When it comes to SEO, there are many challenges that a website has to go through. The problems, however, depend entirely on what type of site you are running. For an ecommerce website, it is easy to get things wrong when it comes to SEO.
In this article, we will discuss those challenges and also share some workaround (solution) related to the challenges. If you own an ecommerce website and are struggling with SEO, this article is for you.
1. Writing a strong product description
There are a number of challenges with providing a strong product description for all the products on your website. Generally, an ecommerce website consists of thousands of products, and they are automated to a certain extent. This leads to poor SEO quality when it comes to content and providing value to the reader.
Search engines, for example, will find little to negligible unique content to crawl. With so many pages to crawl and rank, no new content will result in no SEO exposure. According to reports, pages that rank on the first Google page have an average length of 1890 words.
As an ecommerce store, you need to update as many product information as you can, especially for the products that you want to rank on. Also, try to work on duplicate content and write unique content for all the products you have.
2. Low quality content
Written content should be of high quality. The need for high-quality content has risen after Google’s Panda Algorithm release. Also, as already mentioned, try to write unique and easy-to-read product description.
3. Loading speed
Website loading speed is one of the main reasons why visitors abandon a website or their cart. If you are running an ecommerce site, you shouldn’t neglect the time it takes for your website to load.
In short, every second counts and the longer it takes to load the website, the higher the chances of lower conversion rate, high bounce rate and so on. To get started, you need to have your website loading time somewhere between 2 seconds to 3 seconds. Anything above 3 seconds, you will start losing your visitors which in return will mean lost revenue.
To solve this problem, you need to get a good hosting and then do some website tweaks by installing cache plugins to optimize it further. If you are not sure which hosting to choose, you should go through genuine web hosting reviews on the web. Also, try to read multiple reviews from different sources to validate the findings and then finally jump to solving it.
For an ecommerce firm, it is always a hard time to optimize a website as they list thousands of products. On top of that, each product contains multiple images which also needs to be optimized. The best way to solve this is to take care of this from the start through using image optimization techniques such as compression.
4. SSL
SSL is essential for any website, and it becomes more critical when it comes to ecommerce. SSL is part of the technical SEO and provides not only security but also improves SEO in the eyes of Google.
SSL protects the content that is shared between the user and the website. On top of that, visitors are more likely to trust an ecommerce website that has SSL as they can use their payment options without worrying about data theft.
Right now, getting SSL is not at all hard. The firm Let’s Encrypt, for example, provides free SSL certificates.
5. Managing user reviews
For the starters, you will find many ecommerce websites who don’t let users review products or manage reviews properly. This approach can seriously damage a website’s SEO. A study done by Yotpo revealed that putting reviews on the ecommerce website resulted in a 30% growth in just one month.
For an ecommerce website, it is essential to understand that there are both positives and negatives of enabling user reviews on your website. However, if you see it from the SEO perspective, it is always better to have user reviews enabled on your site.
You also need to manage reviews to ensure that they have a better impact on your website SEO so don’t just allow any discussion and avoid fake or unnecessary reviews to keep your ecommerce website SEO healthy.
6. Site design and redesign
Another big challenge for an ecommerce website is having a proper site redesign, responsive and supportive of a multiple screen size. Many new ecommerce websites mainly focus on getting their site online without brainstorming their website design and optimizing it for SEO and user experience.
The biggest challenge here is to redesign the website after it has decent traffic and content. There is a huge change of growth if the design/redesign is done correctly. One such example includes Seer Interactive redesigning their client’s website with the client seeing a 75% increase in organic traffic.
Pawan Sahu is a digital marketer and blogger at MarkupTrend