Search ranking results don’t necessarily ensure your business success, but they go a very long way to helping you generate web traffic. From here, a good conversion strategy will help you turn this traffic into paying customers. It all starts with a good ranking for searches relating to your business and what you sell.
So, why is your online store still struggling to rank highly?
Try as you might, you just can’t seem to gain any places and may even struggle to appear on the first results page. It’s hard for your business to compete and make sales when it’s basically invisible to your target market. In this post, we’ll explore some of the common reasons your online store isn’t ranking highly…
Your site isn’t indexed
An index is a term given for a database used by a search engine. When a site is indexed, it becomes part of this database. As a result, the website can now be found by other users when they use the search engine. This is an oversimplification of what happens, but it basically looks like this:
- A user searches for something via a search engine
- The search engine looks at the keywords they use in the search
- The search engine looks into its index and presents the most relevant websites based on the search
This all happens in an instant, and there are more technical procedures at work. So, one reason your online store isn’t ranking well is that it isn’t actually indexed. You keep following loads of great SEO practices and believe your site should rank well. But, you scroll through the first page and see no sign of your site. You click on the second page and there’s still no sign – nor is there on the third. What’s going on? It could be that your site isn’t indexed because you accidentally have it set to block search engine bots from crawling through your site. You can fix this issue pretty easily, and then your site will be ready for Google to crawl and index.
A good tip to see if this is your problem is by typing your URL into Google. If you still don’t see your website in the search results, then it’s definitely not indexed.
You don’t have a mobile-friendly site
Mobile-friendliness is a huge thing for search engines in this day and age. Think about how many consumers will be on their mobile devices every single day. Look at your own consumer behaviors and consider how often you will search for things online via your phone. A lot of people do their online shopping through mobile devices, and Google wants consumers to be met with websites that will work on these devices.
Consequently, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it isn’t going to rank well on mobile searches. You may still rank the same on desktop searches, but you will fair poorly through mobile ones. This becomes more important when you consider that mobile search is the most popular way of searching for things online. It accounts for over 50% of all searches, so you’re missing out on over half of your potential customers if your site isn’t mobile-friendly. Usually, it’s a quick fix to make your site responsive on mobile devices, and you will see an instant improvement in your search ranking.
You use Shopify
There’s nothing wrong with Shopify – in fact, it’s one of the most popular eCommerce platforms around right now. For online business owners, it’s a platform you can trust to help you create a very nice website that functions well and helps you make money. Unfortunately, there are some issues with Shopify relating to SEO. As an example, because of the way tags are generated, you can end up with a lot of duplicate content on your site. It can get pretty confusing, but search engines basically think that you have the same content on numerous pages, despite the fact that you don’t.
If you use Shopify, then it could be holding you back. It is possible to counter this, and all you need to do is work with SEO experts that understand the ins and outs of this eCommerce platform. From here, you can work around the drawbacks and ensure your site ranks a lot higher.
Your store is too slow
Slow page loading speeds will always be a dagger in the heart of any website looking to rank highly. However, they’re a bigger problem for online stores because these websites tend to have more information on them than your average website. You’re reading this post on a blog that has loads of different pages full of different blog posts. That’s a lot of content, but you only really load a snippet of it at a time. Plus, the majority of the content is written, with the odd image.
With your online store, you could have hundreds of products that are listed on your site, including hundreds of images – and possibly even videos. You need an extensive menu to help separate your products and improve navigation, not to mention all the content you have on there too. Simply put, online stores are heavy websites that require users to load a lot of data all in one go. As such, you will likely have problems with loading speeds unless your site is optimized.
Unfortunately, Google penalizes websites that don’t load quickly. This is largely because around 70% of users state that page loading speeds impact their decision to buy from a site or not. Google wants to provide the best experience for its users, so it deranks websites that are slow. Ideally, you want your site to load in under 5 seconds. The closer you get to an instant loading time, the better.
Learning why your online store isn’t ranking is the first step in taking positive action. What is the main problem, or is there a combination of problems? Some of you may find that your issues are all down to the very first point on this list, while others may see numerous things holding you back. Either way, identify the cause of your ranking problems, then fix them to rank highly!
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