5 SEO Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Ecommerce Site’s Conversion Rates

If you want a sustainable marketing strategy that can bring truckloads of traffic to your ecommerce website, then you need to optimize your pages for the search engines. With the right keywords and SEO strategy application, it’ll be easier for your customers to find you online through the search engines. As you can probably imagine, that bit is important. Let’s apply this principle to dropshipping, for example, a commonly employed ecommerce model.

If you are selling women’s clothes and accessories, and your customers search for those using the search engines, how can you increase the chances of them seeing you if you aren’t optimizing your dropshipping site for the search engines?

The dropshipping model is increasingly becoming popular, so you’ll be competing against numerous online sellers, not to mention already established business brands — with that understanding, you need to employ whatever feasible means you can to get your visitors to land on your pages. Arming yourself with the right SEO knowledge, along with excellent dropshipping ecommerce guides, is crucial if you want to stand out and drive lots of relevant and sustainable traffic to your site.

The bad news is, it can be easy to make SEO mistakes that can hurt your sales and website’s conversion rates. To help you avoid the SEO mistakes that can ruin your site’s conversion rate to oblivion, allow me to share with you some of the most common SEO mistakes. Before that, however, let’s talk about SEO and conversion rates, first.

SEO and Conversion Rates

Search Engine Land defines SEO as the process of getting free organic traffic from natural search results. These results come from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Knowing how your target audience search for information will help you put together an SEO campaign that will resonate with them — therefore, making it more effective.

Your target market’s search behaviors can be categorized into three types:

1. “Do” searches

These are transactional searches that people do to look for activities they want to do or experience.

2. “Know” searches

These searches are informational queries that can range from trivial to scholarly articles and research papers.

3. “Go” searches

These are navigational searches that direct the users to a particular website like Facebook or a brand’s homepage. On the other hand, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is defined as the process of driving your audience to perform a specific action. This may include signing up to an email list, filling out a form, and subscribing to your services.

How SEO and CRO Should Work Together in your Website

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is choosing SEO over CRO (or the other way around). Not only that, but others also think that one strategy might mess up the other. The truth is, both your SEO and CRO elements should complement each other. SEO helps bring more traffic into your website, while CRO helps convert those website visitors into warm leads or paying customers. In essence, SEO attracts visitors, and CRO encourages them to take action on your offer.

To ensure that your site’s conversion rates aren’t impacted negatively by your SEO efforts, allow me to share with you these SEO mistakes that you should avoid.

Using the wrong keywords

SEO strategies are heavily based on keywords. Running your keyword research carefully will not only help you rank for lucrative keywords, but you’d also be able to garner the right kind of traffic — which leads to better conversion.

Here’s an example search result for the keyword “SEO Mistakes” from KWFinder.com

How do you find the right keyword for your website?

It’s all about finding the balance between the search volume, PPC, keyword difficulty, and last but not the least, buyer intent. The results indicate the search volume for the keywords related to “SEO Mistakes.” A keyword difficulty that’s above 50 means the keyword can be difficult to rank. This means, even if the term “keyword” is searched for more than 73,000 times, it won’t be the best one to target.

(Note: I’m just using the keyword “Keyword” as an example. You need to consider the intent of your readers when choosing which keywords to rank for on top of looking at other metrics like search traffic and difficulty level, etc.)

The term “online marketing” has more than 12,000 searches and may seem like a good match, but it will still be difficult to rank — since it’s “KD” shows as 57.

Be sure to look for the sweet spot.

Choose keywords with a lower keyword difficulty and a relatively higher search volume.

You should also use long tail keywords in your SEO strategy. Long tail keywords are a long string of keywords (often 3 words or more) that your target audience may use when running their inquiry through the search engines.

This makes it a better strategy when targeting a niche demographic since it’s highly specific to their wants and needs. LSI Graph is an awesome tool that you can use to find specific long tail keywords for your business.

To find the best keywords for your website, be sure to include transactional keywords in your search.

Words like “buy” or “sale” can help improve your conversion rate. It’s also good to consider keyword seasonality in your strategy. This will help you detect which keywords will perform well in the long run.

Limiting your search engine visibility.

Search engines use automated search bots to “crawl” and index the web pages. However, despite these awesome AI, it still has some weaknesses. Search engines aren’t so good at completing online forms so any content in them might remain hidden.

Duplicate pages can also cause problems for search engines. Content that isn’t text-based can also be difficult to rank, however, search engines are getting better at this. Crawlers may also be quite lacking when it comes to having the intelligence to judge the quality of content. These bots rely on how much interaction people actually do with your website (among other things).

This means you should also work on marketing your website and its content. Increase its shareability online by adding plugins enabling your audience to share it on social media. You also need to make sure that your website has its search engine visibility turned on.

To do this, you need to go to your WordPress dashboard. Go to, “Settings,” then “Reading,” and scroll down to find the tick box where Search Engine Visibility is.

If you don’t want search engines crawling your incomplete work and indexing it, you can tick this box and turn it on once you’ve made changes.

Neglecting your website speed

Your website speed can make or break a sale. Do you believe that?

According to NeilPatel.com, loading time is a major contributing factor to visitors leaving your page. Even a two-second delay can cause your visitor to close the browser and look for another option. This can hurt your conversion rates, of course. Remember that your website is your online real estate and it leaves a lasting first impression. If it loads fast, your audience will tend to think that you’re a professional or a legit company. This increases your customer’s trust.

In fact, 79% of online shoppers say they won’t go back to a website if it has trouble loading. Some of the biggest names in the industry have proven this to be true, as well. Amazon did several tests on their website speed, and it showed that they would lose $1.6 Billion every year if it slowed even just by one second.

Forgetting about website rendering on mobile devices

Mobile rendering is a must for all websites, especially for ecommerce businesses. Online shoppers today are no longer confined to their desktops or laptops. Most of the purchases now happen through mobile devices.

Take a look at these statistics to see how important mobile rendering is for buyers.

1. 91% of mobile users say that being able to access your web content via their mobile device is very important.

2. 91% of today’s marketers believe mobile marketing is the core of their business.

3. 89% of mobile media time is spent using Apps.

4. Almost 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the 2018 holiday season were made on a smartphone.

5. 80% of shoppers used a mobile-phone inside of a physical store to either look up product reviews, compare prices or find alternative store locations.

6. An estimated 10 billion mobile connected devices are currently in use.

And so the question becomes, “As an ecommerce business owner, how should you respond to these numbers”?

The best way is to make sure that your ecommerce website is mobile-friendly. You should use a responsive website theme and optimized your pages for mobile-friendliness. The buttons, link, and CTAs should also be tap-friendly and have the appropriate size. Infographics are also preferred over heavy and lengthy texts. Most users in mobile devices are on the go and see on smaller screens.

You can check your website’s rendering by using SEOPtimer.com. See the example below:

Poor link structures

Having a poor link structure will hurt your site SEO-wise. Remember, crawlers index your site depending on your site’s internal link structure. This helps them understand your website’s structure and index your content properly. If your link structure is poorly mapped out, then your chances of ranking your pages will be impacted negatively.

What’s worse, when running an ecommerce site, your link structure’s value doesn’t just lie in its ability to help you with your SEO. It can also help you with your conversion rates.
Imagine running an ecommerce store that’s all about selling smartphones. If your link structure is poorly mapped out, then you won’t bother linking to other related products like charges or headphones — all of which is something that your audience might need together with their phones.

Can you see how destructive it is for companies to have a poor link structure? Not only will their SEO suffer, but they’ll also lose sales (lots of them, for that matter) that they otherwise would have gotten had they just linked to relevant products/pages.

Conclusion

It can be difficult for new ecommerce business owners to set up and establish a successful store on their own. With the right tools and strategies, you can easily avoid these SEO mistakes on your website. You also increase your chances of being successful tenfolds.

Did you encounter any SEO mistakes in the past? How did you manage to resolve it? Share it with us below.