SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2022: A Guide For Organic Growth

Understanding eCommerce SEO is very crucial in this fast changing digital word. Driving traffic and increasing sales, are probably the two main goals of every eCommerce website. But to achieve these, you – as an eCommerce storeowner or a digital marketer – have to keep up with the latest and fast changing search engine algorithms. And of course, you should be aware of the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022 so that you can be prepared not to repeat them.

So, What is SEO?

Alan Bleiweiss from Good to SEO, defined SEO as the process of convincing search crawlers and algorithms that “this page is the best choice for this search query.”

With SEO, you help your users to discover your eCommerce online store in the most organic way. In order to win the SEO battle in 2022, you need to provide useful and relevant content to your users, and of course avoid the top SEO mistakes of 2022.

With this high-volume algorithmic evolution, Google and other search engines assimilate new technologies for search.

SEO is the process of convincing search crawlers and algorithms that this page is the best choice for this search query.–   Tweet This!

Nowadays, digital marketers have to optimize their content for voice search, desktop visitors, mobile swipers, and their social media followers. Completing these tasks and avoiding the top SEO mistakes of 2021 to optimize your SEO seem impossible but, take a deep breath.

Download your guide and learn all about SEO tools that can help you gain organic traffic.

Things may evolve very fast but don’t forget that the principles still remain so do the same errors.

Let’s get deeper and analyze the top SEO mistakes of 2022 to get your website’s ranking higher every single day.

What are the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022?

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #1: Having Poor Internal Link Structure

One of the main top SEO mistakes of 2022 is having poor internal linking. Although your website grows, thanks to your “awesome” content, you have to fix some basic linking errors. This means everything. From duplicate content to 404 errors.

Internal links are one of the most crucial elements for your SEO strategy.

They provide valuable functions for your website some of which are:

  • Providing clear pathways to conversion pages.
  • Spreading authority to webpages hidden deep on your site.
  • Providing additional reading or interactive material for users to consume on your site.
  • Organizing webpages categorically by keyword-optimized anchor text.
  • Communicating your most important webpages to search engine crawlers.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #2: Not Using Analytics to Understand the Converting Content

In other words, SEO means conversions. It’s very easy to find the best phrases and keywords that send the most traffic to your website and question yourself when you can’t get a high ranking on search engines. But don’t forget that traffic is not your only goal. There are some more specific phrases with lower traffic but more conversions.

The only way to figure this out is to track your keywords and phrases. You can use an analytics tools to measure the conversions of your phrases and compare them against each other. As a result, you will be able to list the most productive and converting keywords. This, for sure, will help you to better optimize your whole website.

 

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #3: Having Duplicated Content

Duplicated content is the situation when the same content appears in more than one page (URL) of your website. In this situation, search engines can’t decide which content to index. So in this case, your website won’t possibly be listed in search results.

Duplicate issue appears in under different types:

  • Homepage Duplication: Be careful and avoid having duplicated versions of your homepage. Search engines won’t be able to decide your best URL and this won’t rank your website highly.

Some examples:

-https://www.abc.com

-https://abc.com

-https://abc.com/home

-https://abc.com/index.html

  • Duplicate URL: There are many examples in which upper case and lower-case characters are being used inconsistently. As a result, search engines are confused and do not rank your website highly. For example, when the original version of one of your pages is www.abc.com/product-xy and all of your internal and external links point at www.abc.com/Product-Xy, there is a splitting in link quality between these two URLs.
  • Different Webpages Having Similar Content: Avoid copy pasting other websites’ content on your website and using the same content across all different type of pages. Put an SEO guideline in place to prevent these kinds of errors.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #4: Forgetting Image Tags

For sure, websites with brilliant images look stunning and more engaging for the users. But all of these stunning images are invisible for the search engines. To make them visible, you have to use image tags.

Check out and be sure to add alt tags on each image. This will make your images be optimized indeed by search engines. Also, an image description combined with caption are bonuses for the search engines. It’s important not to fill your alt tags with keywords. Try to use real descriptions and include keywords if they are appropriate.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #5: Forgetting to Optimize Your Site for Local Search

If you are focusing on customers within specific regions, you have to learn about local search. Search engines handle this differently. You have to try more region-specific keywords in your titles and meta descriptions. Local address and phone numbers included in the header or footer will help you show up in local results.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #6: Forgetting Content Marketing

With the rise of inbound thus content marketing, many things changed in the SEO world. SEO strategies should not be considered without content marketing anymore. Just building tons of backlinks, social media marketing, blog and forum commenting are not enough to rank your website highly.

Remember that with the continuous algorithmic updates of search engines, even if you have a high ranking thanks to your keywords, your position is not ensured. If you follow the latest updates announced by the biggest search engines and modify your website accordingly, you can avoid the biggest SEO mistakes.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022 #7: Not Consulting Paid Media

Nowadays, SEO focuses on acquiring and nurturing leads whereas paid media focuses on acquiring and converting leads.

You can change this relationship and create a unified message to target your customers at every step of their journey.

To achieve this, you have to use the same keywords and promote the same product page.

PPC keyword research and landing pages’ performances (for example, the reports of Facebook and Twitter’s advertising platforms) will give you an idea about your campaigns.

 

What Are the Most Common eCommerce SEO Keyword Mistakes?

Some of the eCommerce SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022 in terms of keyword research are being made during the keyword research are:

  • Ignoring the preferences of the search engines.
  • Not understanding the users’ needs.
  • Not having an idea about the long tail keywords.

When defining your products, you have to understand the words your potential customers would use. The keywords you consider to be relevant might mean something else for your target audience or be too generic. In both cases, your optimizing work is a complete trash.

If you are an entrepreneur and looking to drive traffic to your eCommerce website, make sure that you are not making these SEO Keyword Research Mistakes.

eCommerce SEO Mistakes 1) Not Executing Your Keyword Research Correctly

We admit that keyword research is tough and is a time-consuming thing. Probably you think that you don’t have to do it very broadly and you believe that you know what your audience will search for. This is a very huge mistake. Take your time and get into your audience’s shoes and make sure you understand their language.

First start with the background research and then countinue with the optimization.

You can use tools like the Google AdWords KeywordPlannerSEMrush, Moz Keyword Explorer and UberSuggest. These tools can immensely help in finding the most trending and adequate keywords.

eCommerce SEO Mistakes 2) Creating Content That’s Not About Your Keywords

One of the biggest SEO mistakes in optimization is producing content that differentiates from your keywords.

The problem here is that you forget your main keyword, the keyword that you want to rank for. Search engines want to serve the users with the most relevant content and if your content does not answer any need it won’t rank well. This happens when many topics are tried to be fit within a single content.

Your main goal here must be producing unique content that directly and truly answers to the needs of your target audience. As a result, search engines, will rank your content after matching your optimized keyword.

Download your guide and learn all about SEO tools that can help you gain organic traffic.

 

eCommerce SEO Mistakes 3) Focusing on Only One Keyword

When you produce content, you could aim to rank for more than one keyword. If you are capable of doing so, you should go for that.  For example, in this post we are explaining the most common SEO mistakes of 2022. Our focus keyword is “SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022” but we are also aiming to rank for other related keywords like “eCommerce SEO mistakes”.

You can use a plugin like YOAST SEO to help you optimize your content for more than one keyword, and also use a tool like Uber Suggest to search for related words. By this way, you can making some of the biggest SEO mistakes.

eCommerce SEO Mistakes 4) Not Grouping Long Tail Keywords

We suppose that you already know that you should target long tail keywords.

But you might realize that you are missing another great opportunity if you are not grouping these long tail keywords together.

When targeting long tail keywords, you have to make sure that you are grouping these words together. The most competitive and high volume long tail keywords must form your subject and you have to spread the other keywords across your page.

With these developments, you will get more competitive and optimize content so that you can get a higher ranking.

BONUS: Does SEO Spelling mistakes affect your website’s ranking?

The answer is YES: You will ask the reason, for sure. Remember that users are human. They judge quickly, they are in a hurry, and once they leave your site they might not come back. Google and other search engines, may not have an algorithm to check the spelling of your website. But they, for sure, do have algorithms to penalize bad user experience. As mentioned above, users will absolutely leave your site, if your content is full of typos, spelling errors and bad sentences.

Users stop but don’t stay: Red flag for your website.

Users will leave a content full of typos and search engines will penalize bad user experience.–   Tweet This!

 

What Are the Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes?

When we are talking about the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022, we can’t go without talking about the technical SEO mistakes. Without a good technical SEO, you will never rank for your target keyword, even if you have a great content and your keyword is super competitive.

Technical SEO makes sure that all of the search engines crawl and index your content correctly.

To make your keyword work count, make sure that you avoid the worst SEO mistakes that arise from technical issues.

1- Confusing Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions with Your Open Graph Description and Title

The title tag is the text that appears in the search results and in the tab of your website. The Meta description is the text that appears as the description of your page among the search results.

The title tags and meta descriptions are always confused with the on-page SEO elements.

Here’s how you can tell which is which:

  • Title tag begins with: <title>
  • Open Graph title begins with: <mega property=“og:title”…
  • Meta description begins with: <meta name=“description”…
  • Open Graph description begins with: <meta property=“og:description”…

Be careful and don’t confuse these. Otherwise you will be making one of the top SEO mistakes of 2022 and it will affect your ranking seriously.

2- Not Having an SSL Certificate (HTTPS)

SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer”. This is used by websites to secure traffic between browsers and servers.

You can understand if your website uses SSL by looking at the URL. “https” demonstrates the security. If your website’s URL says “http” this means that your website lacks the extra layer of security. This – for sure – affects your ranking negatively because search engines use https as a ranking signal.

Be sure that you have implemented SSL on your website and make sure that every page of yours is secure.

You can purchase an SSL certificate from providers like Rapid SSL, Symantec, Comodo.

 

Download your guide and learn all about SEO tools that can help you gain organic traffic.

 

3- Inappropriate Specification of Language Parameters

If you want to translate your website into different languages, use the hreflang tag to specify a URL for each version of the translated pages of your website.

After the use of this tag, the search engine will understand that these URLs are translated versions of the same page.

As a result, if someone is searching for your page, for example in Germany, search engines will automatically show the German version, if the search is in China search engines will show the Chinese version and so on.

These parameters allow you to list the right page, in the right language, to the right audience.

4- Using Too Many Redirect Chains

Too many 301 redirects, will absolutely hurt your technical SEO.

That would look like this:

Page X > 301 Redirect > Page Y > 301 Redirect > Page Z

With these kinds of redirects, you lose a link equity with each step in the chain. If you have to use redirects, make sure that one URL turns to another without any other stops along the way.

You can check for any redirects from Screaming Frog SEO.

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022: The Final Thoughts

We have pointed out the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022 that people have when it comes to their websites.

Everyone thinks of the eCommerce SEO mistakes they make and they want to overthrow them for sure. The best is to consult the best practices.

Always be humble and take a step back here to this post to evaluate if you are doing your best 🙂

Curious to learn more? Take a look at related posts!

 

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