This couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that the optimisation of an e-commerce website is a lot more difficult than an average website.
This is where many shortcuts occur which can present real problems for the website down the line. Here are five of the most common errors that occur on an eCommerce website.
This error is usually prevalent in clothing & gift item websites with a broader range of individual items.
While it might seem tedious, the simple truth is that the failure to add a quality & informative product description will completely hinder any chance of the page appearing in Google’s search rankings.
It may be a time-consuming practice but it’s definitely worth the effort.
Looking for a surefire way to have your web pages banned from Google’s search engine? Well, this is it. These descriptions are sent out automatically to many online stores who in turn leave the text in its original form. This results in the manifestation of one of Google’s primary pet hates – duplicate content.
Want to avoid this? Simple, stick to your own unique content. If like many other eCommerce websites, you have thousands of individual products, you may wish to implement a No Index meta tag on product pages that you are unable to write unique content for.
It’s a known fact that over 70% of online buyers check out the reviews of a particular product or service before deciding to make a purchase. So if your eCommerce site lacks these reviews there’s a high chance that you are missing out on a large proportion of the audience.
Review pages are also more likely to show up on the top of Google search results than normal selling pages. Encouraging product & service reviews is also a great way to add unique content to your website. Customer-generated content helps to alleviate the hassle of creating your own unique content for the website.
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A surprising amount of online sellers don’t bother optimising the page URLs on their websites to include rich keywords. This leads to unreadable URLs which makes it confusing for search engines and ultimately – the customer to find your product pages.
Instead of incorporating technical jargon, your page URLs should tell a story to the customer so they know exactly what they are going to find on the page before they even click in to it. This will go a long way towards encouraging conversions.
As mentioned above, one thing that really rouses the ire of Google is duplicate content. So much so that they have really upped the ante in terms of punishing websites that persist in it. However, this is still one of the single most common on-site SEO mistakes on an eCommerce website.
The importance of creating your own unique content cannot be stressed enough, never EVER copy & paste anything from other sites. Duplicate content can also generate from archives, categories, tags & other sorting elements which have yet to be indexed.
There is a number of ways to resolve this, however. A robots.txt file will no-index the parts of the website which are generating duplicate content while canonical tags will indicate to search engines to index a specific URL.
Are you a business owner looking to improve your overall online ecommerce performance? contact the experts here at matrix internet today!.
By Jeff Sheridan
By Conor McCaffrey