ECommerce Businesses Need to Avoid 7 Common SEO Mistakes
When it comes to eCommerce websites, marketing teams constantly face the challenge of making their sites visible to their target audience in this ever-changing world of Google search rankings. As eCommerce sites make revenue from online purchases they have to be careful in optimizing their site and not get affected by Panda or Penguin updates. Unlike other websites, commerce websites require constant SEO attention and if you make single mistake it may jeopardize your SEO campaign and thereby affecting your eCommerce business. In this post, you will be informed about the common SEO mistakes made by many eCommerce sites, so that in future you will not fall victim to them.
Not Having Text Description of Your Products
Even though a picture captures more attention and worth a thousand words Google and other search engines do not think so, at least when it comes to their ranking mechanism. If your products do not have a solid text description, your search engine traffic will be reduced and loses your SEO rankings. But you do not have to panic and all you have to do is to post some quality product descriptions and make sure that these product descriptions consists of unique content that is relevant to your online retail store.
Not Giving Importance to Customers’ Reviews
One of the best things you can do for your search result rankings and sales is gathering product reviews from customers. According to many surveys, approximately 70 percent of buyers want to read about what other people think of the product, and Google gives more priority to pages that contain customer reviews than compared to ‘selling’ pages. So, you need to utilize appropriate tools to feature reviews and help to boost your search optimized rankings.
Generic Titles
Many web designers know better than to use duplicated title tags, and yet they seem to fall into eCommerce websites all the time. We know it is hard to come up with many unique title tags when selling lots of similar products, but make it a priority.
Not Integrating Your Site with Social Media
If you are active on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site, with quality and consistent posting, you will get the right benefits. But do not let those efforts go to waste by forgetting to insert social media links on your eCommerce site. Customers are looking for these buttons and what they find on the other end can have a big impact on what they decide to buy from your site.
Content Duplication
When it comes to duplicate content, it may sometimes hurt your SEO rankings as Google penalizes some form of content on your site that appears to be repetitive. So, for your eCommerce website you need to careful not to duplicate content more than two pages.
Product Pages Stuffed with Keywords
Keyword stuffing in the product description is not a good idea and there are commerce sites do this tactic instead of actionable content, sizes fitting and usable details. Do not stuff product pages with useless keywords and there is a difference between cunning, providing actionable content, helping the customer and stuff tons of spammy keywords just to be noticed. If your keyword stuffed pages are spotted by Google Panda update, it will surely block your page from the top search results and the resulting recovery from Google’s penalty action takes more time than you imagine.
Lacking Image ALT Text
Your site will be seriously getting affected if you not provide an image ALT text and if you ignore this, it will negatively impact your SEO recognition. If you think about the real content pieces you have at your disposal, the real sizable content pieces, your images are vital among them on a retail website. You have descriptions, titles, reviews, and images. Being an eCommerce site, you need lots of images and optimizing the alternate image text of your images can take a bit more work, but it is an easy way to target direct search queries and give the search engines some greater context of what those pieces of content are all about.
Actually, the list of common SEO mistakes done by eCommerce sites goes on and this doesn’t mean you need to give up on your campaigns, but you can seek expert assistance from professionals who are well-versed and experienced in handling eCommerce SEO projects.