Why Your Online Store SEO is Failing—and How Australia’s Get More Traffic Can Help
Online store SEO is no easy task. In fact, search engine optimisation for e-commerce stores tends to be markedly harder than it is for blogs and more basic websites. There are several reasons for this added difficulty, from the higher quantity of pages to the fact that e-commerce pages tend to come and go as limited or seasonal products cycle in and out of your inventory.
Many of the reasons for the difficulty with SEO for online stores, though, tends to be self-inflicted. While there are some inherent hurdles with online store SEO that aren’t there with other types of websites, perhaps the biggest challenge with e-commerce sites is that they are also more likely to have potential pitfalls.
Common Errors with SEO Online Store Strategies
Indeed, if your online store isn’t seeing the kind of traffic and conversion rates that you want or need to continue growing your business, any number of errors could be at fault. Here are just a few of the factors that could be contributing to your lack of search engine traffic:
You copied and pasted the manufacturer descriptions rather than write your own – If your e-commerce site carries products from third-party manufacturers, then this strategy might seem like the best way to go. After all, writing original copy for dozens, hundreds or even thousands of third-party products is time-consuming and costly. It’s faster and cheaper just to use the manufacturer’s product descriptions.
The problem is that Google filters out pages with duplicate content, so if you are using manufacturer descriptions, your pages aren’t going to rank. Even if they did, manufacturer descriptions are rarely absorbing and almost never engage customers and encourage sales. In other words, you need unique content.
Some of your pages don’t have any product descriptions – You wouldn’t believe how many product pages across the web have no written content, period. Some site managers will create pages and upload photos, intending to ‘come back later’ to write content. Others will learn that having generic third-party product descriptions hurts their SEO and will just delete all those descriptions and not replace them with new text.
Whatever the reason, if you don’t have description text for your products, your online store SEO is going to suffer. Without text, there isn’t much for search engines to crawl, which means that your pages have virtually no chance of ranking on the first page of a Google search. The bottom line is that you need unique, original, keyword-targeted text for every single product in your store.
Your headings are weak – If you carry third-party products, you must assume that customers are going to be searching for specific brands and model numbers. In addition to more general product-related keywords, it’s important to highlight these specific details—preferably in your headings, page titles, URLs and meta descriptions. If search engines can pick up that information, it’s going to help the SEO for your online store.
Get Help with Your Online Store SEO in Australia
If you are looking for help with your online store SEO in Australia, give us a call at Get More Traffic today. Whether you need keyword research, original product descriptions, tweaks to your headings and metadata or other improvements, we can help. Call us on 1300 332 256 to learn more about our SEO for online store websites.