Search engine optimization, or SEO, is vital in making your site ready for the online world. This will help make your platform more visible to both the online users and the search engines. A well-planned SEO will boost your traffic and conversion rates.
Contrary to common belief, however, the process of SEO does not only revolve around keyword incorporation, but it also involves optimizing all the internal and external factors present in your website’s environment.
Believe it or not, no matter how much this is emphasized, most people are still having a hard time getting a grip on this factor. This is the reason why in this article, we are going to talk about the common SEO mistakes to avoid on an eCommerce site.
After reading, you are expected to be familiarized with the errors of others and prevent yourself from doing it in the near future in order to keep your site running.
1. Overlooking Research
Some people like to dive straight into the process without even doing basic research, and let me tell you why this is not a good way to start.
Whatever strategy you are working on, if you proceed without knowing what resources you need, the preparation process, and some tips, you will probably end up with wasted time, effort, and even money.
This fact, alone, should be enough to convince you to conduct in-depth studies before starting SEO.
Specifically, some of the things that you should look into are:
- Your Niche Target Audience
- Competitors
- Right Marketing Strategies
- Keywords
- Third-Party Applications
This will take a lot of time, but this will assure you of fewer mistakes in the future. The quality of your research will also affect the success of your next tasks.
2. Having No Concrete Strategy Plan
Having a lot of knowledge about SEO is not enough. You have to be able to put them together systematically so you can avoid being lost throughout the process.
This is another mistake that leads site masters to not getting the results that they want.
Here are the reasons why a strategic plan is necessary:
- The strategy is easier to monitor
- Mistakes can be spotted more efficiently
- You can keep track of your progress
- It can be a source of motivation
- It will serve as a guide in your site’s journey
Not allotting time to making a concrete SEO plan means that you are giving up the benefits listed above. To effectively do this, however, it is most recommended that you list all of your goals, and determine your next steps from there.
3. Targeting the Wrong Audience
Moving on, the next mistake that we will be discussing revolves around the type of audience that you are targeting.
Most sites rely only on their niche to deduce their target market but it’s more than that. There are a lot of factors that you should consider. Some of these are:
- Location (Specific City, Country, Local/Worldwide)
- Demographics (Gender, Age, Occupation, Religion, etc.)
- Statistical Reports
- Competitors
- Marketing Platform (Social Media Sites, Another Site, Own Website)
You can come up with answers through the use of questionnaires and surveys. You can also opt for a plugin, or a third-party application but expect that you will need to pay using this method.
Lastly, if you have the time, you can manually conduct the market research by analyzing statistics from your site and your competitors.
4. Imitating Other Creators’ Strategies
Others like to rely on what their competitors do, thinking that they will garner the same results. This is not the case, though. Each site is different. Even if you have the same niche, your analytics and your visitors will still have different values.
Taking this into account, it is prudent for you to refrain from doing this, and start creating your own instead. When you start doing this, you can just find yourself earning results that will fit your goals and your site at the same time.
Keep in mind that the statement “What works for others, may not work for you.” goes both ways as what may not work for others, may work for you. As a website master you have to start thinking outside the box, and stop limiting yourself to others’ preferences.
5. Providing an “Alright” Content
You get it, content is important, this will be the body of your website. However, what others don’t understand is that you should not be settling with content that even you, the creator, is not satisfied with. Your site’s quality should start with you.
Stop putting out content just for the sake of having it. You should put yourself in the position of your readers, and try to think of what they will feel after reading your article or your story. This will be the key to producing high-quality content and boosting your traffic.
6. Not Optimizing Pages for Mobile Devices
Depending on your resources, your site will be shown in desktop view when accessed by mobile devices by default. This will affect its overall display, media positioning, user experience, and other factors.
According to Bank My Cell’s latest study, 66.92% of the population worldwide own and use mobile devices. This means that there are billions of people that are probably searching on search engines remotely through their phones. Your site not catching up to mobile advancements equates to losing billions of potential traffic and leads over time.
Modern site creation platforms nowadays, however, are automatically optimizing published pages. So look it up whether your current service provider is offering this feature.
7. Not Paying Attention to Loading Speed
The web loading speed is another factor that will hinder your site’s success if not optimized. Unfortunately, this is the case for most sites online, which is the reason behind their high bounce rates.
As the general rule of thumb, you should improve your site’s loading time to be as fast as possible. This should not go beyond 5 seconds, though, because the longer it gets, the more visitors will exit by the second. Remember, that users want instant access so you should provide it to them.
This factor greatly depends on the quality of your web hosting platform so it is best that you check an application’s response time before purchasing.
8. Focusing Solely on One Page Element
SEO is not a one-man process. Like what is previously stated, this requires optimization of both the internal and external factors present. However, because of the number of things that one needs to pay attention to, they tend to focus solely on one SEO factor thinking that this will carry the site’s success.
This mindset is wrong. Although it may get overwhelming, keep in mind that you need to keep them balanced so your website comes out best in all segments instead of varying critics like being so-so in some aspects and being horrible in some.
9. Brushing Off Analytics
The last error that we will discuss involves analytics. Even if some site masters know the importance of statistics, some still view this as nothing more than just numbers. With this mindset, they just take this information for granted and go on to site management.
This won’t get them anywhere, though. Not viewing your analytics means that you have no means to know accurate results and determine if your website is doing well or not.
Take time to study your site’s performance regularly. This will help you with defining the things that you need to improve, and which should be maintained.
Summary: common SEO mistakes to avoid on an ecommerce site
Just because SEO is necessary doesn’t mean you can just give minimal effort out of the need for saying that you practice it. Knowing the mistakes that most site owners do is significant, so you don’t make the same ones on your platform.
Again, keep in mind that SEO is as important as any other element that builds up your site. This is not a one-time thing so don’t expect that both the process and the results will only need overnight tinkering.
Recent Posts
Many consumers have divided or negative feelings about marketing practices. Unsustainable marketing breeds distrust—whether it’s the false promise of greater value or convincing customers to buy...
The most significant investment to think about is web hosting to get more traffic and higher performance and run your website successfully after you build it. So it's essential to select the best...