An ecommerce site lets you sell your product to the entire world, but you’re actually competing against the entire world. Right now, there are anywhere between 12-24 million eCommerce stores around the world today. So how do you compete with all of that?
The good news is that very few stores are running their eCommerce sites the right way and only about 650,000 stores sell more than $1,000 per year.
In the world of eCommerce SEO, you don’t achieve success, you maintain it. You need to stay on top of every single Google update and know what it will mean for your store.
However, if you’re just starting out, here are 4 mistakes that most companies make right out of the gate.
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Cheap Hosting Solutions
If you’re looking to keep costs down in those lean early days, this is not the area you want to go with a “cheap” solution. Because “cheap” in this case is actually costing you a lot of money.
First of all, there is downtime, which is a revenue-killer. Even if you don’t believe that you’re dealing with enough volume for downtime to really hurt your income (yet), you need to consider how much slow speeds from a shoddy host can cost you. Consider that:
- About half of your would-be customers expect your page to load in 2 seconds
- 40% of visitors will abandon it if it takes more than 3 seconds to loadå
If you have gone with a cheap provider, you will definitely want to upgrade your website hosting services sooner versus later to fix this leak in your sales funnel.
Using Factory Product Descriptions
Let’s say you’re selling the new Samsung TV on your site. To save time, you copy and paste the product description from Samsung into your sales page. This is not a time-saver, this is an SEO-killer.
This description likely already appears somewhere else online, which means Google will see your site as duplicate content and they won’t index your page.
Make sure you’re writing your own unique product description for every product you’re selling. Yes, of course, this is more time-consuming. However, failing to do so is simply giving away valuable SEO clout.
Not Creating a Publishing Bible or Cheat Sheet
If you have multiple people on your team creating and publishing product pages, you need standard procedures to ensure that everybody is doing the right things, every single time.
This means creating a bible, checklist or cheat sheet with clear instructions for what you need for every page’s:
- Title tags
- Page copy/ product description
- Headings (H1, H2s)
- Images, captions and image descriptions
- Meta descriptions
It is extremely difficult to build SEO, or measure your results when you have five different people doing five different things with your keywords. Consistency is crucial to measurement and growth.
Even if you are the only person who is uploading and publishing, document your standard procedures right now, so you can quickly hand it off to somebody else, if need be.
These three steps are very much just the tip of the SEO iceberg in the world of e-commerce. Your strategy and standard operating procedures will likely change a few times a year.
However, the three things we have discussed today are the most common mistakes that your business may make, and avoiding them today can set you up for success tomorrow.
