All organizations aim to show exponential growth and, in turn, increase business manifold. Towards this end, elaborate business plans are created with online marketing occupying a prime place. Despite all attempts, very few organizations have their house in order. It all starts with ubiquitous SEO that most companies neglect. The success of your website depends on whether you are deploying the correct SEO strategies. 

It is stated that 93% of all online experiences begin by searching for the information, with 58% of all search originating from mobile phones. This requires companies to recheck their SEO strategies to ensure they are not making mistakes while working on their SEO. In case your website is not ranking high on search engines, ensure that you are not making these common mistakes.

(Source: https://www.codemeright.com/blog/post/common-seo-mistakes-how-to-avoid)

Check the load times:

There is a lot of online data that will link user response to your website to how fast it loads. While it may seem negligible, but a 2-3 second different could mean a lot for visitors to continue their journey on their website. A major with some of the lesser-known e-commerce sites has always been the loading time. While the famous ones like Amazon load in a flash, several others take ages to load.

47% of prospects wish that a web page would load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of visitors abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The longer the website takes to load, the more are the chances of visitors abandoning the site.

Enable web security:

Search engines prefer secure websites over insecure ones. The reason being search engines are in the business of ensuring a safe browsing experience for their users. Google came up with an update in 2018 that heavily penalized non-HTTPS websites by prioritizing HTTPS websites. Procuring an Comodo EV SSL Certificate will help you protecting your site and improving SEO rank too as it offers the highest validation as well and business verification that shows visitors about business authenticity.

What HTTPS does is that it encrypts the communication between the web server and the visitor’s browser. So, any third-party cannot read that information. Again, an e-commerce site must adhere to the PCI-DSS guidelines. The guidelines require them to deploy stringent practices to prevent financial fraud from their websites.

Writing a gripping product description helps:

There is always an evident difference between the product descriptions in a renowned e-commerce site to ones lower down the order. Why do we forget to write descriptions that entice the customer to know more about our product? Unless they are willing to know more, they will abandon the site and move on. Probably to your competition! And they may never come back.

Before starting to write, do understand the buyer persona and put yourself in their shoes. Try to understand what problems they are having. You must also ensure that you are speaking in a tone that is in line with the overall communication strategy.

Gather customer reviews and testimonials:

While word of mouth is one of the best ways to receive prospects, we must also ensure that we have the requisite number of customer reviews and testimonials. It would help if you convinced visitors to buy; else, they may opt for your competition.

Research shows that an average consumer goes through at least ten reviews before trusting a company, and only 53% of them would do business with a company with less than four stars. SO, you need to entice your customers to write a review for you. Also, ensure they have a great experience to give your five stars for their association with you.

Enabling Schema Markup:

Improving your search rank is a tedious task. You will get help if you use schema markup. What is it? It is a few lines of code that you put on your site that allows search engines to return informative results for visitors. It will inform the search engines what the information on your site means. While having a structured schema helps to rank better, only a third of all websites use this. You must also implement local SEO markup on your website to help in your local SEO activities. 

Duplicate content should be removed:

You must not have duplicate content on your website. Search engines do not like duplicate content. The penalty that is imposed is that your page would not rank above your competitor. It is in your best interest to find out any duplicate content and remove them. You may delete those pages or, at least, use 301 redirects to ensure search engines are on the right page. Your site must not allow Google to understand that you are deliberately using duplicate content.

User-friendly URLs help:

Having strange URLs for your pages does not help. Visitor friendly URLs are a significant ranking factor for Google. You must ensure that the keyword is present in the URL and do make it concise also. Various CMS plug-ins can suggest URLs for you based on the keywords for that page. It becomes easier for visitors to understand the content from your URL. WordPress users can use permalinks to come up with a URL suited for site visitors.

Optimization for voice search:

It is said that by this year, 30 of browsing will be done using voice search. Does it mean that focused content and keywords could be a thing of the past? Not quite. You must anyways position your content to understand question-based keywords. Choosing the correct words that link to your web page is the need of the hour.

The final thought:

Working on SEO will allow your site to rank higher in the SERP order. It will ensure that you are easily searchable, and more visitors are on your web pages. However, many factors lead to improving your website search rankings. It starts by ensuring protection for your site by procuring an EV SSL certificate. We have discussed the critical factors to avoid SEO mistakes.