Explore Some On-Site SEO Issues That Could Adversely Impact the Traffic and Rankings of Your e-Commerce Store
Businesses had a plan of spending a whopping $79 billion on Search Engine Optimization by the end of 2020. Even though it appears to be an astronomical amount, the spending seems justified if you keep in mind the numerous tasks that entrepreneurs or business owners are required to juggle consistently, right from retaining the existing customers to generating several business profiles in some of the most popular local directories. Moreover, some on-site SEO issues necessitate their attention. If they fail to address those on-site SEO problems, the overall online presence of their businesses could be adversely impacted.
For preventing the loss of current clients and sustaining growth, it is of utmost importance for businesses to identify some of the most critical on-site SEO issues and fix them at the earliest possible. However, many online e-commerce stores have a misconception as they believe that if they focus on displaying the right products prominently on their e-commerce sites, the search engine traffic will automatically start rolling in. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth, and SEO never works in that manner. It pays to remember that all the hard work you had put in for months or even years to achieve a higher ranking on the search engine for relevant keywords may become a futile exercise as a result of SEO challenges and issues. If you fail to resolve your on-site SEO issues timely, you may lose whatever you had achieved after years of hard work. However, if you address these issues at once, you may forge ahead of the competition and end up gaining a higher SEO ranking for your e-Commerce store or you can get in touch with digital marketing agency Auckland or similar ones to know more.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to chunks of content across or within domains that seem considerably similar to some other content or may match some other online content. As per https://www.semrush.com/blog/semrush-study-on-site-seo-issues/, research findings indicate that the most common search engine optimization issue is duplicate content and over 50 percent of analyzed websites are having duplicate content issues. Remember that your e-commerce site may end up getting sanctions as a result of duplicate pages.
First of all, if your site has duplicate content, you would lose your ability to choose specific pages you wish to rank. Moreover, search engines will have no idea about which pages to demonstrate in SERPs. You must realize that it is the objective of search engines to make sure that the web becomes a much better destination for users. It should be a place where users, as well as, search engines will acknowledge and show appreciation for unique and valuable content.
You may consider using robots.txt for blocking areas generating duplicate content like tags, archives, and also, category pages. You may focus on using the canonical tag for indicating the search engine bots the specific pages of your site that you wish to index. Even though duplicate content does not mean specific penalties, you could face issues when your web pages with duplicate content start cannibalizing each other and that too, for the same SERP positions, and then Google would end up filtering one of the similar web pages. In such a scenario, the rel=canonical feature could prove to be helpful, by indicating clearly to Google precisely which duplicate page should be ranked.
Not Enough Product Descriptions
Most of the e-stores commit the blunder of not including an apt product description in their listing. If you fail to incorporate a text description relating to the product, it may end up minimizing the possibility of your webpage appearing among the top ten results of a specific search engine query. We know that visuals play a pivotal role in the success of an e-commerce store, but you cannot do away with a proper product description. Even though pictures are known to speak volumes, however, as far as products are concerned it is best to include a perfect product description. Search engines are not in the habit of ranking pages according to the pictures present on the pages. They are used to reading the text present on the website. Then they demonstrate the product description on the search engine results pages.
If stats were to be believed over 18 percent of the sites that are crawled display a pretty low word count on certain pages. Remember word count is supposed to be a complex SEO metric. There seem to be no alerts about a webpage’s minimum word-count limit. Moreover, Google will be ranking those pages higher on the SERP, those that have longer and high-quality content. You need to ensure that no content on your website would be copied from some other websites. Focus on generating your unique content and incorporating the keywords into the description for getting higher SERP rankings for your pages on search engines.
Insufficient Product Reviews
Statistics reveal that around 70 percent of product buyers examine online product reviews before purchasing a product. Hence, if your e-commerce site doesn’t have customer reviews relating to your products, you would be missing out on a substantial chunk of your target audience. Moreover, it is easier and simpler for web pages containing product reviews to achieve top rankings than your product pages. Product reviews go a long way in generating genuine and valuable feedback from the customer. This helps to boost customer relations. Hence, you must ensure that your users have the option to go ahead and post product reviews on your website.
Absence of Alt Tags
High-quality visuals are critical for the success of an online store. Just like humans cannot survive without oxygen, e-stores cannot survive without pictures. An e-commerce store should focus on using high-resolution, relevant, clear, and detailed photos of its products. However, site owners have to pay equal importance to alt tags. We know that an alt tag would be working as an apt textual description for your product, thus, it enables the search engines to correctly categorize them. Several brands make the mistake of inserting the critical keyword phrases within this tag.
Conclusion
Google relentlessly strives to provide a useful and valuable experience to all its users. You need to ensure that all existing onsite-SEO issues have been addressed and resolved. You may take time to attend to the issues but you cannot undermine them as that would end up deteriorating the overall situation.
