Four factors that may negatively affect your e-commerce SEO — Retail Technology Innovation Hub

Sometimes websites experience a sudden drop in SEO rankings, which can happen for various reasons.

You cannot always avoid this, but you can certainly minimise SEO errors and work on e-commerce success. Investing in SEO is a valuable investment that makes you more visible to your target audience.

It’s terrifying when an error brings down a website for even a few hours. If you are struggling to increase your rankings, keep reading.

Here are the four things you can do to boost your website, fix these mistakes, and maximize your online presence.

Eliminate duplicate content

Duplicate content is content on a website that completely matches the content on other websites or is very similar to it. If you have a significant amount of duplicated content on your website, it will affect your site rankings negatively.

Duplicate content also means that you have created new pages on your website that are similar to the other existing pages on the internet (like the H1 tags or the title). As a result, it becomes difficult for a search engine to determine what to feature in the result pages.

Content rankings drop when Google chooses between matching content. Although this is not technically a penalty, it’s a mistake you must fix to improve your rankings.

Multiple pieces of identical or similar content in more than one place make it difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant.

When preserving your brand reputation and writing original content that is not copied from your competitors, plagiarism checker software is a great solution. Copy and paste your content into this tool. It will scan it and compare it to the other websites to show you a percentage of plagiarised content.

With a plagiarism checker, it’s easier to fix whatever needs to be fixed and avoid the risk of plagiarism.

Domain name

It’s a challenge to choose a domain name that is not already taken and fits your business perfectly. The concern is not just the availability but also how it will affect the SEO.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing a domain name for your e-commerce website:

●      Insert your keyword.

●      Use your brand name.

●      Keep it short and relevant.

A keyword might not boost rankings, but it is still helpful because search engines tend to bold keywords in domain names. In some cases, your brand name is not a keyword.

If this is the case with your website, choose a brand over a keyword because search engines like Google value branding more.

Your domain name must be relevant to your industry. That way, your target customers can understand better what your business is all about. Keeping it short is also important, so choose a domain name with one of two words.

Although a domain name has little effect on your website’s SEO, having a well-thought and relevant one will benefit you in many ways. Your website’s authority and reputation will improve and this will help you protect your company from possible reputation damage.

If you are struggling with creating a domain name yourself, you can buy cheap domain name options. They are a safe, secure, and significantly cost-effective solution.

Low quality links

Low quality links are links from low-quality web and article directories, guest posts, or spam comments.

Those kinds of links are seen as unnatural by search engines. If you have many low quality links pointing to your website, Google will send you a message asking you to remove them.

But if you haven’t received any messages, it doesn’t mean you don’t have any unnatural links. Identify all the URLs pointing to your e-commerce website and check if any of them is low quality.

If it is, remove those links by sending emails to the webmaster. This process can take time. Usually, six to eight weeks is enough to get responses to your emails.

While waiting for responses, take screenshots of the emails you have sent. When the process finishes, you can ask Google to examine your website again by sending a reconsideration request.

If you haven’t received any messages from Google, examining is unnecessary. Simply removing low-quality links by emailing the webmaster is enough.

Bad redirects

Ideally, redirects help you guide search engines and users to find specific content on other URLs or direct them to the most appropriate alternative resource.

A wrong redirect doesn’t fulfill the user’s intention and takes your visitors to a different URL than intended. It happens due to certain website changes when the rankings for a specific URL get lost.

You mustn’t change the old URL unless your new page is ready. You should navigate users to the page with the same or better content than the previous one.

If you don’t fulfill their intents and create lots of redirects that go to the homepage or a page with different content, it will influence the ranking of the redirected page.

Final thoughts

All your efforts to optimise your website will fail if you don’t keep an eye on the factors that can hurt your SEO. These common SEO mistakes can limit your chances of getting higher rankings in search engines.

By avoiding mistakes, you will enhance your click-through rate, improve your customer experience, and boost sales. Keep an eye on these factors, follow the best SEO practices, and frequently track your website’s performance.

Happy optimising!