It should not come as a surprise that e-commerce websites tend to see regular footfall. As online personifications of a marketplace, successful e-commerce websites thrive on a constant inflow of virtual shoppers. But this is not something that can be taken for granted. Rather, the online retail websites constantly compete among each other and strive to achieve maximum number of page visits and user engagement on a daily basis.
While a lot of this has to do with marketing, promotion and social media exposure, the primary battleground for this is the Google Search Results page. Getting featured in the top five Google search results is perhaps the most important thing that any website can hope for. According to Google competitor Bing, the top result to a search query generally witnesses 42% of the traffic, the second result witnesses 11% while the third, 8%. This means that even within the top five listings, the disparity is huge. Not to mention the fact that not being featured in the top five to ten search results is a sureshot way to non-existence in the online world.
The thing that many sellers don’t understand about popularity on search engines is how much it depends upon the website content. The truth is that if your website is struggling with traffic on the internet, the issue to focus on is not social media strategies, marketing or even clickbait, but rather, the content that you host on your website. The importance of content is not limited to just this. As the primary means to communicate with the customer, the content on your website already has special importance. Good content has the power to make the customer feel comfortable during transactions. A good example is how Android phrases its messages –
One of the thumb rules that Google designers live by is to keep it concise. By asking questions like ‘Got Google?’, it brings a casualness and reassurance to the conversation, making the user feel at home with the system.
Here are a few common web content mistakes that you should avoid.
Common E-Commerce Web Content Mistakes
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Lack of Product Description
One of the worst mistakes that you can do while thinking about content on your online retail website is to not upoad unique product descriptions. As a retailer, you may often list consumer products that may also be available with other online sellers. In fact, most products sold online are listed multiple times, by multiple sellers, on multiple websites. How do you make your listing stand out?
The answer lies in unique product content. Retail products generally come with their own content, written by the manufacturing company. Most retail listings just copy-paste the same content in their product description. This is a bad idea, because Google trackers penalise websites with duplicate content. This is why it is important to take some time out to think about and write unique, catchy and keyword rich descriptions for your products.
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Lack of Reviews
After all, e-commerce websites are not known to be content rich. An online retail website would generally host, common, non-unique content on each of its webpages – like titles, headers, columns, etc. One of the most important spaces for unique content on online retail websites therefore becomes the reviews section. Customer reviews not only provide insight and become a valuable resource for potential customers, but also, they make the website content rich.
This is why websites like Zomato and TripAdvisor focused on gathering unique product reviews before diversifying to other services. While it is common practice for many online sellers to get paid reviews, it is important for you to convince actual customers to contribute reviews to achieve all the benefits that the review system offers. Find innovative ways to urge customers to write product reviews for your website.
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Non-Unique Titles
Google trackers scan content in terms of its hierarchy on a webpage. This means that titles and headings on your website acquire a special importance. Keyword rich headings and titles, that can be distinguished from the rest of the content on the basis of their font size and placement, are the most effective means to drive website visibility on the search engine. It is a good practice to list out potential keywords for your product and find ways to utilise them in important places on the website. A good tool to test potential keywords is Google AdWords.
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Not Updating Meta Tags
A webpage is essentially an HTML entity, which is decoded by the web browser, like Chrome or Firefox, to show the page as we know it. To assist the search engine, HTML documents can be provided with meta tags. These are essentially a list of keywords that are associated with the website, and stored in the meta index of the webpage. The first thing that a search engine tries to match the user’s search query, is the meta tags of the website.
When you look at a page of Google search results, you might notice that each result has a small description along with it – around fifty words of unique content that may not be found inside the website. This is another content opportunity that many webmasters miss out on. High visibility content like this needs to be carefully crafted to be keyword rich, so that it is search engine optimised.
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Duplicate Content
A big no no when it comes to webcontent is copying content from other websites – it is easy, and seems insignificant while you’re doing it, but it is also one of the top five worst things you can do to your website. Not just outright plagiarism, but even what might seem to be innocent duplication, trememndously harms your website. This is not an ethical issue. As we mentioned earlier, Google’s search engine penalizes websites that are found to have duplicate content. This means that your website might risk losing itself in the oblivion along with millions of other sites that are floating online. Prevent this from happening by making sure not to duplicate any of your web content.
If you have queries, get in touch with Browntape. We are India’s leading e-commerce solutions experts, and we are always happy to help!
