4 Usual SEO Problems Plaguing E-Commerce Websites

When it comes to e-commerce, setting up a website is relatively easy. The real challenge lies in getting customers to it. Back when websites were a new concept, it was enough to build your site and submit it to directories. Since then, things have changed a bit, with marketing becoming more complex. Here are the 4 Usual SEO Problems Plaguing E-Commerce Websites.

The Internet is filled with billions of pages. In fact, the e-commerce industry is growing at an average rate of 10% each year.

It makes sense that 63% of marketers say that their top marketing challenge is generating traffic and leads.

While there are quite a few ways you can boost your online traffic, SEO and PPC campaigns are the two biggest contenders that marketers turn to.

The costs of bidding on competitive terms are too high, especially for e-commerce properties that are just starting.

On the other hand, SEO is ideal for all businesses because organic traffic from search engines is virtually free.

4 SEO Problems Plaguing E-Commerce Websites

That said, implementing SEO on an e-commerce site is difficult because many sites are run by multiple people who aren’t SEO professionals.

Fortunately, some research uncovered solutions for the four most common SEO problems professionals face.

So, if you’re looking for useful tips to help you boost your traffic without paying Google or Bing, this article is for you.

Low-quality content

When you think of running an online store, the last thing on your mind is content creation. The saying “content is king” only applies to traditional sites, right?

Well, unfortunately, that’s far from the case. Most SEOs got away with copy-and-pasting product descriptions from manufacturers in the past.

But today, that’s far from ideal.

In essence, product pages need to be more than pages with a photo and blurbs about a product. You also can’t just copy and paste descriptions from the manufacturer.

To increase your SEO rankings, you need to have custom product descriptions.

With this, you can only fit so much information into the average product description. After all, you don’t want to be writing a novel for each product.

And in some cases, such as on more significant sites, it’s impractical to optimize thousands of product descriptions.

This is where user-generated content can be used to fill the void and help boost sales.

Amazon, for example, features customer product reviews, photos, and videos.

But e-commerce sites are more than a way to offer products. They’re also a great way to share knowledge and add value to your prospective and current customers.

Demand Metric has found that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing.

If you’re not in that majority, you’re missing out on a simple yet effective way to boost sales.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “I’m a retailer offering products. What does writing have to do with this?”

In short, there’s a variety of benefits to blogging, especially when it comes to creating long-form content.

One of the biggest reasons blogs help businesses is because they give people a reason to visit your site even if they’re not looking to make an immediate purchase.

For example, when you’re purchasing something like a TV or computer, you probably do a bit of research beforehand. Why not build trust with your customers by writing a buyer’s guide?

Nespresso does an excellent job of attracting consumers to their site with their Coffee Selector. It takes you through a questionnaire to discover what roast of coffee suits you best.

Even if you don’t plan on immediately purchasing coffee from Nespresso, you still have a reason to visit the site. And that can lead to a conversion later on.

Neglecting technical SEO

Just because the content is king doesn’t mean you can disregard the technical side of things. Even the most excellent content is worthless if Google isn’t able to index it properly.

Although e-commerce sites have more moving parts than your typical blog or official website, the same fundamentals of SEO apply.

That being said, there are a few quirks unique to e-commerce sites, which can make things a bit more complicated. Fortunately, the solutions aren’t as difficult as you would expect.

Improper linking

When you’re shopping in a store, isn’t it frustrating when you get lost among the shelves of items, trying to find what you’re looking for?

Just as brick-and-mortar locations have to make their stores easy-to-navigate, you need to ensure your online store is simple to use.

An essential part of simplifying your navigation is to leverage breadcrumbs throughout your site.

The benefit of this is two-fold. You’ll be able to improve click-through rates while also improving the usability of your site.

Duplicate title tags

Now, there are going to be some instances where descriptions will overlap. For example, when selling products from the same or similar brands.

But coming up with unique titles doesn’t have to be complicated. You can use the “ brand-model” title tag formula.

This means structuring your title tags in the following way: Brand — Model — Item Type.

Examples of this include “Toyota Corolla Compact Car” or “Dell Inspiron Laptop Computer.”

This approach works so well because most search queries are phrases rather than single keywords.

On the surface, this might seem tedious, but it’s essential to put in the effort since click-through rates affect search rankings.

Not very useful, right? That’s precisely what Google thinks when it encounters pages like that.

Lack of “speaking” URLs

Now, take a look at the example below

As you can see, there is some gibberish, but it’s pushed to the end. The beginning and middle parts of the URL are a bit clearer.

In the SEO space, we commonly refer to those types of URLs as “clean URLs” because they’re easy to read and understand by both humans and search engines.

This provides you with another opportunity to add keywords to your website, but your visitors are more likely to share the URLs on social media.

It is also essential to understand URL parameters, which help search engines effectively crawl through your site.

Parameters hold a ton of information about your page, including how many times the link has been clicked and where people found it.

Setting up useful parameters will help you and search engines understand your website better.

We’ve come a long way since the days of dial-up Internet. In the past, it was the norm to wait minutes for pages to load. Today, even a few seconds of lag can cause cart abandonment.

Cart abandonment increases exponentially between load times of up to 10 seconds.

Slow load times

Shopify has found a few other notable tidbits around customer satisfaction. Specifically, how slow load times can lead to negative brand perception.

While you can’t necessarily flip a switch and speed your site up overnight, there are a few simple tips you can follow to squeeze more speed from your server.

But before getting started with these techniques, you should secure benchmarks.

You can easily do this with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

Here, we can see the page speed is average, while the optimization rate is excellent.

Of course, one of the best ways to keep your site speed up is only to use the essential features for your online store.

Once you’ve trimmed your site to the essentials, you’ll want to enable caching on your website.

In essence, this is when your server takes basic instructions and stores them for faster processing.

Even with caching enabled, I highly recommend using a content delivery network (CDN) for handling images, videos, and other media if you have a relatively large e-commerce site.

As with caching, CDNs are a pretty vast topic, but the concept is relatively simple. Rather than having servers in one location, you’ll have a global network of servers to cut load times.

For those of you who are building out a brand new e-commerce site, or if you have the development resources, you should try to leverage accelerated mobile pages when possible.

One of the final components I want to touch on regarding technical SEO is the need to enable SSL across your entire website.

Over the past few years, Google has increasingly emphasized SSL in regards to SEO. Half of page 1 search results on Google are from SSL-enabled sites.

The importance of SSL

In the past, SSL certificates were expensive and difficult to obtain. Today, however, they’ve become so common.

Virtually all web hosts can handle installing them for you — including e-commerce specific sites like Shopify.

Depending on your needs, you might want to look into Let’s Encrypt, a service that offers free SSL certificates.

Not building links properly.

Getting people to link to product pages is pretty challenging. While many people turn to affiliate programs for link building, those links aren’t always helpful.

To build natural links, you need to take a varied approach to link building. I already mentioned the importance of blogging, but that’s not the only option you have.

One of my favorite e-commerce link-building methods is through user review sites. A survey of 30,000 websites by Yotpo found that business reviews play a significant role in organic page views.

While we’re on the topic, it’s worth noting a few other benefits to using review sites for your business.

Leverage review sites

They increase site traffic, give your site legitimacy, and provide a great place to find content and topics for your blog.

And whether you’re a small business or fairly established, getting more reviews isn’t too tricky with the right techniques.

By giving away coupons and offers, you can get other bloggers to link to your homepage and your product pages. Just make sure you’re not giving away too much.

In an era where millennials are tuning out messages from big brands, many companies are turning to influencer marketing to boost their business.

Leveraging discounts

And while it’s unknown just how much social shares directly impact rankings, they offer a few side benefits that provide an edge.

Influencer partnerships

Of course, while external links are excellent for your e-commerce site, you can’t neglect the importance of internal links.

You’ll want to leverage internal linking because your category and product pages are packed with a variety of valuable keywords.

Without internal links, those pages will likely go to waste when it comes to SEO performance.

Internal Linking

Amazon is the master of this with their “Customers who bought this item also bought” carousel:

Lack of collaboration between SEO and SEM teams

If you’re like most e-commerce site owners, you’ve probably leveraged pay-per-click campaigns on your site to some degree, at least once in your career.

There’s a good reason for that. PPC, unlike SEO, provides website owners with more control over their traffic. It also provides immediate results while SEO takes some time.

Organic clicks are now labeled as coming from Google but no longer display the query string. Analytics tools, instead, are identified under the token “not provided.”

While there are a few workarounds to this issue, for the most part, this algorithm change has made it challenging to perform keyword research without additional resources.

Now, there’s no shortage of tools for SEO professionals on the market today. But they can only do so much.

Even the most experienced SEOs are going to encounter keywords that are nearly impossible to rank organically. For example, it can be challenging to rank for a competitor’s brand name.

PPC helps you fill this void while providing immediate results, whereas SEO can take some time to show a sufficient return.

All that being said, SEO can provide exponential results over time, while PPC is a steady driver of traffic.

Although combining SEO and SEM efforts might take some effort at first, in the long run, it provides you the best of both worlds.

Conclusion

Just because e-commerce sites have plenty of moving parts doesn’t mean making your site SEO-friendly has to be complicated.

While SEO used to be about gaming the system and finding loopholes to exploit, today, it all boils down to two components:

Content quality and website usability.

Google expects website owners to delight their visitors and customers. That’s why you need to focus on adding value to your target audience.

In essence, you want to write for users first, robots second.

That’s not to say keywords aren’t relevant today. But it’s all about weaving those keywords into natural language.

Proper e-commerce SEO involves a two-pronged approach. You want to focus on the technical and practical sides of website management.

On the practical side of things, you need to educate your audience through quality materials that inform and delight.

And don’t just limit yourself to text. You can also use video.

There’s no arguing that link building remains an essential part of SEO. By creating link-worthy content, you can gain a significant edge over the competition.

And while all of that is great for the user (and your site), SEO only goes so far.

PPC is still an essential way to drive immediate results in today’s competitive landscape.

While they both involve opposite tactics, there is some middle ground — keyword research.

By using SEO strategically, you can slash your PPC costs on high-value keywords.

Once you’ve mastered the art of SEO and your PPC team is on the same page, you’ll need to focus on converting the traffic that comes to your site.

How have you fixed common SEO problems on your e-commerce site? Here are 4 Usual SEO Problems Plaguing E-Commerce Websites.