7 Ecommerce SEO Mistakes That Are Probably Costing You Money

Let's be honest, SEO doesn’t tend to be the most popular subject for store owners because it's hard to know what Google wants!

But as soon as a customer jumps on the web, they'll head to a search engine to find what they are looking for, so you're gonna have to give SEO some much-needed attention.

And considering 90% of users don't go past the first page of results, it's vital that you adopt the right SEO techniques so that you can give your online store the best chance to be seen!

Just be sure that you aren’t making these 7 SEO mistakes...

#1. Not associating keywords with buyers

It's true, keywords will help you connect with your audience. But they won't work if you don't use the keywords that they are searching for. It sounds pretty simple really, but it's surprising how many sites don't have the right direction when it comes to their keyword strategy.

When your customer visits Google, they have a question that they want answering. What you need to do is find out what that question is, so you can create content that specifically looks to answer it. This can then be used as your keywords so you can optimize your site to attract the right audience to your online store.

Action points:

  • Find out the questions that your buyers are asking
  • Create content that answers those questions

#2. Spamming content with keywords

So as important as we think keywords are, it's still crucial that you don't adopt any bad techniques when it comes to your content.

When creating content such as blogs, ebooks or infographics, you need to make sure that it's well-written. It has to make sense, it has to add value and it should definitely not involve too much usage of your chosen keyword.

Action points:

  • Don't overstuff content with keywords
  • Make sure your content is well-written
  • Hire an expert writer to do this for you

#3. Having a ton of duplicated content

This is a common mistake in the world of Ecommerce for one simple reason: the product description. Typically Ecommerce merchants that sell loads of different products will just use the manufacturer's description for their products – so that means you're gonna have loads of duplicated content which can get you penalized.

The solution to this one is straight forward. You need to write unique descriptions for all of your products. Sure it may take time and effort, but once you've created unique content you'll see the benefits and it will add more value to your site.

Action points:

  • Create unique content for your product descriptions
  • Use keywords within your content
  • Use benefits and features to encourage more sales

#4. Not optimizing meta tags

The meta tags need to be optimized across your site for SEO success. A meta tag is used to provide information about a web page for the benefit of search engines and website users. These include the title page that appears in the web browser and the description of the page.

Make sure you don't have duplicated title tags, that you keep your tags short, and that you include the right keywords. Although Google doesn’t put a huge focus on this, it's also good practice to use keywords in your alt tags for your images so that they can be optimized for search results.

Action points:

  • Keep your title tags to a maximum of 70 characters long
  • Keep your meta description tag between 150 and 160 characters
  • Use keywords within your meta tags

#5. Focusing too much on link building

Link building was once a technique to bring in more traffic, but those days are gone and if you focus on the wrong link building strategy, you could be penalized. Sure, getting people to link to your site will help you improve your SEO. But it's important that you understand the difference between a valuable link and a spammy link.

If you try and encourage links from sites that don't have a great page rank, this can do more harm than good. You need to focus your efforts on building links from authoritative sites so that Google knows you can be trusted. So rather than building links, aim to create valuable content that authoritative websites will want to link to.

Action points:

  • Focus on quality links ahead of quantity
  • Create valuable content
  • Promote it to influencers to encourage valuable links

#6. Not having any product reviews

A huge part of SEO is about building trust within your community and product reviews can really help you do this. Truthfully, 70% of users will look to reviews before they make a purchase decision, so if you don't have any available then you could be missing out on a lot of sales. And reviews can help you feature a steady flow of unique content on your site – which is great news for SEO.

If you're looking for an easy way to integrate reviews onto your online store then check out review platforms such as Yotpo – something that you can expect from our ecommerce solution.

Action points:

  • Encourage users to leave product reviews
  • Integrate your store with a review platform

#7. Using too much flash

So we all want a website that looks great, but flash content makes it harder for search engines to read because it doesn’t come in their language – HTML.

We're not saying you shouldn’t use flash, but you just gotta be smart about it. Your homepage is likely to get the most amount of traffic, so don't waste it by having a flash focused homepage. Make sure you have a balanced page of image, text and links so that both Google and your customers know where to go next.

Action points:

  • Make sure the content on your site comes in HTML format
  • Balance your homepage with images, great navigation and text

Takeaway

So there you have it – our 7 SEO mistakes that could be costing your store money! Remember to forget about spammy archaic techniques, and focus on optimizing your site for a human, rather than a search engine.

And if you want to find out more about how our Ecommerce solution can help you bring in more traffic then contact us today!