Ecommerce website development has become a craze in the market. But this craze has also resulted in the entire platform getting commoditized. There are thousands of websites selling millions of products, only a few achieve success. The reason in most cases being poor implementation of ecommerce solutions especially with on-page optimization. Let us take a look at some of the common SEO mistakes of ecommerce websites and how to avoid them.
Mistake 1: Using Duplicate Content
In most cases e-commerce websites display a large number of products in their stores. They use the title, description ‘word for word’ given by the manufacturer. The problem is the same content would be used by hundreds of other websites. As far as SEO is concerned duplicate content is perhaps the most detrimental factor in a website’s success.
Solution: Almost 90% of your sales would come from a handful number of products no matter how big a product inventory you have. So identify those products and place unique content in their description. This will attract search engine spiders and if you have abundant human resource available make each and every product description unique.
This is nothing but a situation where the same content appear across multiple URLs and raises duplicity issues. This happens when you allow users to search for your products in multiple ways by customizing search results. Canonical issues don’t easily fall into your eyes but can result in poor performance of the ecommerce store.
Mistake 2: Canonical Issue
This is nothing but a situation where the same content appear across multiple URLs and raises duplicity issues. This happens when you allow users to search for your products in multiple ways by customizing search results. Canonical issues don’t easily fall into your eyes but can result in poor performance of the ecommerce store.
Solution: Use the rel="canonical" tag in the <head> section of the website and tell the search engines which page is the native or default page. The search engine will index only the default page and help you attract more traffic to your website.
Mistake 3: Product Categorization
In a superstore there are agents to guide you down to the products in case you can’t find them. There are no such helpers in an online store so if your customer has to click five times and go to the fifth sub-index to find products you are rest assured about a FAILURE! Search engines won’t index these products either in their results pages.
Solution: Use proper product architecture and make sure that your products are well categorized and don’t go beyond a third-level index. Popular products can be listed in a one click page such as ‘Hot Deals’, ‘Most Selling’ etc. Use a proper sitemap as this helps both the search engines as well as the visitors in your website.
Mistake 4: Legacy Code
Legacy code is one of the most overlooked areas of ecommerce website development despite the fact that they increase the page load time enormously. Legacy codes are nothing but those which cater to the needs of customer who are using old OS and browsers. The truth is most of these customers will seldom shop from your online store!
Solution: Get rid of it immediately as it adds less value to your online store and give you poor SEO score.
Mistake 5: It’s Not about Traffic
Success in ecommerce web development is not merely about getting visitors to your website but selling products to them. Success is measured in conversion rate or number of sales per 100 or 1000 customers. Keywords, social media marketing etc. can get you traffic but cannot ensure sales.
Solution: Focus on the highest selling products on your website and place them on the homepage. Offer attractive discounts and other freebies as this attract attention of the users and help you achieve higher conversion rates.
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