When building a website, many have turned to using the simple drag and drop software. And while this software is great for the aesthetics of the design, it may not be beneficial for the overall functionality. Primarily, the text may not appear in the Search Engine Result pages. For e-commerce sites, this is a big issue. If you are wondering why your keywords are not showing up in SERPs, here are a few reasons which are common.
The words are too generic
Website builders which use templated and plug-in SEO building tools tend to put too much generic keywords into the sites. For example if you have a dog grooming site in Seattle Washington, the site may just keyword dog grooming. The issue with this is that your keywords are competing with every other site that has dog grooming in the text. Instead of using these short words, use long keyword strands (in this example put Dog Grooming Seattle Washington).
Non-supported fonts
Just because a font is aesthetically pleasing does not mean that it is able to be recognized by browsers. While most browsers will add a generic text for fonts which are not identified by the browser, there are instances where the font will not be recognized and the text will simply be skipped over. This eliminates the possibility of any SEO being attributed to the text.
The best practice when making your e-commerce site is to look for inspirational online stores which have similar fonts to the ones you wish to use. If you are not familiar with the font, use Evernote, PDF Text finder, or such software to identify the web text associated with that site.
The text has been rasterized
Perhaps the most common fluke in text keyword association when using drag and drop website builders is the rasterization of your font. Essentially, the builder takes the text block and turns it into an image. Any text which is within the text block is therefore not seen as being keywords and font, but rather as being an image on the page. The real disadvantage is since you did not intend the text to be an image, there are no tags, alt image text, pointers, etc. to help the words be found in the search engines. The only way that the text is beneficial at this point is if your site is stumbled upon.
Ensuring that your text is not rasterized is crucial to having your keywords in SERPs. The best way to check this is to export your site to your server and then use a keyword finder tool for your site. If nothing comes back, or if you find the list of keywords to be rather scattered, generic, and containing none of your long keyword strands, it is very probable that your text has been rasterized. If this has occurred check your design for any image frames which may be overlapping your text box, check your export settings, and ensure that all the fonts are web safe.