Optimizing an e-commerce website for better SEO results is perhaps one of the toughest jobs. Managing SEO for e-commerce product pages is any day tougher than it is for any other multiple-pages website or blogs. You may be living with the misconception that listing as many as hundreds or thousands of products would help you do good SEO ranks. But it is time to snap out of this misbelief. In e-commerce websites, you will deal with several different variables, which makes it even difficult to manage your SEO optimization.
Since there are no hard and fast SEO optimization rules, it is ideal to avoid or at least minimize the number of SEO errors on your web pages. To strive in this competitive market prominently for a longer time, you cannot afford to make any SEO blunders, as that will not help you in any way to form or shape your business.
So, suppose you are new in the business or not confident enough about your SEO skills. In that case, there are several companies out there who provide professional SEO services to help you gain thousands and millions of dollars worth of revenue from your e-commerce business.
Now, let us talk about 7 serious SEO faults you need to be aware of to ruin your e-com business.
Shortage of Product Description
In a broader sense, it is the most common mistake committed by e-commerce business websites for clothing stores or gift shops. Any leading search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo prefer unique and informative high-quality SEO product descriptions.
Recent studies have revealed that 87% of online shoppers consider the onsite product descriptions a vital factor for making the final purchase decision. Lacking provide detailed text description reduces your products’ credibility, which reduces your chance to be on the top 10 list of popular search engines.
Besides, always make sure to answer as many relevant queries as possible from the buyers, even if they are low-frequency queries. Putting up high-quality product images is important for sale, but it has no role in enhancing your SEO ranks as the search engines do not count images.
Apart from creating the best possible unique content, you can also keep the following things in your mind for achieving more fruitful SEO results:
- Include only best-quality, unique, and descriptive text content to help direct your visitors towards making purchase decisions.
- Never copy-paste your content from any other websites. It can prove to be disadvantageous, or even the search engines can punish you for doing so.
- The ideal word count for your product description is important. However, you should always discard too lengthy content descriptions as well.
Deficiency of Product Reviews
Customer reviews for any product (positive or negative) are a big determiner for a purchase. Reviews play a vital role in succeeding in your overall SEO strategies. Statistics have shown that almost 70% of the buyers’ purchase decisions depend on the on-page reviews. It means that if your website deficits in this section, it will surely reduce your chances of sales and ultimately result in a reduced conversion rate.
Interestingly enough, the results show that the review sites have better SEO results than the product selling pages. The best product websites include a separate section where the customers can share their purchase and product using experiences with the new or existing other viewers, making them able to create whole new groups of the target audience for different products.
Also, if we see the usefulness of the reviews from the buyers’ perspective, it gives them the confidence to invest their money in a product with lower risk. People tend to trust these reviews from the other buyers almost the same as word of mouth from their acquainted people.
Here are some beautiful benefits of these reviews from the customers:
- They are unknowingly generating unique content for your website, and that too for free of cost. If you have ever dealt with online marketing strategies or business, you will know how hard it is to create unique content. Thus, product reviews are a great way to solve at least this problem.
- The online marketing world is an extremely volatile one. It is always evolving. Every moment, thousands of companies try their best efforts to replace some other company on the SEO pages. The reviews also become helpful in evolving your website effortlessly. The reviews always keep the wheel rolling. It comes as a great help for all your collective SEO efforts.
Use of Manufacturers’ Description
As we have already mentioned that creating unique content is a factor of prime importance. You cannot ignore this one. So, suppose you are still using the exact same contents for any product from its original manufacturer websites. In that case, it can give the search engines the power to penalize your website or even ban it from the internet.
This is a lot of other e-commerce business websites are also using the same content as it is on the manufacturers’ page. Thus, when you use the same, it will be caught as non-unique content and discarded from the Google results. Moreover, the manufacturers’ page’s content is also not written in a way for selling them.
We cannot stress more because always creating unique and exclusive content to avoid all such hazards. But we understand that if there are thousands of products on your e-com site, it is not only difficult but next impossible to create unique descriptions for each of them. So, in that cases, what you can do is just put a ‘no-index meta tag’. This tag will keep your products with generic manufacturer descriptions out of the search engines’ considerations.
If you think some of your items will be out of the stock of your inventory, you better hold them back from the SEO listings. Thus, it is always better to keep brushing up on your SEO techniques so that your website does not look spammy.
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Lack of Optimization of Product Pages According to Search Demands
The demand of people is the last verdict in any business. So, when you manage the SEO for e-commerce product pages, make sure to have a clear idea about the current product demand trends and the keywords people are entering on the search engine pages. If you fail to do so, there will be a high chance that you would end up spending your time and efforts promoting the wrong products. It is a prevalent mistake that stores with a huge number of items do.
You need to optimize your product pages and product descriptions with proper keywords and titles to acquire the maximum audience’s attention. If you do not use the popular search keywords in your descriptions, you will never become able to attract your target audience, no matter how unique or good-quality content you make. So, here are a few points that can help you make better content for achieving the highest SEO success:
- The specific model numbers of your product’s title tag on the H1 headings.
- Make sure to include the brand names in the H1 heading title tag.
- Do not overlook the importance of filling up the ‘image alt tag’ description.
- Remember not to overcrowd your product description page with the keyword phrase by mentioning it too frequently.
Lastly, you better refrain from incorporating iframes on your website’s main pages, as that can harm your SEO ranking.
Generic Titles
Like the SEO product descriptions, you need to be unique in creating the titles on your product pages. It is important to make the search engines able to identify your e-com website as an exclusive entity. Creating keyword-centric content along with a unique title is considered the fundamental rule of the overall SEO strategies. But somehow, many online business owners tend to observe this basic rule.
But it is challenging to uniquely tag each item of the same type or different model of the same product from the same brand, especially when an e-commerce website has products in abundance. You are left with no other option but to repeat the same set of keywords again and again. In this scenario, creating an unmatched key phrase is best.
Search engines are also aware of this problem. So, these key phrases will help it look seamless. For example, there is a technique called the “brand model” title tag. Most buyers type for a key phrase instead of a particular keyword. Thus these “brand model” techniques come very beneficially. The technique goes like this – brand name – the name or the model number of the product – and then the product’s type, i.e., “Levis t-shirt for men”. If you are still confused about the concept of creating a unique product, you can take assistance from efficient online or offline platforms like Ubersuggest.
Absence of Speaking URLs
Poor URL structure is another mistake that e-commerce business owners make. Have you heard the term ‘speaking URL’? In simple terms, speaking URLs are the URL structure with the product title or the main keyword phrase within it. It is of utmost importance to create such URLs for each item in your website to optimize the search engine results. The more unique your URL ID is, the more you will have a chance to rank higher in the search results.
Here are three main reasons why you should use ‘speaking URLs’:
- Semantics: These URLs make it easy to know or expect what the customers or the buyers are clicking on. The URLs full of gibberish and numeric makes it appear doubtful or spammy, which can turn your potential customers away from your site.
- Anchor text and keywords: Many blogs and other websites may pick your URL and use it on their site as an anchor text. Thus, if your website or product URL contains the important keywords used as an anchor text, it will redirect the viewers to your website.
- Relevancy: Having the vital keywords within the URL also helps you rank higher in SEO for relevant product search results.
Too Much Duplicate Content
Excessive use of duplicate content is again one of the biggest problems for your SEO needs. It is perhaps a dangerous threat to your website’s SEO position because it will bring down your SEO ranking and potentially affect your earnings from the website every week. Many fashion or clothing e-commerce websites face these duplicate content issues as their different sorting elements, printable pages, tags happen to be almost the same.
Here are some useful tips for trimming down the amount of duplicate content:
- Best product websites use the robots.txt tool as it helps block areas that make duplicate contents.
- If you have multiple pages containing almost the same content, search engines like google choose similar pages as a canonical URL. The canonical tag on any URL tells the search engines where they should pay attention.
However, removing all duplicate content from your website is not an easy task. You may overlook some areas, but google will not. Those days are gone when you could spin some of the contents and still rank higher in the SEO pages.
The Bottom Line
When we are talking about SEO for e-commerce product pages, we need to remember that Google is the most predominant search engine in the industry to date. And Google is always concerned about providing the best user experience. So, try to make contents and websites that meet all of Google’s parameters to please your customers because Google knows the best.
Finally, for achieving the best outcomes from all your SEO and other online marketing planning and efforts, it is always better to rely upon the industry experts like Shrushti. Thus, keep avoiding all the above-mentioned mistakes for the best of your e-commerce business.
About the Author
My name’s Semil Shah, and I pride myself on being the last digital marketer that you’ll ever need. Having worked internationally across agile and disruptive teams from San Fransico to London, I can help you take what you are doing in digital to a whole next level.