Are you struggling to attract customers to your e-commerce website site?

You could be making major SEO mistakes and not even know it.

You already have awesome products, a great brand, and the website to do all the business on. What you’re missing are the SEO hacks to bring in the customers.

No one is going to know about your awesome products if you don’t show up in the search engine results page (SERP)!

If you’re ready to assess your site so far and see where you can improve, keep reading for the 7 most common SEO mistakes e-commerce sites make.

1. Your Titles Aren’t Optimized

The title is the overall indicator of whether this is a product your customer wants to see or not. It also plays a big role in your SEO.

If you aren’t using specialized keyword phrases in your titles, you’re making a mistake. Shoppers often search with phrases to describe what they’re looking for. Your titles should include 1-2 of these.

Keep your product titles to 70 characters and under.

An easy hack for creating unique and searchable titles is to list the brand, model number, product name, and item type in the title. These are the specific keyword phrases shoppers often use.

Consider adding other attributes that apply to the product.

2. Your Descriptions Aren’t Optimized

In addition to keeping your titles SEO-friendly, the text descriptions of your product need to be as well.

One of the biggest SEO mistakes e-commerce websites make is using the manufacturer’s product description and not creating their own. The manufacturer’s description looks like a lot of abbreviations and numbers that customers may not understand or have the patience to read.

Google doesn’t give high rankings to these pages.

Always create a unique, not copied and not rewritten, description for each product. Yes, this is time-consuming. And, yes, it’s crucial for your ranking in the SERP.

Use your description to entice viewers as well as provide the important information. Avoid writing fluff to increase the word count; get to the point and give the customer the info they need.

You should also be including keywords and keyword phrases in the description. However, using too many is called “stuffing”, one of the worst SEO mistakes, and Google will lower your ranking for doing this.

3. No Reviews

Google rewards pages that have genuine content created by the public. This could be through comments, likes, and reviews.

Having lots of reviews on your product pages shows Google that customers are interacting with your site which proves its usability and likeability.

It makes sense for reviews to be important to Google; they’re important to customers. How likely are you to buy a product with no reviews over the same product on another site with lots of good reviews?

Think about how successful Amazon has been, they rely on user reviews.

When there is constant reviewing on a page and you continue to reply back when there are questions or concerns, Google sees that your page is active and being clicked on.

Plus, reviews are free, unique, written content for your site!

4. No Internal Linking

The longer guests stay on your website, the better it looks to Google.

An excellent way to keep guests on your site is by including internal links in your product descriptions and the rest of your website. They’re already reading one page of your website; use that opportunity to entice them to read more.

E-commerce websites can benefit from internal linking by including a blog section.

These blog posts could be a shopping guide for different occasions or times of year that apply to your industry. Or, you could do a featured product blog post every week to go in-depth on a product’s details.

In the product description, consider adding links and images to corresponding products you sell. If you sell fishing hooks, include a link that goes to the page where your bait and tackle are sold.

5. Not Shareable

People like sharing products they find useful to their friends, family, and followers. How are they supposed to share it if there are no social media buttons?

Not having social media share buttons is one of the worst SEO mistakes to avoid.

Every product you sell should have a share button for Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Every image on the product page should have a Pinterest button so people can pin it to their boards.

Online sharing is the new word-of-mouth marketing.

When your customers share what they like on their Facebook feeds, they’re basically endorsing your brand to all their followers.

6. Low Usability Score

What’s worse than an e-commerce site with no keywords used? An e-commerce website that isn’t usable to guests.

Basically, if customers can’t find what they’re looking for or are having trouble loading pages, they aren’t going to stick around, and your ranking will drop. Here are usability factors you need to consider:

• Mobile optimization
• Page loading time
• Ease of navigation
• Font type and size
• Optimized coding

There are lots of other factors that make your website usable. Just remember that Google rewards websites with high rankings when they create the best possible user experience and have no SEO mistakes.

For an example of a website with good usability and positive user experience, check out the home page for Canada Wide Pharmacy. It’s fast, easy to navigate, and fully optimized.

7. It’s Not Current

When was the last time you saw a website from 1999 on the first page of Google’s SERP? Not since 1999.

Google gives higher rankings to websites that are consistently live, active, and updated.

This means you need to be engaging with customers in the comments section and ensuring your information is up to date and accurate. And, you should have new content uploaded regularly.

Many e-commerce sites will hire a content writer to keep the blog section relevant and updated.

Ready to Fix You SEO Mistakes?

You may have realized that you’ve made one or more of the mistakes listed in this article.

While it may seem disheartening, this is a big moment for your website. You can now address your SEO mistakes, fix them, and watch your sales increase.

If you’d like more information on website SEO and the tools to make it easier, check out our resources page.