No progress in 3 months!!
-
Hi All
I have been using Moz for about 3 months now and love the tools and support. I have been working really hard on seo improvements, fixing lots of coding errors and adding content to my site. My last 3 keyword reports have been very disappointing. I have lost rankings in many of my keywords and some have been ranked very well for years. (talking google) I see only 2 factors that have changed. 1. My 'improvements' and 2. the google update. As everyone knows seo is very time consuming and I am so disappointed with my site going backwards after such a dedicated focus. An example would be the keyword 'christmas return address labels'. I am not even ranked in the top 100 and the last report put me down 50!Here is a link to my category page for funny christmas cards for another example:
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/cards/funny-christmas-cards.html
BTW I sell greeting cards and I am so frustrated that Zazzle seems to dominate every keyword and google shopping result. It seems they are gaming the system.
P.S. If you are an seo professional I would be interested in your services as well.
Thank you
-
Great answers. Thank you for taking the time.
-
Adam has some great advice! I would like to reiterate Adam's comment about diversifying your online marketing efforts. Think past SEO. With Google's affinity for smashing ads all over the top of the SERPs driving organic further and further down the page, online marketers need to think about alternatives. Organic traffic is nice (FREE!) but sometimes you have to spend some green to make some money!
A couple additional recommendation:
- I think that a cute social campaign would be a terrific way to increase traffic to your site and build engagement. You have a fun product, leverage it! If you can think of a way to get people to engage with your brand you'll see increased revenue. I love Youtube for this. Here is an example of an unsexy brand crushed it.
<a>http://worldsbestcasestudies.com/dela-say-something-wonderful/</a> - Try and watch this without crying! I dare you!
Follow it up with promoted posts,
<a>http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/blog/2013/04/social-media-advertising-guide/</a>
- PPC campaign focusing on the Long-tail. You aren't going to beat Zazzle, but maybe you can be more strategic with your keywords.
<a>http://www.wordstream.com/ppc-advertising</a>
Good luck!
P.S. Remember that Moz is no longer SEOmoz for a reason. There is a ton of content here on alternative online marketing outlets. Spend some time in the blogs section and research. Go out there and kick some ass!
-
Hey Mker,
Here are a few things to consider:
-
You are in a sector that is hit pretty hard with an authority domain (Zazzle), you have to remember that the closer to the authority source a link is the more value it holds. Perhaps even opening up a Zazzle shop with an external link, or trying to get some craft blogs to write about your service could be some very valuable routes.
-
Integrate the product schema (http://schema.org/Product) not only will it help your SEO rankings but it's sure to boost your CTR and conversion rates simply because of the additional visual stimuli
-
Do some detailed keyword analysis, perhaps they keywords you are fighting for simply aren't the right fit for you. Try finding a number of easier ones that have smaller traffic but by grabbing a few of them you could equal the traffic of a more challenging word
-
Consider further segmenting your products so that you can have pages that target specific keywords - just like too many cooks spoil the stew, too many keywords spoil the SEO. If it makes sense to split your products and optimize your pages give it a whirl
-
SEO isn't the only strategy, consider inbound marketing some PPC ads or a Facebook fan page running a promotion make work wonders at the holiday season. Believe it or not even if you were ranking first organically some users would still only ever click the ads, and users that are ad shoppers are far higher when it comes to converting.
-
Off-site is going to be key in such a competitive industry, but far to many people make the mistake of trying to go for big high-quality links and as many as they can muster. Remember Google sees everything and hates SEO their main goal is to find sites that naturally and organically gain authority across the internet. When considering such things you may want to look at what seems reasonable for your industry. Appearing on popular mum blogs, craft blogs and holiday blogs or forums would be your best bet. If suddenly you had a ton of wikipedia links it would likely seem a little sketchy!
-
Watch out for any SEO now a days who doesn't talk about inbound marketing and buyer personas. SEO as a tactic is a dying breed, SEO is now a part of a much larger strategy - and the key reason why SEOmoz is now Moz. People who talk to they are blue in the face about building you links and optimizing your on page are likely to hurt you in the long run. Take the time to invest in someone who is going to give you a holistic and complete approach to inbound marketing. When the user is happy, Google is happy and ranks are high!
-
Last but not least use a tool like ahrefs and scan for sketchy links, maybe despite all your hard work something is dragging you down. Try and contact those webmasters of any spammy links you may have to get them removed, and if worst comes to worst try the Google disavow tool
Oh and PS don't forget a site map, eCommerce and a beautiful sitemap with product schema markup is sure to be a great hit!
-
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
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company. They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content. Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session. Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo). They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this. My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions. These are the things we've identified: All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now. Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
Technical SEO | | oline1230 -
One company, 3 countries, 3 sites - best solution?
Hi all, I'm working with a company that has 3 x websites all on separate WordPress platforms. One is at .com, the others .fr and .de - they are essentially very similar. I have suggested that it is worth exploring setting all of these websites up on the .com domain with country-specific directories to combine their authority and help all 3 websites naturally rank due to combining incoming links, authority etc. Quesitons: To ensure each country has control of their site, would you maintain a separate install of WP at each directory, i.e: .com/fr/ and .com/de or would you put it all on the same WP? Would you go down this route of combining all 3 sites onto one domain with country-specific directories? What are the pitfalls?
Technical SEO | | Bee1590 -
Top 3 SEO Strategy/Research Practices
Hi Moz Community, I am launching a series of new e-commerce websites and wanted to know before I started the content writing what are the TOP 3 strategy/research practices and techniques I should be doing before building my website? Bonus points for those who can give me a Top 5! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | xlucax
Luca0 -
Changes to website haven't been crawled in over a month
We redesigned our website at http://www.aptinting.com a few months ago. We were fully expecting the crawl frequency to be very low because we had redesigned the website from a format that had been very static, and that probably has something to do with the problem we're currently having. We made some important changes to our homepage about a month ago, and the cached version of that page is still from April 2nd. Yet, whenever we create new pages, they get indexed within days. We've made a point to create lots of new blog articles and case studies to send a message to Google that the website should be crawled at a greater rate. We've also created new links to the homepage through press releases, guest blog articles, and by posting to social media, hoping that all of these things would send a message to Google saying that the homepage should be "reevaluated". However, we seem to be stuck with the April 2nd version of the homepage, which is severely lacking. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Lemmons0 -
Issues with Google Analytics since 3/15 @ 6:00AM ET
Our site, IrishCentral.com has been experiencing issues with GA since 6:00AM ET 3/15. Our "realtime" analytics withing the new GA interface have been fine and no changes have been made to the site code at all. I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing these issues and if there is a resolution. We are fine w/o them as long as we know that the aggregation of the data is delayed and not forgotten. We are reaching 1 million uniques this month and would be a shame to lose this data. Any help is greatly appreciated. Joe
Technical SEO | | Irishcentral1 -
Do links hold there value after 12 months?
Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?
Technical SEO | | Entrusteddev0 -
301 redirect to 1 of 3 locations based on browser languge? Is this ok?
Hi all, I'm taking over a site that has some redirect issues that need addressed and I want to make sure this is done right the first time. The problem: Our current setup starts with us allowing both non-www and www pages. I'll address this with a proper rewrite so all pages will have www. Server info: IIS and runs PHP. The real concern is that we currently run a browser detection for language at the root and then do a 302 redirect to /en, /ge or /fr. There is no page at the www.matchware.com. It's an immediate redirect to a language folder. I'd like to get these to a 301(Permanent) redirect but I'm not sure if a URL can have a 301 redirect that can go to 3 different locations. The site is huge and a site overhaul is not an option anytime soon. Our home page uses this: <%
Technical SEO | | vheilman
lang = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE")
real_lang = Left(lang,2)
'Response.Write real_lang
Select case real_lang
case "en"
Response.Redirect "/en"
case "fr"
Response.Redirect "/fr"
case "de"
Response.Redirect "/ge"
case else
Response.Redirect "/en" End Select
%> Here is a header response test. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ HTTP Request Header Connect to 87.54.60.174 on port 80 ... ok GET / HTTP/1.1[CRLF] Host: www.matchware.com[CRLF] Connection: close[CRLF] User-Agent: Web-sniffer/1.0.37 (+http://web-sniffer.net/)[CRLF] Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF] Cache-Control: no-cache[CRLF] Accept-Language: de,en;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3[CRLF] Referer: http://web-sniffer.net/[CRLF] [CRLF] HTTP Response Header --- --- --- Status: HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Connection: close Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 14:28:30 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Location: /ge Content-Length: 124 Content-Type: text/html Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQSRBQACT=HABMIHACEMGHEHLLNJPMNGFJ; path=/ Cache-control: private Content (0.12 <acronym title="KibiByte = 1024 Byte">KiB</acronym>) <title></span>Object moved<span class="tag"></title> # Object Moved This object may be found <a< span="">HREF="/ge">here. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ To sum it up, I know a 302 is a bad option, but I don't know if a 301 is a real option for us since it can be redirected to 1 of 3 pages? Any suggestions?</a<>1