The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to increase an e-commerce site’s usability so that it can start bringing in the right people through popular search engines. While site owners should be investing their efforts into optimization to create a high ranking for a particular key term or phrase relevant to the industry, if they’re looking to create impactful raw traffic, they will also want to accommodate a variety of SEO techniques to drive clicks and make their business more noticeable online. That being said, since there are so many resources out there that tell you what you need to do, it’s also important to know which efforts should you be avoiding altogether. 

Don’t blame performance drops on algorithm updates

While sometimes a performance drop happens suddenly because of how frequently these updates occur, you shouldn’t resort to blaming Google for your low rankings or drop in organic traffic. In fact, performance drops can occur for a variety of different reasons. 

Some common reasons for organic performance drops include: 

• Newly discovered technical issues on the e-commerce site
• Significant content changes to the e-commerce site
• Seasonality (higher traffic October to December)
• Competitor changes 
• Manual actions

Keeping the above possibilities in mind is important as you don’t want to always blame performance errors on algorithm updates. 

What to do instead?

Several SEO techniques allow you to bounce back from organic performance drops, however, here are some quick tips that you should investigate to allow your site to start hitting the algorithm. 

• Check your coverage report in Google Search Console.
• Run a site crawl to check for structural changes.
• Run an automated audit on your SEO tool of choice to check for any hidden errors. 
• Check robots.txt for any new disallow directives. 
• Run a fetch and render to see how Google is rendering your site.
• Have a look at your changes tool in the Wayback Machine.
• Install an activity log plugin to track your site changes.
• Investigate your Google Analytics and start analyzing pages. 

Don’t duplicate location page copy 

If you’re in charge of developing location page copy for a large-scale company that possesses many locations, it’s important to create unique copy for each location, even though it can be time-consuming. While it may be easy enough to just duplicate the copy and change a few things here and there, we highly advise against this. One of the best SEO techniques that you can utilize for better local ranking performance is to write some text that’s unique so that you increase your chances of getting noticed. So, don’t be lazy, simply find some inspiration for your writing so the task isn’t as tedious as it seems.  

Don’t pay for links

In the field of search engine optimization, link building is a set of two words that are used to describe an action aimed at increasing the number and the quality of inbound links to a website, intending to increase that page’s SEO ranking. So, while link building is incredibly beneficial for an e-commerce company that’s looking to get noticed, quality and relevance are even more essential, which is why you should never pay for your influence in the industry. It’s easy to pay and guarantee your place among a series of backlinks but link building is more favorable if it’s within well-known publications and written by people who admire its importance. We recommend investing in a partnership rather than appearing in paid features because noteworthy publications have a greater chance of organically growing a backlink profile.

Are there any other SEO techniques that are often used but shouldn’t be? Drop a comment below to share your expertise with our readers.