6 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

SEO for eCommerce stores has become one of the vital things to improve and optimise, so you should always consider what SEO mistakes should be avoided. Especially since the health crisis, when online purchases skyrocketed to the highest volume ever received, surpassing even Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But optimising an eCommerce store is not as simple as it seems, and there will always be problems and errors we will encounter while doing our SEO optimisation.

What are the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2021?

1.Lack of product optimisation

One of the most common SEO “horror stories” that are found in eCommerce stores are websites with a lack of product optimisation. This consists of just uploading products to your eCommerce store and leave the product description blank or minimal.

Product descriptions are not only good for SEO rankings but it will as well provide more information to your customers about the item. Take advantage of this space and engage with your audience. What are the characteristics of your products? Why is your product unique? What makes it different from the rest? Do you have technical specs that could help your customer? All this information is important to improve your product optimisation and descriptions.

2.No product reviews

Product reviews are vital for eCommerce. Why? Did you know that 57% of users read product reviews when making a purchase?

If your eCommerce store does not have product reviews implemented, your shop could be running the risk of getting a lower revenue than expected. Something important for SEO is that these product reviews need to be non-biased and implemented through an external platform such as Trustpilot or Yotpo, which have as a requirement that these reviews are from verified customers.

Another positive thing about having these reviews from an external service is that they can be automatically picked up by SERPs and be displayed as rich snippets in the search results.

3.URL structure

URL structure is one of the most overlooked attributes of a website. An URL should contain descriptive keywords about what the user and the SERPs are going to find on the page. It is not an unusual thing, especially in eCommerce stores, seeing that URLs contain non-ASCII characters that damage the structure of the website. It is important paying attention to these small details to make the user experience as smooth as possible.

4.Duplicated metadata, another one of the main SEO

Metadata, titles and descriptions are the first online impression of your brand.

The first interaction an online user will have with your website is seeing how it is listed on search rankings –  and this is what makes it so important, as it will make the difference between a visitor clicking in your listing or not.

It is an underrated attribute of the websites that many webmasters do not take advantage of and as well as abusing duplicated titles when they should be unique to each page.

These titles must be tailored individually to each page, descriptive, and targeting key terms of the brand, which should engage with the user and have a call to action to increase Click Through Rate (CTR).

H1 are also important and should be different from page titles, as they are focused to describe what the page is about.

5.Duplicated content

Another common eCommerce SEO mistake is excessive duplicated content. This is one of the easiest issues to be resolved. Same as metadata, it is important that every page has its own unique content.

Sometimes, it is unavoidable having repeated text or pages in a site, however, attributes like canonical tags should be used to make sure that the crawlers are looking at the original version of the page.

Other similar issues involve regional variations of a page. For this reason, attributes like “hreflang” should be used to indicate the correct version for each language/location (i.e us/en – en/en) .

If the problem of the website is duplicated files the file robots.txt should be used to be able to guide crawlers to what content should not be indexed.

6. Page Speed

Is your website slow? Did you know that page speed is a key element for a user to engage with your website?

An average user’s attention online is just three seconds, if your website takes longer than this to load, you risk losing a user, which means a lost sale and the possibility of that user not returning to use your site.

Optimising images, reducing excessive code, upgrading servers or updating to the last version of your CMS are some of the improvements your website could go through to better its page speed.

Some of the most common eCommerce SEO mistakes to avoid in 2020 are focused on product and on-page optimization, which are in fact easier to fix. Implementing SEO strategies reinforcing these areas will have a positive impact on your website performance.

If you need help with your SEO strategy, our digital marketing experts are on hand to implement a bulletproof strategy that will deliver results. Get in touch by emailing success@5874commerce.com or calling 01213695874 to find out how we can help you reach your SEO goals.