11 errors in e-commerce that you make

Many online retailers believe that simply listing as many items as possible will be enough to generate a lot of traffic. But this is a common mistake.

SEO for ecommerce is a complex topic, more time consuming than it is for blogs and websites. This is not least because the products and product pages are constantly changing.

It is very likely that you are making a few mistakes without even knowing it. In this article, we'll take a look at 11 not-so-obvious problems you might have overlooked and how to solve them through your SEO efforts.

1. Rely on rating only

Search rankings shouldn't be the only measure of SEO success. Google uses hundreds of different signals in its algorithms to rank sites. The factors that determine the position of the site can change at any time. If you focus only on ranking, you don't see the big picture, and then your tactics won't work anymore, you won't understand why. Plus, a high ranking doesn't necessarily mean a lot of conversions or sales. You need to focus your SEO efforts on keywords and techniques that drive customer traffic.

What to do?

You can get a better understanding of an ecommerce site by looking at the rankings combined with other metrics:

• Organic traffic changes.

Displays how many people visit the page from the search results, regardless of your ranking.

• Revenue from organic non-branded traffic (which comes from queries that do not contain your business name).

This will show you which keywords and SEO strategies are driving the most customer traffic.

Taking these factors into account, as well as your ranking, will give you a better idea of your performance in search results.

2. Lack of product reviews

Even if you have a stunning page with high-quality content and first-class images, but don't have objective third-party reviews, you could be missing out on significant amounts of traffic.

When it comes to SEO, testimonials are an easy way to continually get new content on your pages. This way, you will improve your product's search ranking and get content with the wording your buyers naturally use.

What to do?

Encourage visitors to add reviews to your online store. Make it possible to rate a product on your site and add a field where visitors can enter their comments. To motivate customers to write reviews, offer a small incentive in exchange, for example, you can include reviews in your loyalty program.

3. Duplicate content

Any content on your site that is also found elsewhere on the Internet, be it a title or a description taken from a vendor, will be considered "duplicate content" and may be excluded by Google. Such descriptions are usually used by online stores that distribute the manufacturer's products, which does not promote sales.

What to do?

Follow a simple rule: create unique content for your product pages. Optimize product titles and descriptions as much as you can while maintaining their value to the product, which is very important from an SEO standpoint. As an example, we can consider the case of content optimization and development of an SEO strategy by Lemarbet for an online store of electronics and household appliances. It was decided to get maximum traffic with unique content for all categories, and pages from website filters were also created and optimized to cover queries with the name of brands and categories. As a result, traffic came in, ROI increased and sales increased.

4. Lack of convenient location of internal links

Internal links are not only good for SEO, but also for the usability of your online store structure.

What to do?

To make the location of internal links convenient, you can refer to:

• Compatible products;
• related categories;
• goods from the same manufacturer;
• products that other customers buy;
• accessories and spare parts.

The advantage is that you can lead the visitor to new pages in your online store that are not yet listed in the search engine's index.

5. Ignoring Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely valuable resource for optimizing your website. Analytics data can give you insight into what works and what doesn't.

There are some common items to check here, but Google Analytics may make suggestions specific to your site.

Collecting, analyzing and interpreting data is indispensable, for example, to find out where visitors come from your site, which pages are most interesting, or how users move around the site. Google Analytics provides you with important information about a wide variety of metrics:

• Attendance;
• traffic sources;
• views;
• duration of stay;
• bounce rate.

By analyzing the data, using Google Analytics, you can optimize your website to better tailor your offer to the needs of your target audience.

What to do?

If you haven't set up Google Analytics yet, do it now. You can learn more about this in the Google Analytics Help. Check out Google SEO reports and find out which SEO strategy is best for you.

6. Do not use services to analyze the site

There are many website analysis services that are extremely important in order to improve your website for customers and potential buyers. Convenient and reliable service in this regard is Plerdy.

Plerdy's heatmap and competitor price analysis is a very important tool for analyzing website usability and conversion growth. Without a heatmap, it will be difficult to track the behavior of potential customers and adapt the website to their needs, as a result, the conversion rate may drop. In turn, the lack of analysis of competitors' prices will make it impossible to increase income.

What to do?

1. Register in the Plerdy system.
2. In your personal account, generate an embed code for the site.
3. Conduct a short setup.
4. Receive site data.

You will see hot spots with a top click map to help improve your site's usability. The heatmap of clicks will show how to improve the resource - the convenience of the site for users helps to increase conversions. And the service of monitoring the prices of competitors will increase sales and increase the level of customer loyalty.

7. Spam

Don't throw spam links to your site on the Internet without doing anything useful. Google is really very good at finding spammers and will punish you for sending spam.

What to do?

Find the right ways to link. For instance:

• Forums where people are already looking for your products but don't know where to go.
• If you have articles or blog posts, ask if there are communities or forums where people are looking for this kind of information?
• Post guest blog posts with audiences who might like your topic.

Submit stories and articles related to your products. For example, if you have an online store for clothing accessories, you might find a fashion blog and write “7 Ways to Wear a Scarf This Winter” with links to your store.

8. Lack of a physical address on the site

Google prefers to rate sites that struggle to prove they exist in the real world. Without a physical address (if you have one) on the website, you might miss out on some of the benefits from Google. You will also miss out on potential traffic from local searches that include your city and products.

What to do?

If you have a physical store, please include the address on your website. If you do not have an actual location, for example, you can advertise the location where the goods are manufactured. This will help you with geolocation and improve your bottom line by saving on shipping costs, as well as boost your local search rankings.

9. Opt out of URL optimization

This is an important element that people tend to ignore. If your URLs are not optimized, it is much more difficult for search spiders to figure out which page this is. It also makes it difficult for users to view the page information.

What to do?

Use so-called "human-readable" URLs, which are composed of terms such as product name, manufacturer, brand, or the like (keywords). Since these URLs are more attractive and more clickable, you must create one for every page of your product.

10. Images are too large

High quality and optimized images are very important, but they shouldn't be too big. If the images are huge, the page load times will be very slow. Google considers page load speed , which affects rankings. Also, potential customers can simply leave without waiting for the page to load.

What to do?

Check if the images are too large. Images for web pages should ideally be less than 100KB. You can do this in several ways:

• If you are using Adobe Photoshop, you can optimize your images with the help of «the Save for the Web & Devices'» .

• You can also use a tool like Simple Image Optimizer .

With these tools, images that are too large can be resized to produce the highest quality for an acceptable size.

11. Lack of mobile version

If your store is not mobile-optimized, you are losing most of your visitors. This is bad, both for potential customers, and in the case of Google, which will not recommend your page.

What to do?

With Google Analytics , by going to Audience> Mobile> Browse, you can see how much traffic is coming from smartphones. Next, a separate URL is created for the mobile-optimized site. Thus, there is a second version of the page that is customized specifically for mobile content.

It's worth remembering that a search engine like Google takes user experience into account. Your online store should be convenient and useful for customers, what is good for your customers is ranked positively by search engines. Correcting these 11 mistakes will help you improve your search engine rankings and increase your income.