Improving the SEO of an eCommerce store is one of the most requested services at the Trilogi (TLG Commerce) Marketing Department. Over the years we’ve identified 5 common mistakes in eCommerce SEO. Practices that are barely effective, or not at all, which we can fix in time and that can completely turn around your online store’s results.
Giving up on SEO too soon
Organic search (SEO) is a discipline that takes patience, and that’s exactly what’s hardest: days and weeks go by and we barely rank a few keywords in doubtful positions, with your best-ranked keyword being a long-tail term on page eight.
Google usually takes about 2 to 3 months before it pays attention to us. During those months Google watches us to see whether we deserve to enter the results more seriously. This depends on having ongoing activity, on working on SEO continuously and on believing in the website/eCommerce store we’re launching.
Doing all the SEO at once won’t make Google notice us sooner; we’ll stay “on the bench” just as long as other eCommerce stores that work on it month by month.
Depending on the type of business, the industry or the quantity and quality of visits we drive to the online store through different channels, we’ll help it rank sooner and better.
“Patience is a virtue”
Don’t think like yourself, think like your customer
One of the most common mistakes is that most eCommerce stores are built around what the eCommerce manager thinks. You can tell by looking at the keywords the store “targets”, the product page copy or the blog articles.
It’s important to focus our business on the end or potential customer, who is the one who will ultimately buy our product or service. Through a specific analysis of your target audience and dedicated keyword research, we’ll help you optimize your SEO.
Let’s take as an example an eCommerce store that sells computer equipment:
Website 1:
Website 2:
Which description do you prefer? I also prefer the description on website no. 2, and that’s not all: below it lists the features and, on top of that, there are several tabs such as customer reviews, videos about the display and even questions and answers. User experience and time on page are also factors that help our site rank.
Your website has to be user friendly in every way, since not all users are experts in your industry.
SEO isn’t just text
As users, when we talk about SEO the first thing that comes to mind is optimized text. The reality is different: SEO has more than 200 factors that help a website or eCommerce store rank. These factors fall into two broad categories, On Page SEO and Off Page SEO, but most of these changes aren’t visible to users.
Remember that most SEO optimization isn’t visible to the naked eye.
Not complementing SEO with SEM
A very common mistake in eCommerce is hiring an SEO strategy without complementing it with an SEM strategy (Google advertising).
SEO delivers medium/long-term benefits, but we always recommend complementing it with a good Google advertising strategy. Visits from Google ads will be quality visits from people who came to our website because they’re interested in the product or service. They build visibility and awareness quickly. This gives us a boost thanks to the number of users we attract, a low bounce rate showing users like what they found, long visit times and other factors Google takes into account. Beyond these factors, we’ll also get quality visits from users who can become customers because they found the product or service they were looking for in our eCommerce store.
Not hiring specialized professionals
We often come across eCommerce stores “optimized” by relatives or by the eCommerce manager themselves, with basic SEO knowledge picked up from various online posts written by self-proclaimed “gurus”.
When we see these cases, we spot them immediately: despite good intentions, keywords with traffic potential usually aren’t well researched or targeted, On Page SEO has room for improvement and in Off Page SEO (inbound links) links tend to sit on penalized pages, sites that add no value, or there are no inbound links at all.
Hiring a professional or, better still, a multidisciplinary professional team is key to an eCommerce store’s online strategy to achieve the expected results.
These are the 5 most common eCommerce SEO mistakes, though there are many more. At Trilogi (TLG Commerce) we want your eCommerce store to be as successful as Coca-Cola, and that’s why we offer you our services.
You can ask us for information by contacting us; we’ll be happy to help your online business grow.
