Did you know that just by making a few simple changes to your e-commerce store that could be the difference between being found on Google or not? And with over 8 billion searches every single day, 8 billion, you don’t want to miss out on that free and organic traffic to your e-commerce store, especially when it keeps flowing over and over.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to use few ecommerce dos and Don’ts. Three simple do’s and don’ts that you can use to start driving more organic free traffic to your store ASAP. We talk about how to generate highly converting profitable traffic to your online store, to your e-commerce store, especially if you’re a small business.
Every business is turning to eCommerce platforms and making them available for all sizes of audiences. As eCommerce continues to grow, the importance of eCommerce SEO cannot be overstated. Did you know that 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine? With the vast majority of online traffic coming from search engines, it is essential for eCommerce businesses to prioritize their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
However, despite the importance of eCommerce SEO, many businesses make critical mistakes that can harm their rankings and impact their sales. In this article, we will cover the top eCommerce SEO mistakes to avoid and best practices to follow to improve your online visibility and increase sales.
So, let’s dig in!
If you’ve stubborn, you’re probably an e-commerce founder or brand creator. You’re looking how to generate more organic traffic to your store. Well, you’re in the right place, so make sure you hit the subscribe button and bell notification so you don’t miss out.
Market and competitive intellifence (CI) are both types of business analysis that help organizations make decisions and gain a competitive advantage:
So the secret to more organic traffic is to ensure that your stores are optimized for search engines like Google and Bing and the other big search engines. It’s known as e-commerce SEO or search engine optimization.
It’s simply a process of updating different parts of your store to make it more visible, make it more relevant, and make it appealing to search engines and in turn, make it more appealing to your ideal customers as well.
So that when people are searching, they see your stuff. Your customers are searching on Google and being in the big search engines every day anyway. So why not allow your store to show up in the results when those customers are searching for those products, or if they’re searching for information about your products that you’ve got or you’ve got information about?
But it isn’t SEO hard. Like, why bother? The thing is, the cost of paid traffic has gone up dramatically over the past couple of years, especially since the big changes in the war between Apple and Facebook around iOS 14 and all the privacy changes.
Basically, the big tech platforms don’t have access to the same amount of information that they used to have access to, which makes the targeting harder. It makes the ads more expensive and less precise.
And we’ve met and worked with many small businesses. Who’s had real trouble moving forward and scaling and growing and staying profitable, staying above water with that cost of traffic on it dramatically?
So what we’re looking to do here, what you should be looking to do, is how do you build a thousand-leg chair? We’ve met so many entrepreneurs and e-commerce founders who built the whole business just off the traffic of one platform.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization often gets a bad reputation in the e-commerce world because it’s seen as being really complicated, slow, and expensive. And the thing is, that can be true.
Many founders we’ve worked with and met have put some effort and money, or significant effort and money into it, only to see very little ROI. In fact, you may even receive emails like this. Have a look at this email here. I’m sure you’ve got some of these before. I get them all the time. They’re really annoying, aren’t they? All of this stuff goes around and sometimes we’re not sure about what’s true, what’s not true, what’s genuine, and what’s fake.
And I’ve seen people approach SEO with the idea of getting spaghetti and throwing it at the wall and hoping something’s going to stick. Now, the thing is, that just doesn’t work. What I think you need to know, especially if you’re a small business or an e-commerce founder, is that driving organic traffic to your store is kind of like baking a cake or a recipe in the oven.
There are some basic ingredients that you need, and there are some recipes that you need to follow to produce the type of cake or the type of cookies or whatever you like to bake. So that turns out the right way. If we take some random ingredients and chuck it in and cook it, we’re not going to get the output that we want. The same with SEO. If we don’t apply the right ingredients in the right order and apply the right cooking time for the right amount of time in the right sequence.
So to help you get started on your organic traffic journey, as an e-commerce founder and a small business, I want to share with you three dos and don’ts of Ecommerce SEO to get you moving forward.
Neglecting Keyword Research
One of the biggest mistakes eCommerce retailers make is neglecting keyword research. Keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy, as it helps you identify the search terms and phrases your target audience is using to find products like yours.
Overlooking Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and schema markup. These elements can significantly impact your website’s search engine visibility and user experience. However, poor SEO can easily drag your site’s ranking down. So, you may contact professionals like Outreach Monks to help you rank better on search engines. You can use their experience to your advantage.
Not Paying Attention To High-Quality Link Building
Link creation is a very important part of SEO and ignoring high-quality backlinks might result in bad SEO results. It is critical to remember that providing high-quality content that naturally gets backlinks from respected websites can yield incredible results.
On the other hand, generating do-follow forum backlinks for your website can amazingly benefit your website ranking on higher grounds. Forums are places where you can find people with similar interests and can initiate discussions over similar topics. You can visit https://outreachmonks.com/forum-backlinks/ for a better understanding of link building and its impact on your overall growth.
Failing to Optimize Product Pages
Another common mistake is failing to optimize product pages. Product pages are where the majority of your website’s traffic will land. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure they are optimized for search engines. This includes optimizing product titles, descriptions, images, and key elements.
Ignoring On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization involves optimizing your website’s content and structure to make it more search engine-friendly. This includes optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and other vital elements to improve your website’s relevance and ranking in search results.
Not Prioritizing User Experience
User experience is a critical aspect of eCommerce SEO. Make sure your website is not slow, easy to navigate, and is responsive on mobile devices. All these features can significantly impact your website’s search engine ranking and user engagement.
Poorly Written Product Descriptions and Titles
Another common mistake in eCommerce SEO is neglecting the importance of well-written product descriptions and titles. Your product descriptions and titles are important ranking factors that help search engines understand the content of your pages. A well-written product title should accurately describe the product and include relevant keywords. Meanwhile, the product description should provide detailed information about the product and its features.
Don’t outsource all of your writing to an AI tool
There are some amazing tools out there now, and recently it’s a whole other topic, but Chat GPT has been released and it’s some incredible stuff. There are some amazing AI tools out there now that are available, and they’re very tempting to write a whole blog for you or to write your whole product description or to write your whole home page with the collections and the bullet points and everything.
The thing is, though, it’s not original, and Google and the search engines can detect that it’s not original. So what you want to do here is use those tools to help you with ideas. But the text on the content, it needs to be original, needs to be in your tone of voice, and it needs to add value to the customer, needs to actually answer questions and help them make decisions.
Images with Right Alt tag and description
That’s really important. Number three, don’t publish your products and collections as soon as you’ve got the images uploaded and ready to go. It’s so tempting, right? Like you’ve spent the time loading the images in and writing a few sentences about your grey t-shirt collection with the traffic ninjas logo.
Attractive Product or Store Description
don’t just start writing content on your website without doing the research first. We’ve met so many e-commerce founders who have put together a beautiful website that looks amazing but not having done the research, they put all this effort into the product descriptions, listing and collection pages and home pages, and it’s stuff that’s just not going to drive any traffic because it’s not what people are searching for.
So what you do want to do is spend some time researching. What are the search terms or what are the phrases, what are the queries, what’s the language that your ideal, perfect customers are using and typing into the search engines so that you can ensure that you’ve got content about those exact words on your website so that search engines can see and show what you’ve got, how it’s relevant to what your customers are searching for.
We call this process phrase mining your ninja phrases. And what that means is there’s a whole bunch of words and searches that people are using, but you want to focus on a few specific ones that are going to be easy for you to get traffic for, easy for you to talk about, with expertise, with authority and trust.
So, make sure to keep these things in mind to skyrocket your eCommerce business.
Don’t optimize your products, your collections, your pages, your content for your brand name
This is a big mistake that we see many small businesses making all the time. The thing is, if you optimize your pages for your brand name, let’s say it’s MakeAnAppLike Shop. Most people out there on the internet are not searching with keywords, so it’s going to be really hard for Google or a search engine to show your result in results when people are looking for grey T-shirts.
So the things to do here use your ninja phrases and use what we call non-branded descriptive text in your product. So don’t say things like a brand store. You want to say something like grey t-shirt collection because people are searching in Google and search engines for grey t-shirts.
Happy Growing!
Wrapping It Up
eCommerce SEO is a complex process that requires careful planning and implementation. If you can successfully avoid these common mistakes, you will be able to reach higher in the search rankings. The abovementioned best practices can help you simplify things, improve your search rankings, attract more organic traffic, and increase your sales and revenue.
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