Niche Cs-cart site needs seo help

Hi

My name is Josh and this is the first time I’ve posted here on the cs-cart forums.



Background: We have an e-commerce website, www.classicreplacements.com, which caters to a very niche market, the replacement china market. We sell hard-to-find discontinued brands and patterns of china (tableware). The industry as a whole consists basically of one big company and a few small ones such as ours.



We have been having problems in our SERP rankings for long-tail keywords, even though our site has been around for a few years and we have a PageRank of 3. We’ve hired a number of SEO companies and have done on-site and off-site SEO optimization, blogs, social media, directory submission, link building etc., but we still don’t come up for most of our keywords.



What makes this even more puzzling is that we are talking about long-tail keywords in a niche market, keywords for which we are a natural fit and should be coming up without much SEO effort. Instead we often find ourselves behind all types of irrelevant nonsense. All this leads me to believe that there is something about our site which is turning Google off but I don’t know what.



(Let me give an example. Our SERP for our general keywords such as “replacement china”, “discontinued china” is in the top ten, but the long tail keywords such as “Royal Doulton Carlyle” and “Royal Doulton Sarabande” we don’t come up within the top hundred, even though we’ve put a lot of work into them!)



Recently I did notice something, but I‘m not sure what it means. When I Google for “similar pages” on our site, all the pages on our site return the same results. Which is not how it should be, every page has different content and should return different “similar pages”. Does this mean that Google somehow sees us as only one page?



Any help on this is truly appreciated. My apologies if I went on a bit long, I just wanted to explain the situation as clearly as possible. We (along with two professional SEO companies) are stumped and if any of you can figure this out, hats off.



Many thanks,

Josh

Hi Josh,



SEO sucks, website accordingly.



I’ll provide my venture as a consumer for your benefit.



I’ve searched for your term on your website and received a large number of results (OK) but I have no idea how I would find your products just by browsing (I’m lazy like 95% of your customers). I want Royal Doulton ‘xyx’ where ‘xyx’ is the set. Since I can’t recall the name, how can I browse?



I’ve found ‘China’ from the top category discreetly hidden via the top menu, (I would have left already) so I can now see the categories to visit.

http://www.classicreplacements.com/china.htmlThe meta description/keywords are as followed:
Not even sure what your SEO guys are charging at this rate but it should be negative numbers. Your meta keywords/description should be the BRANDs that you stock, after all that’s what your customers should be searching for in categories right?



Step 3, I’ve found Royal Doulton as I was looking for
http://www.classicreplacements.com/china/royal-doulton.html
The page title is
China Royal Doulton [COLOR=Red]at Classic Replacements[/COLOR]
The highlight in red is redundant - remove it from everything. ‘China Royal Doulton’ should be ‘Royal Doulton China’ because that’s the logical way for English speakers to search.



Finally, I find Carlyle that I was looking for via this URL http://www.classicreplacements.com/china/royal-doulton/carlyle.htmlI guess this is what I’m looking for right, apart from the bad HTML formatting on page it’s not all that bad. Final click to the product.


http://www.classicreplacements.com/china/royal-doulton/carlyle.htmlAfter 4 clicks the best information I can find about quality, chips (if any) and why it costs $200… is This is part of the Carlyle pattern by Royal Doulton Well Sir - I can act like a jackass here as a potential customer however since I’m not:

I see two major problems: Your SEO is non existent, second your products have no descriptions.



Your hosting sucks, see here

http://www.google.com/search?q=classic+replacements+china&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a “Error: Cannot connect to the database server. Backtrace: File: /home/content/43/6355043/html/index.php. Line: 36. Function: require.”

Thanks for the constructive criticism. I’m looking for a programmer to help implement some of the changes you suggest and more. Do you do programming?



Regards,

Josh

[quote name=‘ClassicReplacements’]Thanks for the constructive criticism. I’m looking for a programmer to help implement some of the changes you suggest and more. Do you do programming?



Regards,

Josh[/quote]



Not particularly in a ‘programming’ aspect, but I can make the site develop customers & cash if that’s what you are asking for.

Okay, sounds good. Can we continued this discussion in private?


[quote name=‘ClassicReplacements’]Okay, sounds good. Can we continued this discussion in private?[/quote]



Absolutely, I PM’ed you without response thus far.



J.