If your e-commerce site is failing to achieve expected levels of organic traffic, it might be worth considering the following 5 areas, to see if your site is running into one or more of these common SEO issues.
Poor product descriptions
It is not unusual for e-commerce sites, especially those with an extensive product range, to include brief product descriptions. As they aren’t providing search engines with much content, however, lack of detail in this area can cause several issues. Descriptions provided by manufacturers will likely be duplicated across a wide variety of different sites, and by utilising these generic descriptions, you aren’t providing search engines with the information they need for you to outrank your competitors.
It would be unrealistic, especially for large e-commerce sites, to suggest investing time into manually updating and refreshing every single product page, but this doesn’t mean you should ignore the issue altogether. Instead, identifying your most valuable product pages and creating unique copy for those pages, specifically with SEO and conversions in mind, can have an enormously positive site-wide effect for your business.
An absence of user reviews
The benefits of user reviews are clear to see across the Internet. However, making the decision to integrate user reviews into your website can be a difficult one, as you are opening your products to very public criticism. Evidence suggests, however, that there is very little to worry about, as products with a diverse range of ratings can lead to more successful conversions than products which only attain 5 star reviews.
Ineffective e-commerce platform migration
Most e-commerce businesses will at some point exhaust the possibilities of the platform they are using, and make the switch to another with a greater number of features or other benefits. There are a variety of issues that come with platform migration, leading to drops in traffic and overall rankings for important keywords. Ensuring you employ the skills and knowledge of an e-commerce SEO professional when undertaking a platform migration or update is essential, to ensure everything continues to run smoothly throughout the process.
A lack of thorough keyword optimisation
Although brand and model keyword optimisation is important, integrating more popular and generic search terms and phrases into your copy is imperative to increase your reach and brand visibility. Utilising competitive research and keyword tools is essential in the successful identification of phrases and terms your audience are using to find similar products. When you have identified up to five highly relevant keywords for each page, including them above the fold and in key blog content will typically result in a substantial increase in traffic over a relatively short period of time.
Neglecting information based content
Focusing on building your repertoire of informational keywords will help you to both establish and build a strong reputation with search engines. Ranking highly for less competitive, but still highly relevant, keywords should be an important part of your overall SEO strategy, because as well as contributing to an increase in traffic, it also contributes to key behavioural metrics, which is information that search engines find highly valuable. In depth keyword research is imperative here, with searching for audience-generated questions and updating lean blog content both important components for securing positive results.