“You can’t just
open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed you
have to create traffic.”
— Joel Anderson
There are few factors more influential to the success of an
eCommerce site than SEO. Search optimization mistakes can be extremely costly
for your business.
As consumers become increasingly comfortable utilizing
various eCommerce platforms and a multitude of avenues for shopping continue to
emerge, such as Google’s ‘Similar Items,’ the competition grows increasingly
fierce.
For your site to thrive in such an environment, SEO should
be one of your business’ main marketing initiatives.
Unfortunately for most small business owners, SEO is a
living, breathing thing; this means that keeping up with the latest trends,
best practices and critical updates can be quite challenging, to say the least.
There is a good chance you might be succumbing to one of
today’s most prevalent eCommerce SEO mistakes.
Let’s rundown the list and help you get your site to reach
peak SEO performance.
1. Thin Content on Product Pages
Thin content can be a site-killer in the post-Hummingbird
world of user intent.
As this relates to eCommerce, there are only a few better
ways to deter a sale than to have a visitor land on a product page that
contains little to no information about the offering. This is a consumer’s
first sign that they are better off shopping somewhere else.
To retain a shopper’s interest and gain sales, it is
absolutely necessary (for user experience and SEO purposes) to write out an
engaging and accurate description of the product.
This does not mean to copy and paste the manufacturer’s
description.
The most important thing you can do is spend some time
thinking about the information that a customer would want to know about the
item before purchasing it. This is the type of unique copy that you will want
to draft to help convert consumers.
While writing product descriptions, bear in mind that if you
end up with content that is too similar from page-to-page it will dilute your
efforts because Google will have issues assigning authority to one page over
the next.
2. Lack of a Content Hub
While we’re on the subject of content optimization, one of
the single most overlooked aspects of SEO that eCommerce sites are guilty of is
the lack of a blog.
You might be thinking, “I sell pajamas. Why on Earth would I
need a blog?”
For SEO, that’s why.
A running content hub is one of the biggest drivers behind
SEO success. You may not realize it, but most of the Internet’s biggest
retailers (including Zappos) have a blog.
In the case of the aforementioned company, content ranges
from sizing guides to company culture, lifestyle tips, and beyond. This not
only serves a SEO function for the brand by consistently posting fresh content
for Google’s spiders to come back and crawl, but it also gives them a means to
internally link to various product pages, inform consumers throughout various
stages of the buying cycle, provide a platform to upsell various products, keep
previous visitors coming back for more, and serve various other optimization
goals.
Be sure to keep your content well organized through proper
tagging elements, customized URLs, and other techniques. If you fail to do
this, you will have a content hub that is equally unappealing to Google as it
is to your visitors.
3. Neglecting Alt Tags
If you follow my column, you know that I’ve talked about the
massive failure around image optimization before. The fact is that 78 percent
of all SEO problems are image related.
While images are incredibly important to the user
experience, image alt tags are equally critical for Google’s spiders to
understand what is going on in the image. This description is what will give
the crawlers context to gain a deeper understanding of what your page is all
about.
4. Product Review Paucity
If you’re in the eCommerce game, I shouldn’t have to tell
you how epically important reviews are. If your products don’t have the social
proof that 77 percent of all consumers demand before buying, then you are
basically begging them to buy somewhere else.
When an abundance of reviews are present, people are more
likely to trust their prospective purchase; it’s that simple.
As far as SEO is concerned, search engines treat fresh and
dynamic content more favorably. As new reviews are uploaded (the more frequent,
the better) the page itself becomes dynamic.
As this aspect continues to improve your SEO score, more
relevant traffic will be driven to your site, which can lead to more sales and
reviews, which repeats the cycle again.
If you aren’t sure how to sway your buyers to leave an
honest assessment, there are a multitude of ways to gain product reviews from
customers.
5. Slacking on Security
Over the past several years, the public has watched a slew
of major corporations – from Yahoo! to Target to Sony – get hacked and lose
their customers’ information. This means that buyers are weary of where they
shop and are looking for certain security markers to gain the peace of mind
that their data will be protected.
One of the most prominent and sought after security features
is SSL encryption. In fact, in 2014, Google announced that it would provide a
slight rankings boost to those who employed the technology:
“We’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites
use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms.
We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking
signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal…. But over time, we may
decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to
switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.”
You shouldn’t, however, employ this purely for the rankings
increase. You should add this encryption to your website for the safety of your
brand and customers.
Source: - http://www.sitepronews.com/2017/08/28/5-of-todays-biggest-ecommerce-seo-blunders/
There’s a ton of competition out there in eCommerce-land.
Don’t let your brand go unnoticed simply because there are a variety of SEO
mistakes on your site. Get your webstore cleaned up with these five tips and
your brand will stand a much better chance of gaining the clicks and sales that
will help you prosper.
Which of these mistakes are you guilty of? What is your
favorite method for gaining product reviews?
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