• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 11, 2018

It pays to avoid mistakes.

SEMrush audited 5 million ecommerce pages to find the 80 most common web site mistakes and technical issues. That helps determine the basic search engine optimization factors that plague brands.

The analysis scans 1,300 online shops for 80 technical and SEO issues, varying widely from mild nuisances to severe business-damaging errors. The analysis looks at the overall health of web sites, as well as each page on the site.

Take web site performance, for example.

It’s widely publicized by Google and others that for every second of delay in the load time of a web page, brands can see a 7% decrease in conversion rates. SEMrush’s analysis found nearly 80% of sites have slow load speeds, while 3.83% of their pages have slow load times.

Nearly 80% have unminified JavaScript and CSS files, while 24.80% of the average number of pages on these web sites are affected. About 51% have uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files on the website, of which 5% are too large. Some 19.50% of the pages on these web sites are affected.

While internal links help site visitors and search engines find content, the findings report that three out of four web sites have broken internal links. In fact, nearly 96% of pages analyzed have only one internal link. About 54% have nofollow link attributes in internal links.

The analysis found 83% of the web sites have duplicate content, and one-third have broken internal images.

The report also points to security concerns. About 72% of the links lead to HTTP pages on HTTPS sites, meaning that not all the pages using a secured version of HTTP are secure. This leads to about half of the pages analyzed having issues with mixed content.

Managing the secure socket layer (SSL) certificate, the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser, is also often overlooked, according to the findings.

Ecommerce sites selling products in different countries need search engines to understand the site might have similar content in different languages. But about 53% of the pages analyzed have missing hreflang and language attributes to alert the search engines. About 25% have hreflang conflicts within page source code. Nearly 23% have issues with incorrect hreflang links.  

Some 89% of web sites have duplicate meta-descriptions, and 72% have missing meta-descriptions. About 90 have duplicate title tags, 89% have title elements that are too long, 55% have a title element that is too short, and nearly 35% have title tags missing on their web site.