Last updated - May 11, 2023
What’s your primary source of traffic?
It is general knowledge that organic traffic is key to the growth of your business. You’ve also probably come across tons of SEO tutorials, but I promise, you’ve never read one like this. FundedPosts creates content for hundreds of businesses, and these are the most common SEO mistakes I have noticed in their copies.
In 2019, data is the most valuable asset, and the primary information provider is Google search. The search box on Google.com is where 61% of first-time purchases begin, so you must pay attention to this. The topic of E-commerce SEO services is long and tricky because no one knows for sure how Google’s search algorithm works, and more interesting is that something that worked last year can harm your SEO this year; a classic example of this is keyword stuffing. This article will highlight the ten most common E-commerce SEO services mistakes and how to avoid them.
Mindless Keyword Stuffing
To rank on Google, your text, meta, and URL should contain relevant keywords. However, most E-commerce SEO services merely try to fit in as many keywords in a post or page. This is an excellent SEO tactic, but only if you know how to do e-commerce SEO auditing right.
If you use WordPress, the popular Yoast SEO plugin makes life easier for you. Yoast tells you where and how to organize your keywords and optimize your meta description, title, url, etc.
To avoid keyword density, a rule of thumb is to keep your keyword density (the percentage of your keywords to the overall content) at around 2.5%. Yoast also gives you
Mindless keyword stuffing kills your SEO as well as user experience. Focus on valuable content, one that flows well; and then put in the keywords, so they come naturally. Content creation and optimization agencies can do this for you the right way.
Links not Optimized
In the previous point, I emphasized that you should not stuff keywords unnecessarily in your URLs. However, that does not mean your keywords should not be in your URLs. Good E-commerce SEO services will advise you to put in only relevant keywords on your post, media, and page URLs, etc.
Most CMSs (Content Management Systems, e.g. WordPress, Wix, etc.) let you configure your permalinks. Confirm that the links on your website are readable and not just a set of numbers of formulas. On WordPress, you can set this by navigating to Settings > Permalinks.
Slow Websites
Bounce rate is an overlooked SEO factor; a higher bounce rate leads to lower Google search ranking. A scary statistic states that 40% of your visitors will abandon your store if it takes more than three seconds to load. Therefore, the slower your site, the higher your bounce rate (hence, poor SEO scores). Several plugins and simple tools allow you to speed up your site by caching your pages, compressing files, and so forth. Learn how to do e-commerce SEO auditing, as it will aid you in testing your store’s SEO scores.
Poor Internal Linking
A Strangloop research found that the top 2,000 e-commerce websites load in 10 seconds on average, and this is not good. Google’s spiders love websites in which pages and posts have elements that link to other pages and posts on the same site. Not only Google, but this also helps your customers to navigate your site more intuitively. Checking your page speed with Google Pagespeed Insights can be a crucial step in how to do e-commerce SEO auditing; you will not only discover your site’s speed, you will also learn how to improve it.
Non-Responsive Design
Most people will access your site via mobile, and so your site must be 100% responsive. A mobile-friendly website means your visitors get a great experience no matter how they access your site, and failing to offer this means that Google will favor a competitor’s responsive website over yours.
Missing SSL (HTTPS)
E-commerce websites regularly exchange financial information between visitors and server. This data is not encrypted, hence can be tapped by a man in the middle. Thankfully, SSL certificates encrypt information moving between your customer and the store, so even if your data is tapped, the attacker will not make out anything from the data. Since encryption is vital for overall user experience, Google loves it. Sites with an HTTPS rank better than those without it.
Duplicate Content
This is where most e-commerce sites fall short. Those copy/paste blogs or product descriptions you got off AliExpress or Amazon are affecting your ranking. Duplicate content sends confusing signals, and this can harm your SEO. The first job of all E-commerce SEO services should be to ensure that most of your content is 100% unique.
Irrelevant Keywords
In the quest to show up on the first pages of search results, you can be tempted to optimize for whatever keyword with low competition. However, do not forget your target audience here; your content should rank for keywords your audience is interested in.
How do you tell what keywords are relevant? You do this through an extensive process we call keyword researching. Marketers use tools like Buzzsumo, Keyword everywhere, Similarweb, Google Keyword Planner to research relevant and/trending keywords, but this post will not go into keyword research. A content creation agency can help you out here.
Complex Navigation Structure
Your website is the virtual office of your business, and if your visitors are confused, how much more Google? Ensure that main buttons or links are not hidden under hidden menus or content. An organized structure will ultimately make it easier for Google to crawl your site, but that’s not all. For even better ranking, submit your sitemap to Google search console.
Analytics is a free Google tool that shows you precisely how your site performs, where you should focus your marketing on, and so much more insights into your visitor’s behaviors.
From the image above, you can see that Analytics analyzes your traffic sources to give you data you can study to improve your traffic. Where the magic happens is when you set up Google Search Console and plug it into your Analytics account. At first sight, the metrics and information may look pretty confusing, but a few YouTube videos and tutorials after, you will get a hang of it.
This list is not exhaustive, but above are the most crucial but overlook factors that can make or mar your search engine rankings. Implement these, and you will see a considerable boost in your SEO. However, if you want to focus on growing your website and leave to SEO or content creation to professionals, you can outsource your on-page SEO tasks to FundedPosts.com.
