11 Common Issues Occur with Ecommerce SEO

 

As eCommerce business is growing rapidly, many merchants join this bandwagon carrying a high expectation to mint money easily by listing various products on their E-shop. However, managing an eCommerce website and running it successfully is a challenging job on account of the frequent changes in products, industry trends, Google updates, etc.

As the online shopping is surging with each passing day, the competition for getting shopper’s attention is also increasing sharply. E-store owners employ various SEO tools and practices to obtain organic search visibility and sell their products/services.

However, doing SEO for eCommerce websites is completely different & complicated from SEO execution for traditional websites/blogs. This article highlights some main eCommerce SEO issues faced by online entrepreneurs and their solutions as well. Just scroll down and cast a look-

#1 Having No SEO Strategy At All

Most of the online retailers just make their eCommerce site live, list a number of products and expect online shoppers to buy from their website. To be honest, they don’t have a definite SEO strategy and specific goals when they optimize their website for search engines.

Solution

Online retailers need to allot a handsome budget to conduct a comprehensive search engine marketing campaign at all the times. They need to have a sound SEO strategy that defines their target with regard to the main keywords they want to target, conversions, traffic, sales, a number of subscribers, revenues, etc.

#2 Low – quality Content issue

In order to help your site rank high in Google and other search engines, you need to use high-quality content while optimizing your website. However, due to the scarcity of meaningful content, there are several E-store owners, who use low-quality content (default product description provided by the manufacturer, duplicate title, meta description, etc.) to optimize their website.

However, using low-quality content to implement SEO practices for eCommerce website can force search engines to downgrade its ranking or erase it completely from their search index.

Solution

Always use high-quality content (created by professional content developers) to optimize your website. Make sure that you update your website regularly with meaningful & user-centric content. If you don’t have the resources to create the sufficient number of quality content, never hesitate to use content development services.

#3 No Schema.org markup

Several SEO enthusiasts neglect the huge importance of Schema.org markup while doing SEO for websites. In fact, it is a markup language (a collection of HTML tags), which allows search engines to understand your site’s content easily and include them in search results. It is quite helpful in increasing your site’s ranking in different search engines. Therefore, you need to add schema markup to each and every page of your site to gain more traffic to your website.

#4 Slow Loading Speed Of Your Website

Website loading speed is one of the most important factors behind the success of your E-store. Google and other search engines consider site’s speed as an important factor while determining its ranking. If your site loads fast on all platforms, it offers good browsing/shopping experience to visitors. But, if your site has a long loading time, it gives a bad user experience. It forces visitors to leave your site immediately, which spoils your business sooner or later.

Solution

To make your website fast, you can implement the following measures:

• Read reviews before finalizing hosting plan,
• Use a CDN,
• Erase unnecessary database regularly,
• Keep your coding simple and light,
• Implement image optimization and compress files before uploading them on your website, etc.

#5 No Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of webpages that are displayed in a single page layout. There are two types of sitemaps-

• XML sitemaps
• HTML sitemaps

An XML sitemap helps search engines to find your website and its internal pages easily and add them to their indexes. An HTML sitemap makes it easier for visitors to navigate the site easily.

If there is no sitemap on your site, both search engines and visitors face difficulties to find the important pages of your site. It may cause indexing delay and lower visibility in search engines.

Therefore, you should add these two sitemaps on your site. You can use Sitemap generator plugins/extensions to create sitemaps for your website easily and quickly.

#6 No blogging

Most of the eCommerce companies ignore the importance of having a corporate blog and communicating with their customers with the help of user-centric content. When your eCommerce website is supported with active blogging, it can help you to boost traffic to your website through inbound links & establish your brand as an expert in a specific field.

Therefore, you should publish unique content on different blogging platforms to educate your customers about your business activities and keep them interested in your business. Write buyer’s guide, product upkeep posts, How to do articles, etc, for the subscribers of your corporate blog and interlink those posts to your site’s main pages to get traffic back to your website.

#7 Lack of User-friendly URL

When you add a new post/page to your eCommerce website, a default URL is generated automatically. There are many store owners who use the default URL for the site’s page. Sometimes, URLs generated are ugly & lengthy (with extra characters having no clear meaning). Such URLs are not keyword-friendly & search engine friendly. If you think from the perspective of users, it may seem unreadable too.

Therefore, before making your post live, you need to edit the default URL and relevant keywords to make them friendly for both your readers and the search engines. It will help search engines to include your website’s pages in search results frequently, helping you to get more traffic to your site.

#8 Lack of ALT Text in images

Images are widely used on eCommerce websites to let visitors have a look at the product they are going to buy. However, SEO professionals make a blunder mistake of not adding the alt attributes to the images they upload on the site. Search engines can’t read out image content if there is no alt text added to it.

Therefore, add alt attributes to all images you upload to your website. It will help Google and other search engines to understand the message of your image content easily and include them in search results.

#9 No Product reviews

Online buyers believe on the opinion/feedback of other shoppers before making a decision about buying new products. So, they browse different online shopping websites to look for product reviews and user rating at first. If you look at a website like Unrivaled Review, you can see this in action. Here, you get an insight into a customers experience, and this ultimately helps you build trust with your target audience.

Additionally, if your own website does not display any product reviews, it is possible that shoppers may not buy from your website.

So, allow your customers to rate your products on your website. Display the latest comments/feedbacks and suggestions as far as possible to attract business from potential customers. It also helps you to remove errors in your eCommerce website and keep it up-to-date.

#10 Lack Of Social Sharing Options

Different Social sharing websites are a great way to promote your site’s content among rapidly growing social media users and get leads from them. So, when you share your content on different social media channels, it is likely to get more page views, which gives a bigger exposure to your site. In case, there is no social sharing option on your eCommerce website, you may lose potential customers coming out from social media channels.

So, make sure you have installed the buttons of all leading social networking channels on your site to allow your visitors to share your content.

#11 Your eCommerce Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly

When you set up an eCommerce venture, you have to compete heavily against several major competitors to earn your share of business from the eCommerce world. Therefore, each and every source, from where you can get traffic, is important for the growth of your eCommerce business.

If you don’t optimize your website for mobile devices, you will lose a significant amount of business that comes from mobile devices. Google also considers it as an important factor while determining your site’s ranking.

So, to boost your eCommerce business, make your site responsive to various mobile devices. It will help your customers to access your site using various mobile devices, which means more business opportunities for you.

Conclusion

If you Maintain a successful eCommerce website, it helps you to generate substantial income and expand your business in all directions. However, while implementing various SEO practices for your eCommerce website, you may encounter various issues, which are mentioned above (with solutions). You can easily do away with such SEO problems as suggested in the article.