E-commerce websites have revolutionized the shopping industry and entirely changed the way we think of purchasing various products. There are several factors that are responsible for the rise of E-commerce websites. SEO is one of them. It helps your E-store to appear up in the search results of Google and other search engines & allow shoppers to buy your products.
In fact, optimizing E-commerce websites for SEO is much harder than doing SEO for simple websites/blogs. There are many online merchants who don’t have the sound knowledge of constantly changing practices of E-commerce SEO and they face numerous SEO issues while optimizing their site for visitors and search engines. In this article, we will highlight some of the main E-commerce SEO challenges and discuss their solutions too. Let’s start.
1. Lack of Quality Content
Lack of high-quality and useful content is a great headache for E-commerce SEO professionals. As Google and other search engines are against the thin/low-quality content, using them can spell catastrophic consequences for your websites such as poor or no ranking in search engines, low traffic, low user experience or even penalty too.
Solution
Generate high-quality content for each and every page of your E-commerce website. It could consume a lot of time, but it will help you to seek the user’s attention and gain good rankings in search engines. If you face problems in content creation, you can utilize the services of content writing agencies to get SEO optimized and meaningful content for your website.
2. No Product Reviews
Most of the E-merchants are ignorant about the importance of product reviews for their E-commerce website. Before buying a product, prospective customers flock to several e-stores to look for online reviews and peer recommendations. They compare reviews to have basic knowledge about the product they want to purchase. If your E-commerce website has no product reviews, you might lose your business little by little.
Solution
Allow users to rate your products/services/websites. Display customer’s candid reviews and recommendations without any moderation, editing or filtration.
Don’t afraid of negative reviews from customers. Negative views give you a chance to make improvements in your website or products and increase sales by providing the best shopping experience to customers on your site.
3. Using the default URL
Several E-retailers use the default URL structure while adding a new page to their website. This doesn’t help you in your SEO efforts and makes it difficult for both search engines and people to find your site’s page on the web. It is possible that potential customers may hesitate to visit your page if it has a suspicious-looking URL.
Solution
Don’t use the default URL for your web pages. Just edit them and add the main keywords to make them SEO friendly. It will help users and search engines to find and understand your site’s pages easily.
4. Website Is Not Mobile Friendly
As the percentage of mobile Internet users are increasing sharply, browsing an old-fashioned and non-mobile-friendly website (on mobile devices) may result in the bad user experience for potential customers and can drive them away from your website. It hurts your E-commerce business up to a great extent.
Solution
Take all steps to make your website mobile-friendly as it helps you in your SEO efforts and boost your sales as well.
5. 404 Error For Unavailable Products
Shoppers are crazy about some products available on E-commerce websites. As soon as they are listed on E-commerce websites, they go out of stock within a short period of time. So, for unavailable products, retailers show 404 error or simply “Out of Stock”. This is not appropriate for your site from a business point of view.
Solution
Whenever you face such situations (product’s unavailability on your site), you could edit the URLs and redirect the shoppers to similar products and relevant categories.
6. Not Using Breadcrumbs
Most of the E-retailers look down upon breadcrumb navigation while designing and developing their website/page. It affects their site’s usability up to a great extent.
As a matter of fact, breadcrumbs are very useful for both search engines and visitors. If you are using breadcrumbs on your E-commerce website, they help search engines to provide internal linking and organize pages/subpages easily. They help humans to know where they are on a site and move back to previous pages.
Solutions
Don’t underestimate breadcrumbs. Use them on all pages of your site. If you are using Magento to host your E-commerce website, it shows breadcrumbs by default. In case, you are using another platform, adding them to your site will boost the output of your SEO efforts.
7. Using Unoptimized Meta Descriptions
Unique meta descriptions help search engines to index your site’s pages in their search results and encourage users to click through to your site. Most of the E-retailers just copy-paste the product description and use it as a meta description for their E-commerce website with thousands of products.
This may not a matter of worry for you if the first line of the product description is not weird and contains a call to action and useful product information. But, you can’t apply this technique for all products having different specifications and features.
Solution
Don’t make needless haste while uploading the product’s page on your E-commerce website. Create a separate meta description for all pages of your website.
8. Inappropriate Site Architecture
Google always thinks about offering the best results for its users when they search for products and services. That is why; before adding your site’s page in search results, Google scrutinizes your site from all angles.
Many web designers and developers have no idea about how shoppers browse E-commerce websites and they offer a solution that doesn’t resemble realities. If your site’s architecture is complicated and users face difficulties while finding products, there are high chances of a decrease in Google SERPs.
Solution
Make your E-commerce website scalable and has simple navigation and
Keep your site structure simple and straightforward to allow visitors to reach out to all pages of your site in a maximum of 2-3 clicks.
9. Mismanagement In Internal Linking
Inconsistent or poor internal linking is a big problem for E-commerce websites. SEO professionals often make the mistake of adding irrelevant links to their web pages, which don’t help them to add value to their products.
Solution
Linking is a vital component that drives success in the E-commerce business. Therefore, you need to do internal linking carefully. Make sure they are relevant to your site/product.
10. Not using a Blog
There are several E-retailers who underestimate the importance of active blogging. As people look for useful content to enrich their knowledge about the products they need to buy, lack of blogging can deprive shoppers of gaining more info about your products.
Solution
To improve the SEO of E-commerce websites, publish unique content on different blogging platforms. It will help you to attract targeted visitors and links, receive more traffic to your site and encourage social media interaction.
11. Slow Loading Speed
All your smart works in SEO (for the E-commerce website you are handling) will go in vain if your site takes more time to load. Both, search engines and humans like fast websites. Users will not visit your site again if its loading speed is slow. Search engines downgrade (in rankings) slow loading websites.
Solutions
Take all possible steps that can make your E-commerce website faster.
Endnote
These are some of the main SEO challenges faced by webmasters when they exercise the different practices of SEO for E-commerce websites. Addressing these challenges will help you to fetch organic search success for your E-commerce website and skyrocket your sales & conversion easily.