Unlike blogs and content-rich websites (e.g., fitness sites), online shops are more difficult to configure for SEO, especially if the products you sell are available on multiple websites.
I will explain below the 5 critical SEO Errors that e-commerce websites make and how to avoid them.
1. Product titles are not unique or SEO-optimized
Product titles are very important for on-page SEO. I have explained in the past why titles must be optimized, and from my experience with e-commerce websites, this is still the number one mistake that most webmasters make.
Duplicate titles within the same website or on other websites are one reason your e-commerce website is not performing well in search results.
What are the characteristics of a good product title?
- Less than 70 characters
- Unique within the website – no other product in the store has the same title
- Be indicative of what the product is about
- Talk the user’s language - The product title should include keywords or phrases people use to search for the particular product, not its technical name.
Some tips for writing good product titles
I know it’s difficult to come up with unique product titles when you have a lot of similar products. Once you write the titles of a couple of products, you run out of ideas; inevitably, the rest are duplicated.
You can include product attributes and characteristics in the title (colors, size, material, etc.) and the brand/model name where applicable. For example, let’s say you are selling tablets. Here are a few unique titles you can use for similar products.
- “Samsung Android Tablet”
- “16GB Samsung Android Tablet”
- “16GB White Samsung Android Tablet”
- “16GB/3G Samsung Tablet running Android”
2. Lack or duplicate product descriptions
Besides the title, the product description is another important part of ecommerce SEO. A critical SEO error that most websites make is either having no product descriptions or having the same content you can find on hundreds of other websites on the web.
Let me explain very quickly why this is bad. Imagine that you are selling a product that can also be found on Amazon, eBay, and other popular and well-known websites. In your product description, you have the exact content that is already on Amazon.
When search engines come to crawl your website, they will understand that the content you have is already in their index, so they will just ignore it and move on. If they find that many of your pages follow the same pattern, they will ignore your website as a whole.
On the other hand, if they crawl your website and find original content about the products you are selling, they will include the content in their index, which is the first successful step in your effort to achieve better rankings for your ecommerce store.
A note about the lack of content. We always say that we need to ‘fetch the search engines with content,’ the real reason we should do that is that content helps them understand what the page is all about. If your product pages only have images of the product and a title, that does not give them enough information to analyze and decide what to do with the particular page.
How do you write good product descriptions?
As with titles, writing unique product descriptions for each product is difficult, so you must think hard about what to write about. A good tip is to describe the product in words by highlighting the physical differences between similar products. For example, imagine you are selling different pens in different colors (same model). Here are a few descriptions:
- “A stylish ball pen with a white label. The main body comes with a brown finish that is both elegant and ….”
- “A blue ball pen suitable for left handers. Your logo is printed with white letters on the top part of the pen and…”
3. Bad formatted URLs
It is common for many shopping engines to present product pages with URLs like http://www.myshop.com/productid12?EEFEFS4, which are unreadable for both search engines and users. Most of them are like that because when those systems were developed, it was easier for the programmers to build the URLs using that pattern, of course, without considering SEO.
If you are lucky, your platform will allow you to change the URL to something more meaningful, for example, http://www.myshop.com/16-gb-samsung-tablet-white.
Note: When doing so, remember to perform 301 redirections from the old to the new URLs.
When thinking about your URL structure, try to create it based on your product groups or categories. For example, if you are selling android-tablets and phones, you can have the following category URLs:
- http://www.myshop.com/android-tablets
- http://www.myshop.com/apple-iphones
4. Website takes too much time to load
Besides the URLS, product titles, and descriptions, website speed is another important element in selling online. Many studies show a clear correlation between website speed and product sales, i.e., faster websites generate more sales.
If the software you are using is old and out of date or if you cannot optimize the code as you like, you will probably end up in the same category as hundreds of online shops that take a long time to load, keeping potential customers away.
As an ecommerce web owner, you must ensure that your shop loads on desktops, tablets, and mobiles as fast as possible (preferably in less than 4 seconds). To achieve that, you can:
- Use a fast VPS to host your website.
- Optimize your images and videos - Optimization reduces the size of the pages, and they load faster.
- Optimize your code – if you cannot do that, hire a programmer to optimize the code of your shop by avoiding unnecessary code calls that may slow down the website
- Optimize your pages - on the product pages, keep the items that can help you make sales, not the items you think are useful.
5. Lack of usability
All the above SEO errors are related to one thing: usability. True SEO is about usability, user-friendliness, and user experience, and to make sales online, your shop has to be usable. This depends on many factors, but in general, an online shop should be:
- Easy to navigate
- Fast
- Mobile Responsive
- SEO Friendly
- Well structured
Last but not least, the usability of an online shop depends on the type of products you are selling. For best results, your shop software should be customized to accommodate and showcase your products in the best possible way.
For example, a shop designed to sell clothes cannot be used to sell cars. It may be usable for the user looking for clothes but not for the user looking for cars. What I am saying is that it is nice to use one of the out-of-the-box shopping software available on the web, but make sure that you can customize it so that it’s usable for the users looking for the products you are selling.
Conclusion
Selling products and services online makes the Internet so powerful and useful. While selling on the Internet appeals to many, creating a shop people will trust and use requires a lot of thought and hard work.
The SEO errors described above are typical errors many business owners make, negatively affecting their online business performance.
Stay tuned for more e-commerce SEO tips and advice.
