SEO for eCommerce: A Complete Guide to Avoid Biggest Mistakes That You Make

Nowadays, establishing an e-commerce business is not just enough to get sales. You need to analyze the issues in your e-commerce store that makes it difficult for your site to rank in the SERPs. For that, it is imperative to hire experts who will conduct SEO for e-commerce following the audit to identify the mistakes.

Though there are some proven SEO strategies that help businesses in overcoming these challenges, some websites still might suffer because of some common SEO mistakes. It is essential for you to analyze and avoid these mistakes in future for higher rankings in Google.

To know more about what are the common mistakes that an e-commerce seller often makes, check this post till the end. You must be knowledgeable enough to take care of these while performing SEO for eCommerce.

9 Most Common E-commerce SEO Mistakes that Kill Your E-commerce Business

If your ecommerce website is not getting enough traffic that means it is not ranking well on search engine results pages. This might be because of many reasons – one of the most common being that your e-commerce store is not SEO-optimized.

In case your website has poor e-commerce SEO, then it might neither get quality traffic nor enough sales. So, you can easily optimize your e-commerce SEO simply by avoiding some common mistakes that are discussed here.

1. Poor Website Structure

Having a website that is poorly designed is one of the biggest challenges that e-commerce SEO professionals often face. A poor e-commerce website’s structure makes it clumsy and difficult for search engines to crawl your website. Thus, it provides a poor user experience to its visitors.

So, an unorganized website might negatively affect the success of your e-commerce website. If your site’s structure is not arranged in hierarchical order, then search engines might have to struggle with understanding the hierarchy of products in the e-commerce store. This often leads visitors to navigate to the wrong category.

So, you should not avoid focussing on your site’s structure so that it ranks favourably on search engines.

2. Inefficient Keyword Research and Planning

The key to success in SEO for e-commerce is conducting effective keyword research by keeping in mind what your target audience is looking for. Most professionals while conducting SEO for e-commerce website fail to focus on what keywords their target audience is searching for. Instead of this, they focus on keywords that seem relevant to their products.

So, it is significant for them to target high volume and long tail keywords with low keyword difficulty. Additionally, if you are not proficient in researching the right keyword, then you must look for an e-commerce SEO agency.

They have SEO experts who are well-versed in Google’s algorithms and possess a good understanding of keywords. So, their keyword strategies will help your website rank higher in the SERPs.

3. Lack of Proper Product Reviews

For any e-commerce site, product reviews play an incredible role in converting your leads into sales. As it provides potential customers with some more credible information about the features of the product directly from the individuals who have already used them, the lack of these reviews restricts audiences from purchasing these products.

Thus, it plays an important role in conducting SEO for e-commerce as it also prevents the audiences from wasting their money on lustreless products. These reviews also create a social proof of the products as people review these products from time to time on these pages and thus those pages remain active.

Moreover, as these product reviews are user-generated content, they are 100% unique, original, and engaging. From the SEO perspective as well, these reviews cast a positive impact on your e-commerce business website, irrespective of the products you are offering.

This will also assist your e-commerce website in ranking higher on Google and various other search engines.

4. Lack of Properly Optimized Product and Category Pages

The category and product pages hold a significant position in SEO for e-commerce website, so these need to be optimized. If these are not properly optimized then this might be the worst mistake that you can ever make to your site.

Therefore, ensure that your product and category pages have 100% unique and keyword-rich content. You should avoid using product descriptions that are provided by the manufacturers as chances are high that most of the online store owners will provide the same in their descriptions. So, try to be unique in your approach to product descriptions.

Additionally, you should also keep in check various other product optimization aspects like the technical specification, colour, and variation. So, you should avoid using inefficiently optimized product and category pages on your e-commerce site if you are serious about SEO endeavours.

5. Not Optimized URLs

Another mistake that business owners often commit while devising SEO strategy for e-commerce websites is using non-descriptive URLs for their web pages. This makes it challenging for the crawlers as well as for the users to find out what the page actually wants to imply.

The best & easiest way to fix this mistake is by optimizing the structure of your website’s URL. For any WordPress website, you just need to add a custom structure to your site by visiting the Permalinks. In the meantime, ensure that the URLs are simple, descriptive, and include the targeted keyword.

In the case of a newly created e-commerce website, you must check the URLs. In case they are not optimized, you need to update them, while ensuring the fact that it does not interfere with the present URL of the website. A minor interference might also prove problematic in generating more leads.

6. Spammy Backlink Strategies

Most SEO freelancers and agencies offer enough importance to building backlinks. But often they build backlinks without any proper strategy which might harm your website’s online visibility in the search engines.

This toxic situation usually arises when your e-commerce site gets backlinks from spammy or irrelevant websites. It also spoils your backlink score. To avoid this situation, it is always advised to build a proper backlink strategy with websites with high DA and PA. This SEO strategy will always prove beneficial for your e-commerce site.

7. Incompatible for Mobile Users

Nowadays, having an e-commerce site that is not mobile-responsive is quite incompetent. This might be the reason why your e-commerce site is losing a huge number of potential mobile customers. So, e-commerce sellers should avoid this mistake while conducting SEO for e-commerce.

Always ensure that your e-commerce site is mobile-responsive. This will also make search engines recommend your site to those who are using their mobile devices to conduct the research. You can even use the Google tool to check this.

8. Website’s Speed is Too Slow

Neglecting your website’s slow speed might often result in a major drop in the performance of your website on search engine results pages. After Google has announced Page Speed as a ranking factor, it really has a great impact on how customers are experiencing your site.

You can check your website’s speed from time to time with the help of the Page Speed Insights tool. You need to also identify the cause behind the slower page speed to troubleshoot it. You can improve your website’s speed and user experience in a number of ways.

Some of these can be:

• Optimizing your server’s performance or changing it
• Ensure to optimize the size of your e-commerce website images by compressing it
• Optimizing the large CSS and JS files
• Performing the Core Web Vitals optimization

Thus, an improved website speed not only improves its user experience but also makes your site much more competitive than before.

9. Not Taking Advantage of Google Analytics

If you are a wise e-commerce seller, you must be taking advantage of the Google Analytics tool. In case you are not, you are missing a lot. This tool is being effectively used for tracking your website’s performance from time to time. In fact, it provides you a clear-cut idea of what strategies are working for your e-commerce store and what not.

Often e-commerce sellers make the mistake of not using this tool. However, if you want to implement the best SEO for e-commerce solutions for your business, then this is one of the most important steps to perform.

By utilizing this tool, you also get familiarized with what SEO strategies work excellently for your e-commerce website.

Conclusion

Planning to improve your e-commerce website’s customer experiences? Then it is important for you to avoid all SEO for e-commerce mistakes that you might be making till date. Making these mistakes on a consistent basis will have a major impact on your organic search visibility.

So, you need to analyze these mistakes to increase your website’s ranking on search engines and satisfy your subsequent customers. Also, you need to stay updated with the latest trends in this competitive SEO industry to combat the e-commerce competition in the search engine rankings.

In case, you don’t have enough time to analyze your website to find mistakes or don’t find yourself proficient enough to do this, then put your trust in a reliable e-commerce SEO agency. They will not only rectify the mistakes that you have made so far but also optimize your website to gain more organic sales and reach.