10 popular SEO Mistakes That Ecommerce Business Must AvoidRecent estimates reveal that over 45 percent online shoppers initiate their purchase activity through a search engine. With a phenomenal growth of the e-commerce business all around the world, you might imagine that SEO is the channel of primary importance to boost up digital marketing. However, this is just an assumption and not completely true since SEO is actually the fifth most effective tool for digital marketing next to other more important tools including Social media, email marketing and other modes. While attempting SEO for your ecommerce site, you need to avoid the ten most popular SEO mistakes others are doing out there.

1 – Not considering the target audience in keyword research
Most ecommerce ventures focus more on locating the keywords that are relevant to their products rather than looking for the keywords the target audience is actually employing. Figure out what your audience might have in mind while attempting a given search. They are generally long tail keywords that shall rank easier due to lesser competition.

2 – Turning your content into a spam
The algorithms used by Google have undergone a major shift during the recent years and keyword stuffing no more works. If you are going to stuff your meta tags, product literature and URLs unnaturally you can actually expect a drop in ranking. Also in the long run, only relevant info shall satisfy the viewers and sustain them on your page.

3 – Duplicating content
Google views indexing and displaying pages with unique info with top priority. It does not want to see every link on the first page landing on the same content. Therefore duplicate content shall be weeded out eventually across domains. Even by using the manufacturer’s product info verbatim on your site, you are giving a suggestion of a duplicate content only for a detrimental effect.

4 – Missing out product reviews
Most customers consider product reviews before making a purchase. Make quality review available on your site. Since review pages would be considered by Google as a fresh content, you are on the gaining side.

5 – Failing to optimize URLs
Putting keywords in the URLs enable the search engines understand your page better. This will also help the searchers prefer your result over the others. While ecommerce sites with several pages go for non-descriptive URLs, this approach is a damaging one.

6 – Neglecting HTML
Know that Googlebot can only read HTML. Therefore your images must have some HTML or an ALT tag for Google to understand it easily. Provide all your images with natural ALT tags. Unless the keyword is relevant to the image, never keyword-optimize the image.

7 – Not having a fast loading site
If your site takes much time to load, you are damaging your search engine rankings. Especially this is a crucial issue for ecommerce sites. It is found that over 40 percent of the buyers abandon a site if it takes more than five seconds to load. The higher bounce rate that results can hurt your ranking. Gain some inputs from Google Page speed Insights to improve your site’s loading speed.

8 – Not focusing on internal links
Google shall appreciate content linking back to high quality content. Include internal links in your blogs to other high quality content on the related pages. Include keywords into your anchor text without stuffing it much with the same keywords.

9 – Over-emphasis on ranking
Unlike what most people believe, the success of an ecommerce site does not depend on ranking high on search engines; rather it depends on the extent of converting traffic into sales. Therefore combine your SEO initiatives with other digital marketing strategies like social media and content marketing.

10 – Missing out security encryption
Missing out security encryption can affect SEO. Security encryption protects your customers’ personal info while transacting on your site. Besides ensuring a superior customer experience, this can also protect your site from hacker attacks.