SEO is still one of the most underestimated aspects of any website constructuring. Most businessmen pay more attention to the fact of how well the website was optimized for search engines, but ignore the SEO point. Therefore, you can find the same basic mistakes in site promotion in many sites.
It is worth understanding the reason of its importance at all. Optimization is a process during which a specialist customizes a website so that it is understandable to search engines. The search system processes all the content available to them and collect information about the subject, purpose and popularity of the website. If the internal optimization has not been performed, the robots simply can’t understand what the website is about and, accordingly, either don’t display it in the output, or display it, but not for appropriate keywords and phrases.
That’s why we picked out 12 most common SEO mistakes for E-commerce which interfere you seeing better dynamic in visitor statistics of your site.
1. Work on a platform you don’t have control of
Today website constructors are getting more popular among entrepreneurs. The advantage of creating a website without any code work is obvious. But with this choice, you lose a full control of your server so a way to get Google attention.
Omitting coding, you avoid really important files for search engines robots – Robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and CSS. To ensure Google bots see all your pages, Sitemap.xml lists all of them. Search bots will index your site according to direct instructions which are prepared in robots.txt. The site loading speed is crucial point for promotion and the CSS files weight defines it. All these files are in your server so don’t doubt in importance of having access to it.
2. Low loading speed
It’s a well-known fact that users don’t wait for loading the page more then 2-3 seconds and leave it. So optimization of the loading time is truly crucial for e-commerce business. There is a number of essential things you can make to reduce it:
optimize image size
2000-pixel pictures look really great on your site but they have a huge resolution which influences the loading time a lot. There are a lot of editing and photoshop tools to reduce image size with a tiny damage of quality. Use them for both pictures and videos at all pages of your site.
While writing the code, many developers like to comment their code lines to understand the whole process after break or before updating. But this code is more difficult to read for execution so it’s better to use Code Minifier tool.
don’t use too many redirects;
When you click on the link, it starts loading and then redirected address starts loading too. It seriously causes low load time. Use an appropriate tool to find redirects and change it with right URLs.
select appropriate hosting option
E-commerce store owners tend to shared hosting because it’s the cheapest one. That’s nice option for beginners but when you start getting more traffic, you will need to change or update it. Plan the hosting option in advance.
3. Ignore having responsive design
Nowadays mobile users bring more and more traffic. People choose quick on-the-go search instead of sitting in front of the computer. That’s why mobile friendliness became a necessary point at building the site. This issue starts with the lack of responsive design.
Google prefers websites which have mobile indexing first. If you still don’t have a mobile version of the site, it’s ranked low, because your competitors made it along with the desktop one.
The main problem here is that e-commerce store owners use only keywords which are related directly to their products(“t-shirt” for selling a t-shirt) or don’t use them at all. In this case, their items are hard to find because keywords is used exactly for this. Search for various keywords or use tools for this process. While doing it, try to concentrate on words which could be used to find your product by your target audience.
5. Create site structure at random
You must already know about such thing as organic traffic. It is a number of users or visitors who come to your website for free. Site structure is the main point here because it defines its factor.
Often business owners build a basic e-commerce site with 5 pages, catalogue and that’s it. It doesn’t have clear navigation, structure and things which will make the visitor to stay.
Pay more attention to your site structure, its UX and internal linking. Look at it from the shopper view and think over logical navigation, links or discounts which will attract user’s attention.
6. Ignore content issues
No matter what your site aim is, you should create a high-quality content which the site will be judged for. There is a misconception that content is not really necessary if you sell clothes or home appliances. But nobody knows a really popular e-commerce site or store with badly-made content in it. To have high engagement rates and get more and more traffic, you should have a blog with interesting, useful articles which are related to your area and can help customers to find some solution. It’s better to fill it with detailed meta descriptions, mediocre SEO titles, headlines, full of keywords, etc.
Remember that your content should be unique, avoid duplication of it. Of course, there could be cases of similar product titles(blue jeans), in this case, set no-index control for Google not to block your site for plagiarism. Try to customize descriptions and headlines as much as you can. People like watching identity and uniqueness in the item.
7. Spamming
Spamming is a well-known promoting strategy which is really annoying and mostly useless. People don’t like seeing it and Google search engines will penalize you because of it. Don’t put your links everywhere and it won’t be judged like a spam. There are more working ways to share the links:
Forums with some specific interests or goals which are related to yours;
Ask other sites from similar area to share your links(guest posting);
share your blog post links in social media and communities(Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn).
8. Delete unavailable product pages
If a product is out-of-stock, most sellers delete its page but it leads to appearance of 404 page. It’s bad for SEO because Google doesn’t like 404 pages at all. In such case the solution is to make a product dark or put “out-of-order” status. It will save your SEO and ranking.
Also 404 page doesn’t help you to attract users. This page is unavoidable because it appears not only after remoting the page but for various errors. Here it’s better to customize 404 page to keep visitors appealed to your site.
9. Ignore product reviews
Even if you have a fully described product with high-quality and optimised images, it still can have a low ranking because of the lack of customers’ reviews. More than 60% of users check reviews before purchasing and if there aren’t any of them, they probably won’t buy it. Also your site is more appreciated and ranked higher if your product is reviewed by real people and star-rated. Google shows such positions in search results so it’s worth having.
10. Don’t have physical address in the contact field
A lack of physical address of your store causes a few problems as well. Firstly, most users like the opportunity to come to the shop by themselves and try on or touch the thing they need. Secondly, Google truly value the sites which do their best to show that they exist. Thirdly, you lose an opportunity to have your store shown in local searches. So even if you don’t have a physical store, you should give the address of your office or storage to get the users and Google trust.
11. Ignore Google Analytics
You can judge your SEO standards on your own or to take help from Google Analytics. When you don’t use it, you lose a meaningful resource with statistics according to success of your SEO strategy. Here you can check what works or not, and don’t spend much time for creating analysis. Set up Google Analytics and check out what SEO approach works best for your e-commerce business and see the alternatives which this tool suggests using in your site. Use Google Help if you don’t understand the statistics and how to use it.
12. Lack of security encryption
Many e-commerce store owners skip the security step to save money but don’t think that it will cost much more problems. It could cause financial or payment data loss, customer personal information theft. Also your site ranking will get lower due to the lack of HTTPS.
SSL certificate encryption and HTTPS are security measures so it’s crucial to adopt it for your e-commerce site. The certificate will show the users that their personal information is safe, and Google gives priorities to the sites with it.
It’s not enough to have a high quality product with attractive pictures and affordable price if users and Google don’t think so. Pay attention to these mistakes and correct them as soon as possible. We hope that you are aware of importance of SEO an site optimization and do your best to be engaging and highly ranked. Use the tools we highlighted to analyze your SEO success and improve it. Multi-Programming Solutions is full of experienced developers who can make a unique e-commerce solution for your business and recommend a working SEO strategy for it. Contact us to get a free estimation!
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