Your ecommerce site is just starting to grow, but you’ve found that customers are having a hard time finding it. Why? The answer could be in your SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting your website to rank highly on search results pages like Bing or Google. It’s critical for ecommerce businesses because it’s one of the biggest factors in whether or not people can find your online store — and that affects whether they purchase from you.
In 2019, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, so if you’re not optimizing your business with At First Page, ecommerce SEO for search, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways to go wrong with SEO — and some mistakes are more common than others. Here are six common ecommerce SEO mistakes businesses make and how to avoid them:
- Duplicate content issues
Duplicate content issues are one of the most common problems we see with ecommerce sites. Even if you’re not aware of it, you may have duplicate versions of your website URL floating around on the internet, causing search engines to be confused as to which version is more relevant and should rank higher in searches.
If you have multiple versions of the same page, Google may choose which version it thinks is most relevant and index that instead, leaving other copies of the page out of its index.
- Missing product pages in the sitemap.xml file
A sitemap is a file where you list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content.
Including product pages in your sitemap allows them to get indexed by search engines, which provides your product pages with a better chance at ranking for relevant keywords. If you don’t have a sitemap for your ecommerce site, you can create one using this Yoast SEO plugin.
- Not Having a Site Map
A site map is a list of all the URLs on your site. It’s a great way to inform search engines about all the pages on your website that they might not find otherwise.
If you don’t have a site map, it’s like trying to visit someone’s house without giving them an address first. They might find your house eventually, but it will take a lot longer than if you had given them the address beforehand.
The simplest way to add a site map to your site is by creating one manually in HTML format and uploading it to the root folder of your server. However, if you want something more automated, I recommend using Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmasters Tools because both services include free tools for creating site maps.
- Not being mobile friendly
In today’s day and age, more and more people are shopping online on their mobile phones and other devices. If your website is not mobile friendly, you will lose sales because many people will not be able to shop from your site. For this reason, you want to make sure that your site is completely optimized for all types of devices. Having poor navigation- Another thing that you want to make sure you avoid is having poor navigation on your site. When someone visits your site, they should be able to easily find what they are looking for or get in contact with customer service if they have issues.
