Expert site feedback required please
-
Hi all,
I would really appreciate some feedback on a site i have developed for a client. To give you a little background, we sell cheese and other associated products online. The site has been online for about a year or so but SEO only really implemented in the last few months.
The site visitors are low at the moment which is leading to low sales of course
I would love some feedback on the areas listed below. My goal is to improve visitor numbers, visibility of the site and sales. Not much then...
• Site design
• Usability
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Any other feedback / advice you would be kind enough to offerThe site address is: http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk
Thanks in advance, i look forward to reading your responses!
Chris.
-
I see
Just tried that out and my local (UK) search terms are a little higher as expected. Seems odd that no one would be searching for "buy isle of mull cheddar" Does it just round down to 0 if the number is quite low?
In your example, would 46 and 36 be numbers worth bothering with if you were optimising this website? I know this is treading dangerously into the "how do i pick the right keywords" territory, so i'll keep it just to this particular example
When you consider that there are over 200 cheeses on the site, is 40 and 50 searches per month worthwhile considering i'll only get a fraction of that traffic if i make it to number 1.
Thanks again Donnie!
-
Ideally it's best to go after 1 keyword per page 2 max. This is one of the reasons for it...
In your case I would target the keyword "isle of mull cheddar" it has the best search volume using: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty
| isle of mull cheddar | 37 | 46 | 170 | 36 | 140 |
|
| buy isle of mull cheddar | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|
| buy cheddar from isle of Mull | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -
Thanks Donnie,
I'm still a little confused about how I would best make use of these reports. To give you an example, we have a product page for Isle of Mull Cheddar (very nice cheese!).
http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk/products/isle-of-mull-cheddar
Ideally, i would like this page optimised for keywords such as "isle of mull cheddar" and "buy isle of mull cheddar" and "buy cheddar from isle of Mull"
I may be going about this in the wrong way but it would be difficult to get all those keywords in the H1 tags and in the description and the title tags and make them bold etc as suggested by the reports. This leads to one report of A and 2 reports showing an F grade.
Should i only be picking one of those keywords? If so then the traffic numbers are relatively low for any given single phrase, i need traffic from a combination of phrases to make it worth while optimising the page.
Any guidance you can offer would be appreciated.
Chris
-
HI chris,
I checked http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk/ and I did it in the SEOmoz report card: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new
Just put the keyword you want to rank for and for which page. it will give you back a grade with instructions on correcting anything that is not best practice.
-
Hi Yvonne,
Thanks for your feedback and your colour suggestions. I also like the idea of an orange call to action button and add to basket button so i'll be speaking to the client about implementing these soon. The cross sell suggestion is great but would require a paid subscription to implement so ideally i' would like to get more visitors to the site before being able to justify additional cost of adding this.
Thanks for you help, very much appreciated.
Chris
-
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your help. Your point about the site not being engaging is extremely valid and one that we had missed due to being so involved with the technicalities of it. Thanks for flagging this up and we'll be putting it right very soon. I also love you suggestions about top 10 lists and incorporating humour into the mox to make the content more engaging.
Thanks again
Chris
-
Hi,
Thanks for your help. Wedding cakes is certainly something we have in the pipeline and we're just in the process of revamping our wedding cake service. I will certainly have a look at connecting and working with review sites.
Thanks for your help
Chris
-
Hi Donnie,
Thanks for your feedback, you make some very good points. Backlinks is a real issue at the moment so that's my next area of focus, the traffic to the site is too low at the moment to begin to draw conclusions from. I'll also take on board you suggestion of A/B testing and try out different versions of some of the key pages.
I actually thought i had canonical setup as i followed instructions on shopify website. How did you check to see if it was in place? Didi you also check on one of the product pages for canonical as well as a generic page such as 'about us'?
Thanks again for your help
Chris
-
I like your website but this quick changes can be added to already great suggestions by others
- Your site is simple but a bit bland ( white plate with white rice ).
- Its been scientifically proven that orange makes you hungry so you many restaurants use orange and I will suggest that too.
- When it comes to eCommerce I am a fan of a simple website but loud call to action button and super sharp images. (Orange buttons for add to basket and checkout). The yellow at the top may be orange
- Cross sell : Customer who bought this also bought.
-
In terms of design, I'd say the site looks pleasant but not immediately engaging/interesting/exciting, there's no strong call to do anything. The gray on gray logo text at upper left is weak. I'd think about adding a strong tagline, or something else that sells the product right away, maybe a funny/informative 'top ten reasons cheese is awesome' or 'five reasons you need to know more about cheese' or some such.
-
Chris,Donnie hit your question right out of the park, but one suggestion that I always suggest to all of my clients is spend some money and become a vendor/affiliate for other sites/companies.
For example, with your company Why don't you see if you can get a review on the food channel? Or how about parterning with some wedding companies to provide wedding cakes? This will allow you to get a link on your website and also help you sell orders.Also maybe looking into other online wine review sites. Gary V's winelibrary.com springs right to mind.I hope that helps.
-
Hi Chris,
The on-page factors are based on the keywords you want to target for each page. You can optimize them here.
Your site does not have many backlinks, I would recommend building a blog on your site with content that others will want to link to. The key here is to get traffic to your site that can learn from it, get entertained by it, or simply just find what they are looking for. I would also recommend getting involved with others in the same or similar niche. Follow them, interact with them, buy them a drink, and then ask them to help you share your article or contribute to it.
The design of your site looks good to me but I don't eat cheese. Unfortunetly there is no set it and forget it when it comes to design... It's more of a test it and then test it again to ensure that its converting. I like to use visualwebsiteoptimizer.com (A/B Testing) for this.
I also noticed that you don't have canonicals set up... I would recommend adding canonical codes to your pages.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Which site as main site? B2C or B2B?
We're currently running two separate sites, one being the "main" page for B2B customers and the other being an online shop targeting B2C customers. Site structure looks like this: <code>[sonnenschirme.at](sonnenschirme.at) = main page / B2B</code> <code>sonnenschirme.at/shop = shop / B2C</code> We're also building a new shop with Shopify which will replace the current shop and it's going to provide a really great user experience (AR models of products etc). Naturally, there are a lot more B2C customers than there are B2B customers (we sell sun umbrellas). The B2C customer type spends around 150€ typically, whereas a B2B customer needs consulting and will spend upwards 10k. B2B is responsible for about 90% of revenue. Both customer types seem to search for the term "sonnenschirme" which is basically just "sun umbrella". Before the shop was accessible at a subdirectory (/shop), it was available on a different domain (not even subdomain), which was really bad for SEO. Once we consolidated both websites into one we've seen a big spike in traffic, due to products etc. of the shop ranking well. As pretty much all competing companies are B2C companies who fight for a share of the "sonnenschirme" keyword, we've been unsure if it wasn't better to have the shop as the main page and the B2B page in a subdirectory. So basically: <code>sonnenschirme.at/subdirname = B2B page
Branding | | agctyz
sonnenschirme.at = main page / B2C</code> But then again B2B generates much more revenue (at least right now). What do you guys think? I'm anxious about "just trying" because it could hurt traffic badly.0 -
Best review sites for SaaS vendor
My client is a SaaS developer and I would like to begin some review acquisition activity. Just wondering if there is any knowledge out there with regards to what review sites google scrapes or uses as an indicator for such products (Yelp and Yellow pages not too helpful in this scenario). I have narrowed down Capterra, G2 Crowd and GetApp as having a good following - but any insights would be much appreciated.
Branding | | P.Myers0 -
Do review sites like consumer affairs negatively affect SERPs?
Hey all, So when googling the name of our site we see consumer affairs pop up around 5th with a 1 star rating. These negative reviews are mostly spammy (competitors, etc.) since we have an awesome support team that deals with all unhappy members very effectively. We reached out to CA and they came back asking for $10k+ (highway robbery) to "help us improve our rating." My question is: do poor ratings on review sites like these negatively affect your SERPs? And if so, how can we work to combat their effect? Thanks in advance, Roman
Branding | | Dynata_panel_marketing1 -
What can i do to regain top 3 for local map listings if I already created a bunch of citation link to my site?
I got hit by a penguin refresh on Oct 5th and lost over 10 #1 rankings. I'm currently #4 on the places listing for my main keyword and really trying to regain top 3 position. I created a bunch of local citation with matching info and really piped out my map listing since it is 100% complete. I'm quite stumped on how to further optimize my map listing to where i can hit top 3 positions. Does anyone have any recommendations on this issue? Thanks Sam
Branding | | junkcars0 -
Impact on Global SEO of Losing One Regional Site
Hi, Plans are in place to have an affiliate company take over the marketing, sale, and distribution of our products in one region of the 35 that we currently operate in. The regional site is responsible for 10% of our overall global traffic. 26% of the revenue to that specific site comes from organic search traffic. The question is whether the loss of this traffic and these pages will have any negative impact on our global SEO status?
Branding | | Corel0 -
Is duplicating video across several sites a bad thing?
Hi, We have a fairly successful YouTube Channel where we create unique and helpful videos that are related to our core business activity. When we create these videos would you consider it a bad thing to not only post them on YouTube but also a couple of the smaller sites such as Metacafe and Dailymotion? Sending to multiple sites would possibly achieve more total views but would this kind of duplication potentially be harmful to the overall success of the video and have a knock on effect when it comes to how it ranks in Google? Thanks for your help.
Branding | | ChrisHolgate0 -
How to get Social Mention from an Expert in A field you know nothing about?
I have read many posts on this. However, the one thing I find challenging is getting an expert to give me a social mention. In many cases they have shared something similar in the past, and in many cases they are too busy. IMO building relationships via forums is the easiest way to find experts who will mention my site. I can engage them in a thread, and eventually take it to a Personal Messages. After building a relationship I can ask for a link or a social mention or to guest post or something. I have attempted contacting many experts via Blogs, E-mail, Facebook, Google + etc. for many different sites, IMExperince most “Experts” (people with large followings) will not give a noob (new site w/no rankings or new user w/no following) the time of day, nor a social mention. I have read many posts on engaging experts: tag them; send them flowers; like every post; make great comments. My result… bruised lips (from kissing behinds). I work with an SEO company, and every new site we work on seems to require a unique strategy for ranking. When we work on building relationships in fields we know nothing about, the outcome is weak. Unless we use forums. What are some strategies that work for you? what approach do you take when you have to build a relationship with someone you cant give value to?
Branding | | SEODinosaur1 -
Should I submit my articles to article submition sites myself or have a service submit my articles for me?
It seems that articles I've written about the transmission industry and submitted aren't being noticed by Google. The sites I've submitted them to were free sites, so my question is should I pay to submit them, or pay a service to submit them for me? Or, should I just continue to submit them myself to as high a ranking site as I can find?
Branding | | allstatetransmission0