6 Biggest Ecommerce SEO Mistakes
Ecommerce SEO is the different horse to ride and you can’t ride it smoothly until you know how it behaves. The reason, why most ecommerce sites fail to perform, is they practice the general search marketing techniques. Here are six biggest mistakes that e-commerce platforms make.
Mistake #1: Focusing on technical SEO only
Technical SEO is a time-consuming job and it accounts for only 10% in success in eCommerce SEO. Also there is little need to spend time and money on technical audits like optimizing site-maps and on-page optimization when there are platforms for technical SEO. With platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento, you can get real help in your efforts on technical SEO. What you should focus on is creating engaging content that interests users and also builds high-quality backlinks. Links are the most important ranking factors for Google.
Mistake #2: Undermining importance of category pages
Category pages can rank your site high on the category-search keywords hence more important than any other page on your site. It someone searches for educational toys and you have these toys they you should make a dedicated category page for educational toys. Categorizing your site will be a good job and beneficial in long run. With tools like SEMRush, you can find the category-keywords, you can rank for.
Mistake #3: Defining duplicate content in wrong way
Ecommerce sites have hundreds and thousands of products and giants like Amazon have product list in millions. Ecommerce are forced to use similar content as they sell similar products. But you should avoid having identical information on your pages. Here you can use canonical tags. Duplicate content with other sites has little importance as you are selling the products that are available on other sites as well. You should focus on creating strong backlink profile instead of rewriting product descriptions.
Mistake #4: Not taking help of reviews
Reviews are free SEO. Feedback from clients interest users and also it builds trust and reliability. Here you can take lessons from Amazon – the ecommerce giant invites customers to write reviews on its products. The reviews give great SEO value to product pages when indexed by Google. Reviews can increase website visits and conversion rates in the long run.
Mistake #5: Using one-offer for all
There can’t be one-fit for all content in ecommerce SEO and if you doing this then you are doing no good to your website. The first thing is to categorize your visitors according to their intent.
Searcher: Visitors that come to your site for more information or education on specific products/services. You should create a blog for these visitors.
Buyers: Visitors that search information with the intent of buying. They are serious about giving business hence should be taken to category pages.
What most ecommerce sites do, they put all the content in one page and then try to get links for those pages. This strategy could work for generating links but it won’t help in making sales. Right strategy is to optimize blog for searchers and then take them to category pages through links.
Mistake #6: Trying fixing everything with SEO
Problem with website ranking starts with content and user engagement. If the content is uninteresting and the user engagement is low, no SEO can strengthen the plummeting sales figure. But if the problem is only with engagement metrics, then it could be solved by focusing on pricing, merchandising and product offering.
Conclusion
Ecommerce SEO is different from simple search marketing. Here you have different set of keywords and you focus more on category pages than the performance of overall site. Your efforts should be to make your category pages more relevant for the targeted users.
