Common and Simple SEO Mistakes Part One

I’m sure we have all been there, we have got a brand new shiny website and we just know that it’s great and is going to make us lots of sales. We have made the decision to spend some time doing SEO on the site and, we’ve got ourselves a few keywords we want to target and are bringing traffic and for a little while all is good and grand, in fact ecommerce heaven, we see our site start to climb the rankings slowly and then it begins to stall and slow down, then we just seem to stop and we are wondering what went wrong. At this point most of us give up and that’s mistake number one, SEO is far from being an exact science but there are some simple changes to common mistakes that should get you back on track.

Keywords – we all know what they are and we all know how important they are, but if you are not optimising for them correctly then they will not work for you at all, or if they work the results will be minimal. Many times we have seen the mistake of going after Global terms rather than Local , for example you are a small ecommerce firm selling fireplaces, fires and accessories, it would be great to rank on page one of Google for the term Fireplaces but of course the competitiveness of this term makes that highly improbable without a very long term strategy. So what’s the answer? Well initially it would be far better to go for a slightly longer keyword target such as Dimplex Fireplaces or make the term more local to you Fireplaces Lincoln for example. Local terms and long tail keywords will almost certainly start producing results more immediately and as the site gains authority you could begin to look at the tougher keywords.

It’s better to stay clear of other common keyword mistakes such as utilising generic keywords as these will more than likely attract traffic from visitors who don’t really have any interest in the products or service you are offering and this will only serve in making your bounce rate grow.

Content – Ask anyone working in the field of SEO and they will pretty much all agree that content is king; you have sorted out keywords that have the potential to deliver you good quality and targeted traffic. So what’s the worst thing you can do?

Poorly written content is one of the easiest ways of losing that hard earned traffic, it’s all well and good having the content optimised for the search engines but the search engines won’t buy your product or service. Users read content and they are your customers and it’s them that have already looked for your services or need to buy your products. Unlike the search bots a human can easily understand and read your content and determine whether or not it makes sense and is relevant to your website or product, and if it’s not then ‘adios amigo’ they will be off, your site will lose trust and you will have an even harder job of getting that potential customer to return.

If you need good content and can’t write it yourself, hire someone who can produce good quality and original articles, read through it yourself and make sure that it is relevant and makes sense, ask yourself this question – Would you put your name and companies reputation to it?

We will cover some more common and simple SEO mistakes in a later post, in the meantime I hope you enjoy this one, if you are looking for some tips and tricks for your eCommerce business then why not take a look at our post on the top 35 tips for ecommerce seo. Please feel free to share and comment.