Why is SEO important for business?
SEO when employed for an eCommerce site can be incredibly effective. It can help you to become more visible as a business by increasing your search engine rankings, which will then ultimately lead to more customers and more sales. When many businesses are implementing SEO and seeing the benefits, not including SEO in your marketing strategy is a huge oversight.
Google appreciates that for large sites it’s very difficult to fully optimise every page, but having and implementing an SEO strategy site-wide across your key pages can benefit your chances of ranking high on search engines.
When you implement SEO it has to be in the right way, as something you think might help could adversely affect your site’s performance in the search engine rankings. So what are some of the most common SEO techniques that should be avoided?
Keyword Stuffing
Whilst it’s tempting to list your products for every keyword under the sun to try and attract traffic, it’s seen as bad practice to list your products for a huge amount of keywords.
Keyword stuffing is a tactic that sellers employ on sites such as Wish, but it can confuse customers and can make your products seem cheap and multi-purpose rather than specialist or unique.
For example, if you saw a product that was listed for the term ‘Foldable Wireless Stereo Noise Cancelling Headphone for Smartphones, Tablets, Laptop and MP3 Player for Outdoors, Indoors and Travel’, would you trust that listing? It’s a skill that’s adopted to rank high on Amazon’s internal ranking system, but it isn’t considered good SEO practice.
Keyword stuffing can also apply to written content as well as names of products, as search engines like Google look for quality, helpful content rather than content which is crammed full of keywords and adds little benefit to the reader. You need to strike the right keyword density whilst trying to only rank for a small number of keywords instead of every keyword you can think of.
Poor or Non-Existing Product Descriptions
When it comes to on-page SEO, you want to maximise the potential of every page with a piece of well-optimised written content, which should include product descriptions of your products. If you’re selling a small number of products, giving a description for each product with keyword-rich content can help your products to rank on search engines whilst also having the added benefit of giving your customers knowledge of what the product is and how to use it.
When you’re selling thousands of products this could be time-consuming, so you can come up with content frameworks or choose only a selection of high-value pages to optimise for SEO fully. However, it’s generally considered bad practice to completely copy and paste content from one page to another. If it’s between two pages on your site Google could cannibalise them, and if it’s copied from another site Google can penalise you for having duplicate content. Sometimes it’s avoidable to have duplicate content, especially on similar product pages, and this is where canonical tags can be applied to pages to avoid this issue.
No Product or Company Reviews
One way Google assesses the quality of pages is by assessing E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. One surefire way to improve the trustworthiness of your site is by having positive reviews left by customers. This can either be by reviews on your own site, reviews on aggregators like Trustpilot, Feefo and – most importantly – Google Customer Reviews. If Google can see your customers have had positive experiences it boosts your business in their eyes, allowing them to see you as very trustworthy.
By neglecting this and not encouraging customers to feed back on their experiences, a lot of potential to be seen as a reliable retailer is gone.
If you’re targeting local keywords and search terms, then having positive reviews is something that really helps Google to decide which are the best businesses in the area.
Slow Page Load Speeds
One thing Google looks for is the loading speed of your pages. If they take longer to load, Google won’t favour them over pages on other sites that can load quicker.
And as well as affecting how high your page appears in the search engine rankings, it can also negatively impact your conversion rate when a customer does find and visit your site.
Some methods you can implement on your site include reducing image size, cutting down the number of redirects on your site, and ensuring that information is broken down into separate pages and isn’t contained on just one singular page.
No Internal Linking
Google uses the volume of internal links pointing to a page as a marker for which pages on a site are most important. The more internal links a page has, the more important it looks. It’s one reason why having internal links on your pages, especially in your written content, is good practice for SEO.
So if a page has no internal links, you’re missing out on Google viewing your pages as important, and internal linking is also useful from a customer perspective. The inclusion of internal links in blog articles, product descriptions and category pages allows users to easily navigate to the different pages on the site, especially when you’re mentioning specific products or services.
Breadcrumbs are an easy way to get internal links into a page, and also improve the customer journey. Breadcrumbs are a text path which tells a user the steps they’ve taken to reach a certain product or category page.
eCommerce SEO at DNRG
At DNRG we have a great track record with SEO in the eCommerce sector, such as increasing The Golf Factory’s revenue by 220.74% after increasing their organic users and transactions through search engine optimisation.
We can talk through how SEO works step-by-step, what we can implement and how it can improve and grow your business. Get in touch to find out more about our SEO services.
