to customers because it will help you to earn a subscriber. Also, if you are linking to other websites, ensure that the linked website will be opening in a new tab, so your website remains there.
Finally, there are other common SEO mistakes that this topic did not cover like dirty sitemaps, insufficient robots.txt, image optimization not properly done, poor internal link building, URL formatting, etc. SEO works like a magnet that could bring visitors to the website so, avoiding mistakes in SEO will lead to more sales and business.
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