Ecommerce sites are complicated.
You’ve got category pages and product pages sprouting out from everywhere.
You’ve got to come up with helpful content for each of these pages.
You’ve got to try and make sure you optimise each individual page to dominate search engine rankings.
It feels more intimidating than the prospect of strolling in to your manager’s office and demanding a paid 12 week summer holiday to ‘recharge your batteries’ (see image right).
But you need to make sure you’re maximising your chances of finding more customers online.
When people buy stuff from you, they ask Google and friends for answers. You need your content behind their click. You’d like your products in their virtual cart. You want their dollars in your monthly sales figures.
So you know how critical SEO is to your online store, even if it seems as simple as explaining your current job specifications to an octogenarian in less than 3 hours.
The fear of leaving sales on the table wins out. You want the best possible chance of meeting and keeping more customers from search engine results. But you don’t have an ecommerce SEO expert.
Suddenly, you’re staring at a bunch of quotes from consultants and agencies with three zeros at the end. Worse, you don’t actually understand what you’re paying for. How is one better than the other? Do we really need to pay a bunch of techie SEO agency guys to rewrite all of our expertly crafted product page content? Is this really going to generate us thousands of sales?
Stop.
Ecommerce SEO doesn’t need to be this hard.
As much as it seems like SEO is a mystical black magic practiced by basement-dwelling tech nerds, it’s really not as complicated as we make it out to be.
We’ve hacked our way through the Ecommerce SEO Jungle for years. We find the same fallen trees and harmless predators barricading search engine success time and time again. Fixing them isn’t difficult.
We’re here to be the David Copperfield guy that does the half hour special showing you how simple those intense magic tricks really are. Sure we’re probably breaking some brethren code and ruining it for everyone, but there really is no need for you to shell out thousands of dollars to audit you online store’s SEO. It’s not magic. We don’t even wear top hats…
We’ll bust the myths and save you the cash. Truth is, an experienced marketing pro can check and fix the majority of common ecommerce SEO errors. You just need some specific advice and a helping hand.
Below, you’ll find the 8 most common things we continually see holding ecommerce site website SEO back. If you’re doing all of these right, you’ve got a good foundation for success. If not, it’s surprisingly easy for you to check and fix these problems yourself. You just need a little help in the right direction. We gorillas are here to give you that help.
We’ve put together a detailed DIY ecommerce SEO audit guide. We’ve broken each of these 8 common issues down and given you a step by step guide for each. Any ecommerce pro will learn how to:
- Understand
- Find
- Check
- Fix
- Know when to ask for expert help
There’s detailed how-to’s on checking and fixing these 8 common ecommerce SEO issues. The guide is a step-by-step job that you can hand off immediately to a team member to follow.
It’s also doubles as a practical troubleshooting guide for you to keep on file. If you’re worried about your SEO, or you see an unexplained drop in rankings, you can pull out the DIY Audit to Sherlock Holmes your problem.
The 8 most common ecommerce SEO issues
If you’ve got issues that our hacks below can’t fix – that’s when you need to think about allocating some of that budget for some expert SEO help.
#1. Crawling and Site Errors
You need to help Google find and crawl your content to get it recommended through search
#2. Indexation Errors
It’s not enough for Google to find your content, it needs to be able to index your content. Often ecommerce sites inadvertently set up content not to be included in search engine results.
#3. Managing Your Site Architecture
Often ecommerce sites have so many layers of categories, sub categories and product pages that search engines can’t find their way through the site’s architecture to find your content. A flatter site architecture usually makes it easier to get search engine referral traffic.
#4. Using Canonicals for Duplicate Content
Ecommerce sites can have hundreds or thousands of products. These products could be replicated across different categories. The content on these pages is often similar or duplicated across categories. Search engines frown upon copied content – so you need canonicals to explain your ecommerce content.
#5. External Duplicate Content
It’s not just internal duplication that cripples ecommerce SEO. Often slack, lazy or spammy outside sources steal your content. You might not even know it. But Google sees plagiarism. You might get penalised for someone else’s thievery. You need to learn how to deal with external content duplication.
#6. www. and non www. Redirects
If you use both www. and non www. URL prefixes, you might have yourself a disaster on your hands. You may have unwittingly submitted two of each page on your site to Google. You need to use redirects to show Google which version is boss.
#7. Researching and Using the Best Keywords
It’s hard to work out which terms to rank for. Some ecommerce sites don’t optimise their content for the terms searchers use to find information. Ecommerce Keyword research and planning allows you to find the best options and measure your SEO success.
#8. Optimising on Page Content
Once you’ve worked out the right keywords for your customers, you need to optimise your content so that search engine bots understand what your content is talking about. You need to explain to Google and friends what keywords you want your content to rank for.
Do you know how to check and fix each of these 8 issues? No?
It’s okay. Not many of us do.
It’s taken us years of practice, just focussing on ecommerce SEO to sort this stuff out.
But once you know how to do it, it’s not that difficult.
So if you want to improve your site’s SEO or you’ve got a rankings problem – don’t reach for that phone to ask your boss for more budget. You don’t need to shell out the big ones for an SEO expert.
Download Your Online Store SEO Audit
You’ll be able to solve most of your problems for free. We tell you when it’s time to tap out on the DIY and call in the experts.
Until then, you can start saving thousands of SEO dollars from that budget line item to give yourself some more breathing room.
And you’ll get yourself some more customers with your shiny new SEO refreshed site.
I know, we’re friendlier than your average gorilla.
And we know more stuff about ecommerce SEO.
No need to thank us.
Oh and sorry to our SEO dark arts magician crew for busting the secrets. We’re just trying to help…
