How to identify and fix the SEO mistakes of your Ecommerce website?

SEO has gained an inevitable significance in this digital era. No matter what industry you are in, ignoring your online presence means you are shutting down a plethora of opportunities.

E-commerce SEO has helped so many businesses boost their ROI and attract relevant leads. Whether it is a plumbing agency, a real estate agent, or a criminal law firm- SEO will help a business attain unimaginable heights. But eCommerce SEO comes with its own challenges. It requires a lot of time, it is competitive and quite complicated. If you are thinking of giving Ecommerce SEO a shot or if you have already jumped on the bandwagon and are facing some issues, this blog will be able to help you determine the right way to identify and avoid some of the most common SEO mistakes. 

1. Duplicate page titles

Each page on your website needs a unique page title so that Google can differentiate you from your competitors. You can find the page titles appear on the top of your browser. These Page titles explain what your page is about. Google needs to know what you are selling so that you can appear in the search results whenever a potential customer is exploring the internet. If your page has identical titles when compared to the other pages, search engines will find it difficult to understand which page to recommend as all the pages have similar titles. Hence, neither of the pages appear. 

The solution:

To review your page titles, you can check them out in your CMS and change them manually. You can do this with the help of a tool called Screaming Frog. This tool will scrape all the pages on your site and allow you to export your list to Excel. This is one simple way to identify and change duplicate page titles. 

2. Duplicate Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions allow Google to know a bit about your content. A lot of people think that Meta is only used to determine the ranking of your website. This isn’t true. Metas are very useful for a potential customer browsing over the internet, hence they’re naturally very important to you too. Often, you can see these descriptions duplicated. When your website has a generic meta description, it is unlikely that customers will feel interested enough to click on the link. Especially if your competitor has a super-specific summary, then undoubtedly you customers will shift to the competitor. Meta descriptions are a great way to help you stand out from the competition. Outlining the core benefits of your content, with precise information and with a compelling call to action can encourage those all-important click-throughs.

The solution:

Meta descriptions can be edited on your website manually by CMS. It is also possible to change the meta descriptions programmatically with a similar formula to your page titles. The best way is to simply use your target keywords in your meta description. However, this will not directly help with your Google ranking. But these words will be bolded in your description thereby helping in drawing a searcher’s attention. Make sure that you don’t fill in too much information in the meta description, keep it concise and to the point. If your description exceeds 160 characters it will be cropped off by the search engine. 

3. Missing product category page

No matter how good your products are or how many appealing images you have on the website, if your website does not have a product category page then it will be a huge hurdle for your customer experiences and it will impact your rankings as well. A customer will search for a product and information based on category-based keywords. Your category pages can help you gain higher traffic to your product pages, so make sure you update them. This way you have amazing chances of ranking in general items. If your website does not have a category page yet, here is what you can do. 

The solution:

First things first, don't stuff the category page with keywords and long paragraphs. Just give your potential customers some really useful and helpful descriptions that will actually be able to help them to differentiate various products from each other. If you fail to do so, your category page is really just a spin-off of your products, with duplicate information. 

You can also add content on the category pages with the help of a template. Even one introductory sentence can be a game-changer. Explain a little about who you are, what you do, answer some FAQs- just add content that would help a potential customer to know your brand better. Just do this and the Search engines will thank you for it.

4. You‘re using a ‘non-www.’ redirect

Don’t completely ditch the non-www. Redirect, you need it to redirect to the www. a version of the address. Or vice versa. Let’s say, when you type in this version of your website http://domain.com, it should redirect you to http://www.domain.com. Or it can be the other way around. Google and various other search engines can’t tell the difference between these two domain versions of your website. Hence, this ends up in a whole stack of doubled-up content. Two pages with the same content affect your running as the Google crawlers will only recommend unique content.

The solution:

Some website hosting companies may be able to fix up this redirect for you. You can get in touch with those professionals and they will do the needful. Get in touch with them and explain to them what you need and they will surely figure something out for you. Otherwise, you can redirect all non-www versions of your URLs to the www version. It is a tricky thing to do hence it is best to leave it up to the professionals. These were some of the main mistakes that people make during local business SEO. Getting in touch with a professional web development company and a digital marketing agency is the best way to ensure that your website functions smoothly and ranks on top of SERPs.

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