8 Ecommerce SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2023 (and What to Do Instead)

Optimizing yourecommerce siteseems like a daunting task when there are so many different aspects ofSEOto consider.

Many business owners make the same mistakes, neglecting important areas and investing energy into the wrong strategies.

We’ve gathered the most common mistakes that ecommerce business owners make, and we’re here to tell you what to do instead.

What is ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO is the process of setting up your online shop so that search engines favor it highly, recommending your brand to people searching for similar products.Seventy-five percent of consumersnever go beyond the first page of search results. If your online store isn’t one of the top results, you’re missing out on valuable organic traffic.

Ecommerce SEO is an ongoing game—your work is never done. Stay on top of the latestecommerce trendsand continue to analyze and monitor your SEO results.

Whether you’re an ecommerce veteran or still trying to come up with anidea for your online store, there’s a lot to learn. Here are eight ecommerce SEO mistakes to avoid this year, and what you should be doing instead.

Hire freelance talent to optimize your ecommerce website

Technical SEO mistakes

Before diving into on-page SEO errors, you need to resolve site-wide technical issues that occur in the back end. If you’re making thesetechnical SEOmistakes, search engines may penalize you and rank your site poorly.

1. Neglecting site speed

Speed is a ranking factor, according to Google. Pages with sub-optimal load times not only risk search engines devaluing their worth, they risk customers losing patience and heading elsewhere.

While plug-ins can improve user experience and conversions, a bunch of activated plug-ins you’re not using can slow down your site speed. Google recommends amaximum load time of two seconds. Anything longer will hurt your rankings.

What to do instead:

If your site is taking too long to load, run through this quick checklist:

• Optimize images with compression

• Reduce redirects

• Remove unnecessary plug-ins

• Use fewer widgets

• Upgrade your hosting

UseGoogle PageSpeed Insights Toolto check the loading times of your pages for free. Here’s an example report for Apple:

2. Poor site structure

A bad site structure is one of the quickest ways to lose potential customers. If pages on your site are more than three clicks away from each other, things tend to get jumbled and customers get lost. A confusing domain name, complicated site structure, and menus that aren’t intuitive cause customers to look elsewhere for desired products.

Ecommerce stores are typically structured in one of two ways. “Hierarchical” site structures have fewer main categories and rely on numerous sublevels. URLs are longer and more specific, but take the user further from the homepage. “Flat” site structures use more major categories. Each page is accessible with as few clicks as possible.

What to do instead:

Every subpage needs to be optimized, as it is treated differently by users and search engines. Determine which setup makes the most sense for your shop by:

• Grouping relevant products together

• Creating a user-friendly navigation menu

• Focusing on UX and UI

• Linking to applicable pages from the homepage

• Trying an ecommerce hosting provider

There are plenty ofecommerce platformsthat make setting up a site structure an intuitive process.

3. Not prioritizing mobile SEO

You might invest hours in a stunning desktop setup for your site, but it won’t do any good if you fail to put any time into the mobile version.

“Many ecommerce businesses focus so much on developing their website for desktop viewing, but most forget that many of us are mobile now,”says Julia Bobak atHomegrounds.“There is a large demographic of consumers who mainly use their mobile phones to view content online, and some businesses forget to make their websites mobile-friendly.”

Skimping on the mobile experience means you’re losing a large percentage of potential customers, as mobile devices account for63% of organic search engine visits.

What to do instead:

Since 2019, Google has crawled, indexed, and ranked the mobile version of your site before the desktop version. Focus on mobile friendliness and mobile responsiveness by:

• Using a responsive layout or anecommerce Wordpress theme

• Self-checking the mobile experience

• Reducing clutter

• Using a larger font

• Finding a good web developer

You don’t have to resolve this alone—check out the best solutions for your online store or work with afreelancer to craft a mobile-friendly site.

On-page SEO mistakes

On-page SEOis made up of all aspects of your content and the portion of your online store that consumers interact with. While on-page SEO mistakes alert search engines that your site isn’t valuable, they also create an unwelcoming environment for shoppers.

4. Low-quality content

The most well-thought-out ecommerce SEO strategy means nothing if it lacks valuable content. Ecommerce SEO involves appealing to search enginesandconsumers. If your content isn’t easy to read and doesn’t answer real questions, you lose authority in the minds of search engines and consumers.

Some common characteristics of low-quality content to avoid:

• Unoriginal content.If you’re not bringing any new insights to the conversation, your thoughts will get lost, since they’re not valuable.

• Short content.You don’t need to write 2,000+ words on a topic, but anything that’s too short will signal to Google you don’t have a proper answer for searches.

• Keyword-stuffed content.Keywords are important, but you shouldn’t sacrifice the merit of your content for a few extra keywords.

Strive for high-quality content on every page, including product descriptions and title tags. Craft detailed product pages that include size charts, unique product names, and helpful product descriptions. Pay attention to trending ecommerce topics if you’re lost on what to write about.

An example of a bad product page:

And a good product page:

What to do instead:

Write with customers in mind. Anticipate their questions, needs, and trending topics.

“Organic traffic is our number one traffic source, and it has grown more than six times over the last two years, thanks to our long-tail organic search strategy,”says Meaghan Thomas, co-owner and president ofPinch Spice Market.“Content that actually answers people’s real questions is getting us high rankings in the search engines.”

Pinch Spice Marketcreates hyper-niche and time-relevant food content—like creating an entireDune-themed dinner party menu for the movie launch—to appeal to what people are searching for.

Plus, you can even consultAI tools to create a content marketing strategy. Or, consult afreelance SEO expert.

5. Duplicate content

Duplicate content can sink your site, whether you’re plagiarizingproduct descriptionsfrom other ecommerce sellers or self-plagiarizing. It’s not enough to use the same product descriptions for all the dresses you sell and swap out the color or style.

Here’s an example of Target’s meta descriptions for various dresses. This templated approach can hurt their rankings—and it doesn’t encourage consumers to click on the product.

Compare this to Zara’s descriptions, which are slightly more unique and interesting, enticing more clicks from shoppers.

What to do instead:

To avoid Google’s penalization, remove duplicate content by:

• Adding “noindex” tags to pages you know have duplicate content

• Implementing canonical tags

• Crafting unique product descriptions for all other pages

6. Targeting the wrong keywords

Don’t only go after the most popular keywords unless you’re a huge, established ecommerce business. Competition is heavy in the digital landscape. Many businesses ignore low-ranking keywords, even though those can drive extremely relevant traffic to your online store.

如果缺乏竞争的关键词排名更容易your ecommerce site is new. A brand new online store isn’t going to rank for terms like “spices” overnight, but many only focus on the most popular search terms.

What to do instead:

To leverage keywords properly, do the following:

• Conductkeyword researchand analysis to determine which words to rank for

• Take into account long-tail keywords

• Look for information and product-focused keywords

• Build product pages around one relevant keyword

“Do a deep dive into keyword research to find lots of ‘long-tail’ keyword phrases to go after,”says Thomas.“长尾搜索结果是特定,high-intent searches with multiple search words, such as ‘Where can I buy an authentic Ethiopian berbere spice in the USA?’ This is where the gold is, because the person searching for these long phrases seems to know what they want, and are likely close to making a purchase.”

Pinch Spice Market crafts blog postsaround long-tail search results. In this case, “what spice goes best with carrots?”

Fix your on-page SEO mistakes with an ecommerce specialist

Off-page SEO mistakes

Everything that happens off your site—but impacts how search engines rank you—isoff-page SEO. Common off-page SEO mistakes are a failure to invest in proven strategies that increase your site’s reputation.

7. Overlooking the importance of backlinks

Backlinks are key indicators to search engines of your site’s trustworthiness and authority. Many ecommerce sites don’t invest in a backlink strategy, causing them to miss out on potential customers.

Withoutbacklinks, Google has no way of knowing how trustworthy your site is. Don’t attempt to game the system by partaking in spammy backlink strategies. Not all backlinks are created equal—quality backlinks are worth more than a surplus of bad ones.

Freelancers can help you source quality backlinks to improve your domain authority.

Fiverr freelancerAl Gomezbuilds high-quality “dofollow” backlinks for clients.

What to do instead:

Prioritize backlinks to key pages—such as the homepage, category pages, and product pages. Invest in backlink strategies, but don’t underestimate the importance of them happening organically when you generate quality content.

“Backlinks are very important when it comes to ecommerce SEO, but you want to focus on long-term strategies that’ll deliver value to users and search engines,”says Ramon Khan, co-founder and CMO atThe Alloy Market.“Focus on building high-quality guest posts, guides, resource pages, tools, and articles on your site. Gaining high-quality links will become much easier.”

“关键策略让宝贵的反向链接create valuable content [on your blog] that’ll attract attention, traffic, and links easily. Submit the content to other editors of major news outlets as well as other smaller websites,”says Nicolas Tranchant, owner of jewelry brandVivalatina.

One of Tranchant’smost popular blog postshas 21 referring domains, according to Ahrefs.

8. Not investing in a social strategy

Asocial marketing strategyis one of the top waysecommerce businesses can grow their brands, but many businesses are too focused on keywords and neglect this other marketing strategy. You need more than just an eye-catching logo. You need a strategy that ensures people will see your branding in the first place.

Social mediais a great way to drive traffic to your ecommerce store. It’s also one of the more popular methods for promoting brand awareness. If you don’t engage with customers on these channels, you lose opportunities for customer service and SEO backlinks.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to run your own social media accounts, consider offshoring that work to asocial media marketing freelancer.

What to do instead:

Start an ecommerce social strategy for your business by doing the following:

• Maintain an active presence on various social media platforms

• Invest ininfluencer marketing

• Run promotions, offering free products for reviews

Optimize your ecommerce SEO with freelancers

There’s a seemingly never-ending list of things to take into account when optimizing ecommerce SEO. As a business owner, you already have enough on your plate, which is why it’s crucial to hand some of the work off toecommerce SEO freelancers.

“As your store continues to grow, it becomes almost impossible to do everything on your own. Hiring freelancers will help you to scale your business and outsource parts of your SEO strategy to get better results,”says Khan.“I have personally hired freelancers for SEO tasks on Fiverr and had great results.”

With a marketplace of specialized experts, Fiverr allows you to chat with freelancers before you hire them. Manage your freelancers, payments, and project files in a single dashboard.

“I’ve purchased 182 orders and spent $4,754.56 on Fiverr and these are my top three tips for hiring freelancers for SEO: don’t expect perfection, be realistic, and ask for samples,”says Khan.

Sign up for Fiverrand hire experienced freelancers forcontent strategy,product descriptions,market research, and more.