Building an e-commerce website is complex. With a wide range of product pages, templates, and content formats, managing the SEO for e-commerce websites is a tough task as well.
With increasing competition in the digital world, optimizing your e-commerce website is imperative to improve online visibility, keyword ranking, increased traffic, and ultimately better conversions and profits.
Whether you are an e-commerce startup or an established business, here are the top 5 SEO mistakes e-commerce websites generally make. Avoid these mistakes to improve SEO performance and achieve better business growth.
1.Website speed – Website speed is one of the few factors confirmed by Google that affects the website rankings on search engine results page. Google always suggests keeping user experience as the top priority.
E-commerce websites with content-heavy pages that include high definition product images and videos can reduce the page loading speed. Thus, poor website speed is one of the major SEO mistakes that cause customers to leave the site. It leads to a high bounce rate and impacts conversion rates as well.
Optimizing website pages to load under 3 seconds should be the priority. It will impress online shoppers to visit your site, engage more and make the purchase.
To find out if you have a problem with the download speed, you can take the website speed test by Sitechecker.
2.Content – Another common pitfall in the SEO for e-commerce websites is producing content that does not add any value to the audience. Often, duplicate content is found on the website as thousands of products and varying inventories are listed.
Lack of fresh and unique product descriptions can drastically reduce page ranking chances. Therefore, write highly-quality as well as descriptive content that helps the customer visiting the site. Remember, unique content improves the trust factor, and valuable content makes it relevant for users and boosts traffic.
3.Mobile-friendly website – Today, smartphones are used by millions of people, more than any other device. Also, search engine giant Google has regularly stressed on the need for optimizing websites for mobile. Therefore, switch to a mobile-friendly website as you are losing out on potential traffic.
Make sure your e-commerce website is lighter and faster for mobile. Optimize the UX/UI by using responsive design features to offer a great user experience to those using mobile to visit your site.
4.Broken links – Broken links are those links on the website pages that don’t work. Any visitor would get a ‘404 Page Not Found’ error on clicking the broken link. It provides a bad user experience leading visitors to leave the page. Broken links are another reason for a high bounce rate which directly affects SEO performance.
You can easily use SEO tools to discover broken links on the e-commerce website and take necessary action.
5.Using cheap SEO tricks & black hat strategies – To achieve faster results in a short time, businesses often resort to “quick SEO solutions” that involve black hat SEO techniques. But Google can easily find unethical SEO tricks now. Moreover, it penalizes websites for violating search engine guidelines.
Avoid tactics like keyword stuffing, purchased links, link exchanges, comment spamming for your e-commerce website.
If you have an e-commerce website, we highly recommend auditing your site. Focus on avoiding or correcting these common SEO mistakes. It will help in better site performance, more traffic, and boost conversion rates.
Author: Nirav Gosalia and Mayank Vora, Co-Founder Logic Loop.
