For all online merchants, it is common to have the notion that it is only listing hundreds of products on their e-commerce sites that they can gain search engine traffic. But this is actually far from reality. Although listing your products and services is definitely necessary for e-commerce SEO, yet the optimizing your website for proper results is much difficult than optimizing your other conventional company websites. Due to having a number of product pages juggling on and off the site, there arise different problems which make SEO tough for e-commerce websites. The concerns of this article will tell you about some of the critical SEO errors of e-commerce websites which you should avoid if you want best results.
- Not enough product description: In the broader sense, this is an error which is made by online clothing stores and online gift shops. It is sad enough to note that due to the total lack of product description, there lies no chance of the page being counted in the top 10 search engine queries, even considering the low-frequency queries. So, make sure you add a description to the items so that a mistake on your end doesn’t kill your pages’ chances of securing a good rank.
- Utilizing descriptions from manufacturers: If you share the goal of being recognized and filtered by search engines, just forget using the descriptions that you get from the manufacturers as this can guarantee a ban of your site from all search engines. Descriptions are usually distributed to different online stores and most of such descriptions leave the main text in their original form. This clearly leads to a large number of pages with non-unique and copied content. To make matters even worse, these manufacturer descriptions are written in a way which doesn’t sell. Hence, create unique content, even with regards to product descriptions.
- Dearth of product reviews: More than 80% of buyers look for reviews of online products before buying them. This means that if your website doesn’t have such reviews, you will be missing a large number of buyers. Moreover, it is even a lot easier for the review pages to reach out to the top of search engine result pages or SERPs. The best thing about product reviews is that your customers create unique content for your store, that too free of cost! It also keeps the product page ‘living’ and plays a role in bringing back the search engines to your site more often.
- Using titles which aren’t unique: One more problem of the biggest online stores is copied title tags. Try your best to avoid identical values and rather watch out for their uniqueness. Although this is the basic of SEO but when it comes to online shopping and e-commerce websites, it has been seen that for some reason, people have stopped observing the simple rules. Focus on creating unique key phrases as the search engines are aware of the difficulty of writing unique title tags for multiple items from the same brand or same items from many brands.
- Lot of copied content: Archives with various sorting elements, pages to print and tags, all these create a lot of duplicate content which shouldn’t be indexed by the search engines and should immediately be closed in robots.txt. Don’t hurt your site’s future with duplicate pages. Use robots.txt to block those areas which show duplicate content and use canonical tags to show which web pages you wish to be indexed. You may also add no-follow attributes to links.
Hence, if you’re wondering about the SEO solutions and techniques of an e-commerce website, first take into account the blunders mentioned above. Don’t let the mistakes become an impediment to achieving success.
