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6 of the most important SEO problems e-commerce websites are dealing with!

  • Cristian Level X3
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    6 of the most important SEO problems e-commerce websites are dealing with!

    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.
    6 of the most important SEO problems e-commerce websites are dealing with!
    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!

    #Problems #E #commerce #Websites #Seo SEO
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    DenisP

    DenisP

    Really good points you've made here. It's interesting though, that this post made me realize that I've seen a lot of these issues on many websites in my region and I haven't really given that any thought until now. I'm from the United States but I'm currently living oversees to experience my European heritage, and I'm living in a country that is kind of on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to economical success. I've just realized that even while shopping on many of the bigger name websites here, a lot of them lack lengthy, detailed product descriptions or even costumer reviews and such. I always wondered why these sites never felt as successful or polished as many American sites, and this made me realize why.
    9 years ago

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    Corzhens

    Corzhens

    Maybe you are talking about the language barrier that we have to accept the fact that the internet has somewhat imposed English as the lingua franca or the unofficial language of the world. Think of the countries where people do not know English but they have to learn in their own way to be abreast with the times. That is the main reason for the lack of good descriptions of products in some e-commerce sites. My take on that issue is to be understanding.
    7 years ago

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    DenisP

    DenisP

    The thing is that the sites that I’m personally referring to haven’t come to accept English as their main language. They are Eastern European sites which write in the language that is native to us here.

    That being said, they don’t write in nearly as much detail as many sites do back in the West. They’re written in our native language but are not very descriptive and actually fairly poorly constructed. When you read it, you can clearly see that it was done by someone that didn’t have much interest in doing an effective job.
    7 years ago

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    JANNESKIE18

    JANNESKIE18

    i think you should think some great ideaa to be a great man
    9 years ago

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    JANNESKIE18

    JANNESKIE18

    do some many design to be a beautiful in eyes
    9 years ago

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    overcast

    overcast

    Some very good points on the product improvement into the e-commerce. You can see that if the person hires the copywriter. They can take care of the description, headline and other parts. That should surely help with the customers view as well. And it can add up some good notice for the content too. I have noticed also the meta description part of the website on many shopify customers need to be properly handled. If people can manage it properly with the cost of the drop shipping and then they don't have to oversell with the words. That's something I'd say a good thing to learn from.
    9 years ago

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    Authord

    Authord

    Very informative, I really learned something new today. The part I want to touch is really the description aspect, it's very important, the importance can not really be over emphasized, without proper description, your website will not get ranked well for most keywords, event though your contents are unique or topnotch. Always go straight to the point.
    9 years ago

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    potentialwriter

    potentialwriter

    Using a theme for creating a website other than the wordpress themes is one of the problems that may prevent your website from getting ranked in google and other search engines. You've got to realize that the WordPress theme is the best SEO technology in the world to get your website ranked high in search engines. Inconsistencies in providing keyword rich contents may delay the ranking of your website too. You must provide contents consistently and you will be surprised at the kind of results you are going to get.
    8 years ago

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    TimothyAlex

    TimothyAlex

    I think the biggest SEO problem for e-commerce websites is duplicate content. Becuase it is easy, many of these sites use images and product descriptions provided by their distributor or wholesaler. As a result, you see hundreds of sites suffering from duplicate content. An e-commerce website that truly wants to succeed will invest the time and money in creating unique product pages.
    8 years ago

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    vinaya

    vinaya

    I have an Amazon affiliate store. I promote amazon products on certain niche. I add amazon products via HTML code. However, while adding products, I use image only. I don't want to show the visitors that the products are actually from amazon. Only the people who want to buy that product will know that the product is actually available on Amazon. There is no description of the products, just the images. I want to add description but this is quite impossible because there are hundreds of products.
    8 years ago

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    Corzhens

    Corzhens

    I have come across with some websites that were designed improperly. Especially when I am using my phone, it is frustrating if you cannot input on the form. I know that it may be due to the non compliant design for mobile. But some others have that design where you have to click 5 times before reaching the desired page. It is simply improper navigational design that turns off visitors like me.
    8 years ago

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