This has always been a basic concept of retail: You’re not going to sell any products if nobody knows that your store exists. This was true in the brick and mortar era, and it’s still true today. Online stores can have perfect business models, outstanding products, incredible prices, and amazing customer service—but if the store itself is not well marketed and made highly visible, it’s simply not going to do well. It is imperative that ecommerce merchants do anything they can to make sure people are aware of their store.

Of course, a big part of this is SEO. To get shoppers, you’ve got to ensure that your site ranks well in online searches. Ecommerce SEO is a precise discipline, and one that is often mishandled, for a variety of reasons. The good news is, the most common ecommerce SEO problems can all be avoided just so long as you know what you are doing.

Where Does Ecommerce SEO Go Bad?

Here are some of those common errors:

Bad site architecture. The way pages of your website are arranged and organized is important; you need a site that is ultimately easy to navigate, both by human users and by search engine bots. Ideally, no page of your site is more than three clicks away from the home page. Ecommerce sites, which often have many different product pages, are vulnerable to this problem, but it can be remedied with a more streamlined hierarchy. Visit a site like Amazon to see what an intuitive tree of product categories and subcategories looks like.

Nonsensical URLS. The URLs your ecommerce site employs should actually be informative and descriptive; again, they should be helpful to the user and to the search algorithms. An example of a bad URL would be: www.hair-supplies.com/product/808324593. An example of a better one would be www.hair-supplies.com/product/shampoos.

Duplicate content. Google looks for originality—and if you have the exact same content pasted onto every page of your site, it’s going to cause you to take a dip in the rankings. This is a common problem among ecommerce sites because all too often there is a stock manufacturer’s product description that’s copied verbatim onto every page—a major SEO faux pas. Printer-friendly pages can also be a big source of duplicate content. Shoot for originality on every page of your ecommerce site.

Thin content. You may think that your products speak for themselves, or that you can get away with just having a product photo and a sentence-long description per page—but from an SEO standpoint, this won’t cut it. Try to fill out each page with 400 words of content at the least—product descriptions, testimonials, etc.

Slow loading times. Remember that a good percentage of your users are going to be on mobile devices—and they don’t have time to sit and watch their phone load a page for 30 seconds or more. Slow loading times kill SEO, and many overly-fancy ecommerce sites simply load too slowly. If your page takes more than three seconds to load, you need to pare it down.

All of these issues can be lethal, but all are fixable, too. If you need help with an SEO fix, give us a call. The enCOMPASS team would love to talk with you about the marketing needs for your ecommerce site.