I have been chipping away at carrying more clients to online stores for over ten years. I’ve been helping a wide range of organizations from plumbers, lawyers to enterprise ecommerce businesses with their SEO. Doing SEO for an ecommerce site is the hardest. Most sites have SEO issues as they don’t follow the ecommerce SEO best practices during the development phase. If you are planning to build a new ecommerce site, you should consult with a digital marketing agency. If you have a website already, there might have some SEO issues. In this article, I will share some common mistakes, and you can fix them today while reading the article.
Having multiple variations of the site URL
Usually, a site has www and non-www version. You need to redirect the non-www form of your website to the www. variant or the other way around. Google and other search engines will consider them different URL with the same content. Due to duplicate content, your site will not rank higher. If you do not redirect yet, link juice will not pass to one another.
How you can fix it
Many hosting service providers offer support for this kind of issue. If you don’t have enough knowledge, you can contact your hosting provider.
If you are unable to get help from your service provider, you can easily do it by redirecting the non-www to the www version from httacess file. Just add the below rule to the htaccess. If you are not familiar with the term, my recommendation would be to get help from your site developer.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Image file name and ALT tag is missing
Google is smart enough to understand your sites text content. However, it can’t read your images. How do they understand images? The simple answer to this question is they read image file names and ALT attributes to get an idea what an image is about. Imagine you couldn’t see your online images. So webmasters need to make sure your that all the images have SEO friendly alt tags. It helps search engines to understand your site content and rank accordingly.
Many people tend to search for product images. If your images are optimized properly, chances are they will rank higher in image search results. If your site has hundreds of images, you can use any web crawler tool like Xenu to get the list images. Write ALT tag for those images and ask your developer to add those.
Competitor and you are using the same product description
Most of the ecommerce sites use the same content provided by the product supplier. This is one of the key reasons for the ranking’s downer. It doesn’t help search engines to identify which pages are better.
You should get help for a professional sales copywriter to write relevant, unique and conversion focus product description. This will add value to your customer and the search engines as well.
Use a plagiarism checker to check if you are product descriptions are unique or not. If you have so many products, you can start with the popular ones.
Doing SEO for Ecommerce is hard. It’s difficult to build backlinks for an ecommerce site because people simply ignore the promotional link. So keeping your site’s onsite optimization score as high as possible is necessary to rank higher. I hope solving the above 3 issues will increase your site ranking. All of them as easy fix and you can do it yourself.
