The Biggest SEO Challenges for eCommerce Sites

The Biggest SEO Challenges for eCommerce Sites

SEO is just one of the many challenges that comes with building and maintaining a successful website – especially if that website just so happens to be of the eCommerce variety. Read on for a few common SEO challenges staring down eCommerce websites and their admins, as well as to learn how to overcome them!

1. Producing Punchy Product Descriptions

When it comes to providing succinct, accurate, easy-to-understand descriptions for all of the products on your website, a number of challenges arise. Some eCommerce websites can house thousands of items, and are usually automated to some degree. In turn, SEO quality of content is poor.  Without a well-written and unique product description, search engines have little to crawl thus leading to low exposure.

Be sure to put solid thought and effort into your products’ descriptions and work on removing duplicate content or repetitive language.

2. Creating High-Quality Content

This goes without saying – content is king. Time and time again, it’s been proven that high-quality content trumps a plethora of low-quality content any day of the week. This is especially true since Google’s Panda Algorithm release. This release rewards high-quality websites through addressing problematic phenomena in Google SERPs including thin and/or duplicate content, lack of authority/trustworthiness, content farming and high ad-to-content ratio.

3. Feeling the Need for (Loading) Speed

How many times have you abandoned a website because the page took too long to load? It ends up website loading speed is just as important to your customers, and if a site is slow, there is a higher likelihood of lower conversion rates and higher bounce rates. For an eCommerce site, a fast site could be the difference between a completed purchase and an abandoned cart.

Make sure that your hosting provider is solid, and be sure to go through extra steps to optimize products, including compressing images.

4. Getting Proper SSL Certification

SSL is a standard security protocol for establishing encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online communicate. Through the usage of SSL, all data that is transmitted between a server and a browser remains encrypted. In other words, SSL provides a level of security necessary for eCommerce sites. This makes visitors more likely to trust your site with payment information.

Further, the proper usage of this important part of technical SEO also makes your website more trusted in the eyes of Google. Luckily, getting SSL is not that difficult – some companies even do it for free.

5. User/Customer Review Management

Why don’t we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes once more, shall we? The last time you were doing research on buying something, chances are you checked out what other people were saying about it before making your final decision. Take a bed, for example – no one wants to wake up with a stiff back, so you’re going to check out what people are saying about this bed’s level of comfort before you decide to buy it.

Google does the same thing when choosing which search results to display to a curious consumer, and which crawl reviews to check for relevancy. Just be sure to keep a close eye on your reviews to avoid any false information or irrelevant discussions, and NEVER manipulate reviews to a point of dishonesty.

6. Website Aesthetic/Facelifts

With an eCommerce site, it is highly important to make sure that your website’s design is responsive. In fact, Forrester anticipates that smartphones retail purchases will total $175.4 billion dollars by 2022 in the U.S.  Further, according to Google, 73% of consumers will switch from a poorly designed mobile site to an alternative site that makes purchasing easier.

Make sure that the Content Management System (CMS) your eCommerce website runs on provides responsive design – and talk to us if it doesn’t!