E-commerce platforms are gaining massive popularity worldwide. Experts estimate that by 2040, 95% of all purchases will be through e-commerce. People’s increasing dependency and interest in the online buying and selling environment has pushed e-commerce sites to invest in growth marketing strategies and tools like SEO.
Almost every purchase channel online relies on SEO to boost their e-commerce business since 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. It explains why SEO is the fifth most effective digital marketing tool businesses use to get more eyes on their website.
However, SEO may not work for everyone. Online businesses must realize that SEO’s long-term success depends on an optimal SEO strategy. In the adrenaline rush of boosting their business with SEO, most organizations fail to customize an SEO strategy for their company and overlook aligning company goals with SEO goals.
Do not become blindsided by the success rate of SEO; you will only see the sun rise on your business if you do not create an ideal SEO strategy for your growth. To help you in the process, here are seven common SEO mistakes that you must avoid for the benefit of your e-commerce business:
Most e-commerce sites are so focused on keywords that they overlook other important aspects of an SEO strategy like link building—search engine platforms like Google value web content that links back to other high-quality content online. Therefore, you must ensure that your web content (especially blogs) contains internal and external high-quality links leading to relevant pages. It explains why successful online businesses hire a link building service for agencies to source relevant backlinks from various industries.
SEO marketing efforts mostly fail when online businesses forget to factor in the audience. Each product or service on e-commerce sites targets a specific ideal customer profile. Companies need to align their SEO strategy to the target audience to connect with them. Instead of finding keywords relevant to the product or service, e-commerce businesses must focus on researching keywords their target audience uses to search for the product or service. Content like blogs, videos, and posts must be created around the latter keywords to increase relevance.
Did you know that 93% of customers read online reviews before buying a product or service? SEO isn’t just about directing traffic to your website; it’s also about converting the audience to buyers. Unfortunately, online businesses seldom use reviews to their advantage. It would help if you looked at product reviews as an opportunity to find ideal keywords or to figure out what people like or dislike about the product or service so you can alter your selling strategy accordingly.
A big part of SEO is improving user experience by giving them enough reasons to stay on the site until they are convinced to interact. To improve user experience, e-commerce businesses flood their sites with cool graphics, visual elements, and attractive video and audio content, making the site slow. A slow-loading site significantly affects overall search engine rankings, no matter how great the SEO strategy is because 40% of webpage visitors abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Hence, you lose most of your target audience to site speed and other functional problems.
If you don’t know how to reduce your website’s loading speed, it’s better to trust professionals who will advise you on the best solutions. If you have a WooCommerce store, you can outsource WordPress web development services and get a fully-functioning website that loads fast and meets all your requirements.
When a website shows up in the search engine, it displays the title and meta description that extend an invitation to users to visit your e-commerce site. Unfortunately, most online businesses forget to enhance their invitation. E-commerce sites need to optimize these two elements to convince the audience to click on the link. Therefore, the site must create an appealing title, preferably using a keyword, and make the meta description clear and attractive to tempt the audience into interacting with the business.
An SEO strategy is not only about ranking your e-commerce website on the first page of search results. It’s also about converting web traffic into sales to garner revenue for the business. An optimal SEO strategy is pointless if the content marketing efforts lack call-to-actions and other tools and tricks that push visitors to buy a product or service. It would help if you considered factors other than site outlook, keyword density, and link building to complete the broader SEO image to convert efforts into revenue for the e-commerce business.
Too much of a good thing can eventually become bad. While SEO keywords can do wonders for your e-commerce business, keyword stuffing does the opposite. Several online businesses believe that stuffing meta tags, URLs, product descriptions, and other textual content with keywords will boost their rankings. However, the search engine can identify this unnatural stuffing, leading to a dramatic drop in rankings. User experience is also affected by keywords, as visitors may avoid interacting with your content. According to SEO experts, the ideal keyword density is 1-2%, meaning keywords must appear once or twice in a hundred words writeup.
Google Images represents more than 20% of Google organic traffic. When optimized for SEO, images can easily help you to outrank your competitors. With the right tools and plugin, images SEO optimization is a breeze.
Basically, you need to compress your images (Imagify) and optimize your images names and alternative texts (ImageSEO).
Easy peasy!
The eCommerce platform requires security and it cannot be ignored. The platform carries thousands of customers’ information on a daily base and it requires strong security.
SSL certificate can be an ideal protocol that can protect the data flowing between the server and the users. However, if the eCommerce platform is running subdomains then, a low-cost or cheap Wildcard SSL is necessary.
There is no need to spend huge costs on purchasing an SSL certificate. Without an SSL certificate, attackers can sniff ongoing information and misuse it.
Avoiding the SEO mistakes mentioned above will help you change the course of your online business and push it towards rapid growth and success. However, you must remember that the digital world is ever-changing and dynamic. Invest readily in research to stay updated with rapid changes in the online business environment – relating to search engine rules & regulations, ideal user profile, user experience, etc. The information may help your business adapt to the e-commerce industry’s shifting pattern, so you can continue to drive your digital selling bu
