Ecommerce websites are growing business nowadays. People love to display their products online and increase business sales. What they don’t realize is that it is not as simple as it looks. Only by preparing a website by displaying products, their prices, and payment options will not help improve business. Join us in this article as we discuss 9 Business-Killing Ecommerce SEO Mistakes.
It takes a lot of effort to make a successful ecommerce website. Though your products are excellent and budget-friendly, if you have not taken care of certain factors that affect SEO rankings, you may be out of the game.
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So, what exactly is SEO? How is it important for your website?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ranking is a significant factor for ecommerce business. Since there are thousands of websites, it becomes difficult to differentiate which one delivers the best result. SEO helps improve the searchability of your website and makes it visible to visitors — customers trust sites with high SEO rankings.
But certain SEO mistakes while preparing a website may affect your ranking and business. SEO was never easy, so consider these options on priority while making your business site.
Let’s have a view of some of the killer SEO mistakes.
1. Irrelevant Keywords
It is essential to study the audience’s mind before putting keywords in your website. Customers may search for the product in ample ways. Hence, you need to incorporate keywords by doing keyword research on the target audience to ensure that your site is visible in maximum searches.
Also, you may have noticed that some sites are full of stuffed keywords. Never do this because keyword stuffing will only hurt your SEO ranking rather than improving it. An example is shown below.
The visitor will be frustrated when he sees repetitions everywhere and would possibly leave the site. Instead, use appropriate keywords and variations in product details, contents, and links, which will improve SEO.
2. Duplication of Content and Page Titles
It’s essential to have unique and accurate content so that it can be easily discovered in organic search results. Google knows that its users want variety in search results and would be fed up with duplication in sites; thus, it avoids sites showing duplicate contents. This, in turn, kills SEO rankings and will isolate your website from prospective clients.
Many new online vendors are unaware of how to handle duplicate content. There are many duplicate checker tools like Siteliner, Copyscape, Duplichecker, etc. which are available online free of cost. Just test your website with these checkers and solve your issue.
You can also use the canonical tag to index the master page for search engines.
Avoid duplicity in page titles, too, for better traffic.
3. Insufficient Product Reviews
Feedbacks from customers are significant in studying customer behaviour and expectations. But apart from the business point of view, the customer survey states that 97% of the visitors check product reviews before making purchases.
And almost 1/3 of the customers don’t shop if a product lacks reviews or have negative reviews. If your website requires reviews, then you lack traffic of potential customers, thus affecting site visibility. Encourage customers to give product feedback by sending emails or messages for better SEO ranks.
4. Incompatible with Mobiles
Websites incompatible with mobile or poor mobile compatibility are at a loss of business. Visitors immediately abandon sites that open very slow or are not visible on mobile.
Since mobile web traffic is increasing every year, make your website responsive, so it becomes mobile friendly and gets you better conversions and better SEO ranks.
5. Slow Page Load Time
Slow page load time or slow site speed time are disadvantages for your ecommerce business. People love to have fast product displays of their searches and are impatient to wait when they are in a mood to shop. Researchers say that people leave sites whose pages take more than 4 seconds for loading.
Proper optimization of images and content for quick display of products will not only improve SEO; (since search engines consider page loading speed in the ranking process) but will also increase sales.
6. 404 Error
HTTP 404, Error 404, Page not found or 404 not found, all indicate the same meaning.
When Google’s spiders crawl to search content on a website page, and this error appears; it’s due to the following reasons.
They are:
- The Page is deleted
- Typing of incorrect URL
- Products are taken off from the site
- Errors in the migration process
- Improper redirection of old URL to new URL
Would you wish to return to a website showing 404 pages? The answer is no because it’s irritating to click links that show a dead end to your searches.
Run Online Broken Link Checker to locate the problematic links in HTML, dead links, broken web links, Bad URLs, and many more. This will help to keep your website error-free; thus, improving productivity.
7. Improper Optimisation of URL
URL (Universal Resource Locator) locates your website in searches. No one wants to face an error in searches and increase frustration levels. After the selection of a domain name, it is essential to optimize the URLs for different pages of your site. This is essential because when a visitor searches for keywords on a search engine, proper use of short URLs with appropriate link building and optimization will give the desired result quickly.
Example:
Proper URL:
https://www.yourwebsite.com/yellow-socks/
https://www.yourwebsite.com/blue-socks/
https://www.yourwebsite.com/green-socks/
Improper URL:
https:///www.yourwebsite.com/yellow-socks-blue-socks-15-green-socks
Stepwise proper customization of URL with suitable page topic, descriptive and targeted keywords, which are SEO friendly and unique, will increase network traffic and help your site go high in SEO charts.
8. No Security
The main motto of Google is to ensure that its users have the best experience on secured websites. So obviously non-secured sites don’t stand a chance anywhere in the SEO list.
Many new business owners do not realize the importance of investing in security and hence don’t opt for an SSL certificate for their website. This is a huge mistake that affects not only their site SEO rankings but also their business.
Apart from installing firewalls and anti-virus software for security, it’s also essential to encrypt sensitive data transmitted between servers and browsers. Here’s where SSL comes in the picture.
COMODO is a leading Certification Authority in market. Encryption Security is possible by installing COMODO SSL certificate. As per your business requirements, you should select the SSL product, which is the best for your company and secure your customers’ data as well as your business website from hackers.
SSL certificate gets you HTTPS in the address bar as well as 256-bit key encryption, which gives your visitors a secure feeling and a boost to your site rankings.
9. Inattentive towards Google Analytics
A layman who is new to business or is unaware of free Google Analytics software is at a considerable loss. Google Analytics plays a superb role in the success of your website.
Google analytics shows customer behaviour and interest, the effectiveness of marketing strategies, etc. It explains what the best for your business is and what needs to be improved or changed.
Since it’s free, set up Google Analytics and acquaint yourself with SEO reports from Google.
Conclusion:
In the above article, I have given a brief view of some of the significant SEO mistakes made by companies while designing their website.
Investment in high-quality content with proper optimization of URLs, images and contents, appropriate contact information, SSL security, unique page titles and content, and an error-free website will automatically improve the usability of your website.
It leads to conversions and boosts customers for positive reviews, thus keeping your site on the top of SEO ranks. We hope these 9 Business-Killing Ecommerce SEO Mistakes heve been helpful, and be sure to leave your comments below as we love to hear from you the readers.
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