Click-Worthy Titles and Descriptions
7 SEO Mistakes That Keep Indie Sellers Invisible
Most guides to common SEO mistakes are written for bloggers chasing pageviews. Selling real products is a different sport: variant pages, prices that move, stock counts, and one person (you) keeping it all tidy. These are the seven errors indie sellers repeat, the ones that quietly park good products on page four.
Mistake 1: The Duplicate Description Trap
List a candle on Etsy, your own shop, and a marketplace with the same 80 words on all three, and Google has to crown one version the original. It's rarely your store. Variants do the same damage: 12 colours on 12 near-identical pages read as thin and repetitive to a crawler. Write one strong description per product and let the variants share it instead of fighting each other for the same query.
"Paste the same 80 words on three sites and Google keeps just one. It is almost never yours.
"Slatesource23rd of July 2026
Mistake 2: Skipping Structured Data
This is the one sellers miss most. Product schema is the markup that hands search engines your price, stock status, and review count, and it's what earns the star ratings and "CHF 14, in stock" labels in results. No schema, no rich result, so your listing melts into a wall of plain blue links. One soap maker added Product and Offer markup in a single afternoon. Two weeks later, the numbers:
Time to add markup
One afternoon
Weeks until it showed
Two
Now visible in search
Price and rating
Click rate from Google
Roughly doubled
Mistake 3: Titles That Read Like a Barcode
Your title tag is the headline Google shows and the buyer scans. Fill it with a SKU and it matches nothing anyone actually searches. The fix is one swap: lead with the words a stranger would type, then let the specs follow.
What Your Spreadsheet Calls It
Blue Ceramic Mug 350ml SKU-4471. Precise, sortable, and a phrase no human has ever typed into a search bar.
What a Buyer Types
Speckled handmade coffee mug. Human words first in the title tag, the specs behind them. The barcode can ride in the back.
Mistakes 4 and 5: Hidden Products and Ignored Images
Two quick ones that leak sales. A product reachable only through a JavaScript filter may never be crawled, and a photo named by the camera teaches search engines nothing. Both are a rename or a link away from fixed.
Products buried inside a JavaScript-only filter can stay invisible forever. Give each one a plain URL linked from somewhere crawlable, then search site:yourshop.com and count how many actually appear. The gap is your missing inventory.
Mistakes 6 and 7: Reviews Locked Away, Pages That Crawl
Reviews are free, keyword-rich text that refreshes itself, so pull them onto the product page instead of leaving them trapped in a widget Google can't read. Then load the page on an actual phone, not the roomy laptop view.
A four-second product page loses the buyer before ranking even enters the picture, and Google judges the phone version first. Test on cellular, not wifi. Speed is the mistake nobody sees until the sale is already gone.
Let the Page Emit the Markup
The schema half of this list is the real chore: hand-writing Product and Offer tags, keeping prices and stock in sync as they change. A Slatesource slate handles that quietly. Structured chips emit clean markup on their own, so your prices and reviews can surface in search instead of going silent. Fix the copy mistakes yourself, and let the page carry the tags.