What Are the Top SEO Mistakes Made By Ecommerce Businesses?

According to VWO, SEO is the fifth most effective digital marketing tool for retention for e-commerce businesses. The other tools that outranked SEO were email marketing (56%), social media (37%), content marketing (32%), and referral marketing (26%).

With SEO ranking as one of the top most important purchase channels for e-commerce businesses, you might think that more businesses would place greater focus on their SEO efforts. However, many e-commerce businesses see fewer benefits to SEO than other digital marketing channels. Getting an expert to focus on the SEO elements can help boost your business in the online market, such as Infintech Designs, a professional SEO firm in New Orleans. 

Unfortunately, this could actually be due to the SEO mistakes that these businesses are making and not because SEO is simply less effective. To help e-commerce business owners understand where they are going wrong when it comes to SEO, here are the top SEO mistakes that e-commerce businesses make.

1. Not Paying Attention to Customers Needs in Keyword Research

While most e-commerce businesses do actually perform keyword research, they spend much of that time finding keywords that are relevant to their products instead of the keywords that their target audience is actually searching for.

Focusing on the keyword phrases that your target audience is actually searching for is a more cost-effective approach to SEO because these keywords are less likely to be as competitive and as expensive as branded product keywords.

2. Keyword Spamming

E-commerce businesses tend to overload content and product pages with keywords in an effort to rank higher for particular keywords. However, with the algorithm updates that Google has made in recent years, the extra usage of keywords just looks like keyword spam to Google.

E-commerce businesses should refrain from unnaturally adding keywords to metadata, URLs, product descriptions, and other areas where keywords don’t often appear on non-e-commerce websites.

3. Duplicate Content

Too often, e-commerce businesses simply copy and paste the product descriptions provided to them by the manufacturers of the products that they sell. As a result, e-commerce sites are often littered with many pages that contain duplicate content.

While it may seem easier to use the provided manufacturer’s product description, if you want your website to rank higher in the search engines, it is generally recommended that you don’t do this.

You should also avoid republishing boilerplate content across multiple pages because this could be considered as the deliberate duplication of duplicate content, as well. Remember, when it comes to achieving higher search rankings, using unique content is always the best approach.

4. No Product Reviews

Customers are much more likely to make a purchase if there are product reviews for a particular product. In fact, 61% of customers look at reviews before they make a purchase. In addition, product reviews also add unique content to your website, which can help you to address the duplicate content problem that most e-commerce sites struggle with.

5. No Security Encryption

Not having security encryption is one of the biggest mistakes that e-commerce businesses make when it comes to SEO. However, most don’t realize that it is affecting their SEO efforts.

Security encryption (HTTPS which encrypts data by using an SSL certificate) ensures that your customers’ personal information is protected when they make purchases on your website.

Not only does security encryption prevent against hackers, but you also reduce the chances that your site will experience a data breach. Google wants websites to provide services that are safe to use. As a result, using HTTPS on your site has been considered as a ranking factor.

If you are concerned about your e-commerce website’s rankings and want to improve them Infintech Designs can help. Contact us today to schedule your free e-commerce site SEO audit.