Cristian
Level X3
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Over the years I've seen a lot of e-commerce websites take off and reach success but also a lot of them that failed miserably especially with SEO, not managing to gain sufficient organic traffic and conversions for a sustainable business.
Having dealt with so many e-commerce projects I've noticed a certain pattern in terms of SEO mistakes and problems they were having. I'm going to list 6 of the most significant SEO issues e-commerce website are dealing with on a general note:
1. Investing little to no effort into their product description
This is the most common and probably the most damaging SEO problem in e-commerce websites. Product pages with a low-quality product description or even a lack of a description altogether. This signals to all search engines a low importance content as well as a bad user experience.
Why would someone buy your product if you have a short, undetailed product description and why would search engines position your results in front of the competition if you clearly have so little to offer?
My advice: Focus on the product description! Include as many details as possible! Do a small survey among your customers to figure out what kind of questions they're having regarding your product and include those answers as information into the description itself. Keep in mind it needs to be simple, straight to the point, easy to understand but sufficient enough to answer questions users and potential customers may have.
Also, if you are selling the kind of products other websites are also selling, like from the same manufacturer, make sure your descriptions are bigger and most importantly: Unique - You need to stand out inside search engines and that means unique quality content.
2. Listing pages or category pages don't have an actual description box.
Most e-commerce websites out there have virtually no listing page description or category page description box. And that sucks from an SEO perspective! Why? Because search engines may have no idea what those listing pages are all about, they may get an idea from the actual title tag and the titles of the products, but otherwise, search engines will be in the dark.
It is your job to single what you are selling with a helpful user orientated piece of content that will also help you from an SEO perspective, especially when you want to rank for short highly popular keywords that stand at the basis of your product's niche.
3. User-generated content: Reviews, Comments, and Questions.
Like I said on above on point 1, you always want more content in your product pages! And what better way to create that content than having your own users and customers create it themselves! This is also probably the best type of content to have because users often use the right "language" and keywords search engines may rank you for but also add to the totality of the content on that specific product page.
Depending on your niche and possibilities you can choose user reviews, user comments or user questions, or even all of them!
Just make sure you have them! Especially the customer reviews! Most users will expect the reviews, their whole buying decision may rest on reading a few reviews so you are definitely loosing a lot of customers for not integrating a user rating/review system.
4. Not using generic and niched based keywords.
I've seen a lot of web stores doing this mistake over and over: using only brand based keywords in their product title and product description, ignoring altogether niche related keywords as well as generic keywords.
Having a good SEO implementing a proper keyword research is key in all of this! Why? Because the e-commerce owners tend to focus on optimizing for the brand only, even if nobody ever heard of that brand or even if the brand is totally new.
You don't need brand based keyword optimization if you have zero searches for your brand based keywords! With that in mind, I suggest you focus your optimization on generic keywords, niche-based keywords, and local based keywords.
5. Bad design and awful user experience.
This is a hard one to accept but many e-commerce websites are missing a very important element: they don't look good and they have huge usability issues. And yes, design, as well as usability issues, will affect your SEO because the way users will interact with your website, search engines can see it and take note of it.
These issues can range from not having an HTTPS and having lots of 404 errors to a bad confusing menu section as well as a long and complicated checkout procedure that may make a lot of users abandon your website out of frustration.
6. A redesign as implemented but the transition was done completely wrong.
Again, I've seen this can to many times that I can count. An e-commerce website decided to have a complete makeover, having a re-design as well as a totally new platform to hold everything on.
The problem is how the actual transition was being made. Not implementing 301 redirects but heavily changing all main categories, pages as well as the URLs. This will lead to a new platform and a new design that might work fine but with the total cost of all previous SEO earned authority, resulting in a website with a better user experience, design, and platform but with a lower organic traffic compared to the old website!
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DenisP
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