Is your site not getting enough traffic? There have been several issues raised over the past years that greatly affect SEO for web retailers. But there is no need to worry. There are ways to resolve those issues.
Let us concentrate more on the plague that most e-commerce site encounters on a regular basis.
Invaluable Product Descriptions
Most e-commerce sites offer a wide variety of products; hence it has become a dilemma for them to create detailed descriptions for each and some use copied or automated descriptions. However, this creates problems for SEO. How?
- Short or invaluable descriptions do not give search engines enough references to work with. Longer contents normally contain more information and keywords and this is what you need to get more traffic.
- Automated descriptions from templates are being recognized as copied or duplicated.
- Copied descriptions from other sites do not give you any advantage over your competitors. You do not have something unique for clients to run after you. There is nothing for the search engines to index.
It may seem impossible to manually update all your product descriptions, especially if they are too many, but turning some good value pages into full-pledged landing pages can make a huge difference.
Avoiding copied descriptions will also help resolve this issue.
Absence of Product Reviews
Reviews or feedback from first-hand users of a product seems to affect search results greatly in unexpected ways.
In a research done by Yotpo over 30,000 businesses, they found out that businesses who have published user reviews on their site received an outstanding level of traffic. For 9 long months of observation and implementation, they noticed that Google organic page views monthly have increased by more than 30%.
Never be afraid of getting fair or negative ratings or feedback. Actually, the more diverse your reviews are, the more legit it becomes. This gives you better conversions.
Less Unbranded Keyword Optimization
Every e-commerce marketer should know the importance of using the right keyword. One of the most common mistakes of websites is that their contents do not match with the keywords they have in mind.
Yes, it is true that clients will search popular company names but not with obscure brands. You still have use generic and popular phrases if you want to get a good amount of traffic.
This does not mean abandoning niche keywords. Just go after the phrases that clients will most likely use when they search for products or services like yours. Also, study the meta descriptions, image alt, URLs, and headings.
Over Usage of Transactional Keywords with No Informational Contents
Never focus too much on transactional keywords. You need informational contents and keywords to target clients who are somehow up the funnel. You can rank for less competitive keywords and establish a better reputation on different search engines with this technique. This has been proven effective many times.
You may use SEMrush to find the level of difficulty of the keywords recommended by Google. You can also search forums to know the kind of questions most clients were asking for informational keywords.
Implementing Poorly Planned Site Redesigns
A poorly designed site can ruin your organic search traffic. You will waste money for nothing. If you are planning to implement a site redesign, be sure to consider SEO. Redesigning your page will affect the format of your contents. Some of the contents that were pulling great traffic can be rearranged and you might end up losing clients.
Be careful when redesigning your page as key pages can be deleted. Links pointing to good pages might be now pointing to nothing. In some cases, contents are being duplicated and you can be punished for that.Never do a site redesign without consulting a professional.
Poor Migration Between E-commerce Platforms
Majority of e-commerce businesses make use of 3rd party platforms when creating their websites. This allows them to focus more on their business rather than developing their pages. It is also common for a site to switch from one platform to another, thinking that they will still have the same features. However, this isn’t always true and it will hurt your ranking badly.
Some make use of JavaScript for pagination while others prefer HTML. Google cannot crawl the pagination if JavaScript is involved. Now you see the difference.
Not Taking Advantage of Promising Keywords
Earlier we have talked about focusing on informational keywords. You must also know how to leverage promising keywords. Knowing how to identify which page on the site already ranks well for a given keyword can be helpful.
Successful e-commerce websites would take time to know low hanging fruit pages which already contain fairly good keywords then update them by tweaking the headers and contents. They also do link building and add quality to their site contents.
There are two good ways to use to be able to optimize promising keywords. First, you can run your U|RLs on Google Keyword Planner. Second, look at your keyword rankings on Google or SEMrush to know which ones already rank on the second page etc.
If your keywords are already ranking even without optimization, then you are looking at a pot of gold. Capitalize on them. Upgrade the headings and contents and you will surely earn a good price!
Practice what you have just learned! Start looking at your site now. Do any of the problems mentioned above affect you? Correct them now and start earning more money.
