When launching your very first online store, it’s important to understand the potential obstacles, research the best strategies to overcome them, and employ tools that will set your online store apart. A resource frequently used incorrectly, especially by newly established stores, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In this article, we’re going to review common errors made in SEO for online stores and provide friendly SEO advice to best launch your online stores successfully.
What Is SEO?
SEO is a vital tool that increases your site’s visibility and accessibility on the internet. It is a method for search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, that prioritizes content based on its relevance and keywords. The more relevant a site, the higher search ranking it receives and the wider reach it will have online. Wider reach equals more traffic for your site. Because of SEO’s complex and evolving structure of rules, it’s easy to make a mistake when employing them.
SEO Errors That Negatively Affect Online Stores
Wrong keywords
SEO is all about keywords, which single words or phrases used to make searches. Because of their importance, using the wrong keywords is a common error with lasting consequences. When selecting keywords for ecommerce stores, it’s vital to keep your customers in mind. What words do they use to search for your products? What are the best words suggested by SEO? The best way to avoid making this mistake is to do your research on keywords before attempting SEO. Use tools such as Google Trends or SEMRush to witness the influence of your keywords.
Lack of images or untagged ones
Not providing images with your products can have serious consequences for the SEO of online stores. Users enjoy crawling sites that offer visually appeal images alongside products and can get too bogged down with details on sites that do not provide visuals. You do not need to crowd your product pages with images, but adding 1-4 tagged photos to accompany your products will increase user engagement.
Unoriginal or dull product descriptions
Another error is duplication, a complicated way of saying your articles are not original. This is especially true for product descriptions. Some online stores use the same product description provided by the distributer, thus duplicating. This can be avoided by rewriting the descriptions, providing original content with fresh ideas and suggesting new product uses. You can either do it yourself or hire professional content creators such as Lowpost, a content creation platform that provides original and customized content.
Not having a blog or not updating it.
Failing to provide a blog or not having a consistently maintained one is fatal. A blog is useful because it provides fresh and relevant variety to your website. Adding a blog gives your site control over which internal links to use, pages to lead your readers to, and products to promote in a more personable and creative manner. Search engines find blogs relevant and are more likely to rank them higher due to their unique content and use of links. Links are important to a blog because they lead readers to other articles, thus creating an engaging experience and driving more traffic across your site. This is known as Link juice. Not having a blog leaves your website without a unique marketing edge that would ultimately set your ecommerce apart.
Complex site to navigate
Another typical SEO error is having poor navigation on your ecommerce site. Your website should be easy to navigate and users should be able to interact with your site with ease. In short, if your website is not «user-friendly», visitors are less likely to stick around or engage with your site. Because of this, search engines would consider your website irrelevant to users and thus, give you a low ranking. So, be sure to create menus that are simple and easy to navigate. By making your site as friendly to users as possible, people will crawl all over it and, as a reward, search engines will see your site’s relevance and worth.
Other errors
Failing to redirect 301 pages, or pages for products no longer available. Discontinued products without redirect pages are annoying to users, who may choose to leave your site as a result. It’s important to keep user experience at the front of priorities and providing a redirect page that not only apologizes for the discontinued product, but also provides valuable alternatives will keep users coming back.
Not linking images is an error few think about, though it does impact SEO. Images should have alt-text, which describes the image and uses keywords, and a source link should be attached.
In conclusion, the best approach to avoiding SEO errors is to follow the above SEO advice and rely on tools such as Lowpost to improve your online store SEO strategies. At Lowpost we are experts in creating content marketing. At our Lowpost platform, we customize content creation with SEO and offer you a great solution to save time and money when implementing your digital marketing strategy.
