Our site is pretty new… but I'm concerned with the lack of love that Google is giving us. Yahoo and Bing search are picking up, but Google seems to not like us at all. They have indexed pages, but in terms of putting us in search we are way back many pages.
Now, we are in a competitive marketplace, so I'm sure that is not helping, but I've run other sites that do much better quicker. Mind you, they are usually blog sites.
What I'm wondering is what is to be expected in terms of Google and a new site. We seem to have a page rank of 0. Is that normal for a new site? Is there something we're doing wrong with the site?
We are using the tags module and I'm not sure that is helping or hurting us. We don't get any warnings really in Webmaster tools. Just some sort meta descriptions types of warnings.
I've tried to use some SEO tools, but there isn't anything too over the top that seems super necessary to fix. Except speed. We aren't doing well with speed, but everyone tells me that is CS-Cart… and I have to wait for the next version for it to improve. Also, I get warnings about too many external javascripts. This is also CS-Cart and I've not found someone who can help with that. I put a ticket into support about that and was told to wait until the next version as well.
Anyone have any thoughts or advice?
Site is:
http://lemonleafprints.com
Thanks in advance!
Very nice site, but unfortunately you chose to have an e-commerce site in an already very competitive category. There are thousands of sites just like yours selling the same products. I recommend finding a niche market first and slowly work your way into the full stationary and card business. If not, I think you will be swallowed up by your competition that has a huge head-start on you.
Maybe you can use Google's Adwords to pay for some visitors, or push the social media angle, but both of these are well known techniques your competition is already doing.
I wish you well
Well, I'm not sure that's an answer to my question. In fact, I'm pretty certain it's not. Thanks though for the encouragement. I'm not sure if this is how posts are normally replied to, but if no one ever tried in a competitive market, I suspect CS-Cart itself would not be around either.
But anyway, perhaps someone else will respond in a more helpful manner and perhaps provide some SEO advice rather than just slam the business idea.
Thanks for the unnecessary slam. I think you misinterpreted my post. I was giving you excellent SEO advise. I was suggesting finding a niche market and focusing on those key words first. As a new site you are never going to compete with your competition on the big key words in your category (stationary, birthday cards, wedding cards, etc). These are tough key words even for a seasoned store. Focus on the keywords your competition does not do well on, build up a customer base and slowly work in the big competitive key words. New online stores seem to make the common mistake of blaming the software and web site, and not looking at their business model first. The same philosophy works for new online stores as in new brick and mortar stores, if your products are needed and the market is not saturated you will do well; and of course product price is key.
You can use this tool to count your key word density http://tools.seobook…eyword-density/
This tool to find broken links http://brokenlinkcheck.com
This tool to check for backlinks [url=“https://ahrefs.com/”]https://ahrefs.com/[/url]
and this tool gives general SEO overview [url=“Google core web vitals - Full Service Internet Marketing Company & Internet Marketing Tools”]Google core web vitals - Full Service Internet Marketing Company & Internet Marketing Tools
If you haven't done so, create a Google sitemap using cscart's built in sitemap generator and submit it to Google.
I hope this helps and I wish you well.
P.S. The reason I responded to the initial post was I have some special insight into your category. My wife has had an online store in the stationary and card business for 10 years now. We struggled against the big guys in this category until I took my own advise and started to focus on unique 3 and 4 word word phrases. Best advise I can give is ask your friends if they were to search for a wedding invitation online, what phrase would they type into a search engine. Hopefully you will learn some unique phrases you can focus on.
Triplets is 100% spot on. His response is exactly what I would have said, but he already said it. The lack of Google love you are experiencing has a lot to do with the competetive market you have chosen and almost nothing to do with CS-Cart.
Congrats on the beautiful looking site though!
Well, I guess I did misinterpret your post, as your next post was much better. You certainly elaborated on what you were meaning and perhaps that would have been more helpful if it had been in your first post. I asked some others if your post sounded dismissive and they also agreed that it was dismissive answer. It could be interpreted as “you might as well just give up”. Which is how I interpreted it.
I was not blaming CS-Cart other than to mention the speed. I was asking if there was anything we, in particular, have done wrong with CS-Cart. There are multiple posts on this board regarding CS-Cart speed, so I didn't think it was taboo to mention it. That is what Google is telling me I can improve - page speed. And the number one thing they recommend about improving it is removing excessive external javascripts from loading in the header. I have tried to address both these things, but I have had no success. That is why I mentioned it. Bing also mentions that my pages are “too big” to be fully cached I think is the terminology they use. This is again because of all that javascript.
We are actually attempting in multiple ways to focus on niche key words. We are using social media. And advertising too. Paid advertising. I also have been in this business for a while. I have sold millions of dollars in product on larger known sites and the designers on our site have also. We have had to get our products in search in extremely competitive marketplaces in the past. I am also running a couple of blog sites about this area. Not super great sites, but even with those my sites are showing as number 1 for many niche keyword searches. I have pages of number 1 positioned keywords in my webmaster tools reports.
So what I am wondering is why this site is struggling. I am not as familiar with CS-Cart as I am with WordPress and ExpressionEngine. CS-Cart has been more difficult for me to control the look and feel of. Or to understand at all.
I'm happy to hear that you all like the look of the site as that was very difficult for me to achieve with my lack of experience. I made the mistake of having it also not work well with mobile and that is hurting me right now. I'm not personally capable of fixing it to work with mobile and I can't seem to find a good css expert to help with that.
Anyway, I was looking for more of a critique of what I currently have done on the site in terms of SEO. I've never run a cart before and Google seems to treat them differently. Right now I am back sometimes hundreds of pages in search for what you'd call niche keywords. Sometimes only 30 pages, sometimes only 9. Nothing even close to 1 except our actual website name. I don't know if that is typical of a very new e-commerce site.
A couple suggestions that may help. Convert your site to full https:// … You are showing that you have an EVSSL yet the address bar is not reflecting that… Not Green… Issue… Also your site is not Responsive… We are also going through the same issue there… We are currently working on a Responsive theme. Since the end of April when Google release they would depreciate sites without responsive layouts our rankings have dropped drastically… Those are two major things that will push you ahead of some of your competition… Just our 2 cents…
We've struggled with CS Cart too.
One thing we found is that Google hates having items in two or more categories. We used the Robots file to block our sale and “What's New” categories and that helped.
Writing your text description with H2, H3 tags and good keywords and your own content is very important, espeically in the first couple of Paras. Write in your own meta description for the page otherwise CS Cart will use the default XYZ: ABC: Item which looks bad.
We've found that CS Cart Rocks Ultimate SEO add-on to be very good and it helped.
You can sign up for Twigmo and Google ranks that as a resonsive site. Seems to work for us.
It's all small stuff, for sure. Hope that helps. I'd appreciate hearing back anything you can figure out.
Jack
If you load your homepage with the console open you will find many errors to fix. Most of them related to your SSL certificate.
You show a SSL seal while you do not serve up SSL.
The homepage loads in over 9 seconds and is 3.7MB large. This is not good.
Your site is not responsive.
Your product names are too long and have been stuffed with keywords.
Your use of tags seems good, but index.php?dispatch=tags.view&tag=bla+bla+bla is simply not going down well with google.
These are some obvious things that Google will not like.
But the site does serve SSL when it matters… during the checkout phase. I had not heard it has to be SSL at all times? I will look into that though. I didn't think Google considered that as an issue. I thought making it SSL all the time made things slower. I will look into it though. We definitely do have SSL during the checkout phase, so we are not doing anything wrong by showing the SSL seal.
The site load time is a CS-Cart issue for the most part. It has a lot of javascript files. The images are optimized as much as possible at this point. It seems odd that I can't have a typical homepage that most sites have.
I already know about the non-responsive issue. I have been attempting to get that working now for months. It is not so easy with CS-Cart. The first developer I worked with did not make it responsive and now it is really a problem to change.
I don't understand the issue with the tags? That is how CS-Cart makes the tag url look. It's just that tags module that CS-Cart has that I am using. Product names are added by my designers. I did ask them to limit their size, but it is hard to police that.
I don't think I can use Twigmo because the store is too modified.
I do have CS-Cart Ultimate SEO. I think there are just many factors that I'm not fully aware of.
Google's announcement on SSL…
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: HTTPS as a ranking signal
On your SSL… You advertise an EV SSL… The address bar should be green… It's not, that tells you there is an issue…
Also you not using www. prior to your domain… I know it's said it don't matter yet in my experiance in seo rankings it needs to be there…
If you go to our cart on the site, the address bar does become green. It is not there for regular shopping is all. It's not that it isn't there at all. I understand what you are saying… you want it to be green at all times. But the SSL certificate on our site is working during the times when customer sensitive information is requested.
[quote name='wasootch' timestamp='1433805310' post='217912']
If you go to our cart on the site, the address bar does become green. It is not there for regular shopping is all. It's not that it isn't there at all. I understand what you are saying… you want it to be green at all times. But the SSL certificate on our site is working during the times when customer sensitive information is requested.
[/quote]
How weird… When I visit my site the entire bar goes green… When I goto your registration page or checkout page it show https:// but not green for me… Tried it in explored, chrome and firefox… Not sure whats going on… Visit my page in my signature… Can you see the difference…
Yep. I think just parts of my site are not initiating the https part. But for me the address bar goes green when I go to my cart on my site. My developer did it this way. I'm not sure why. I would have to ask him.
It also goes green for me when I go to the register and sign in pages.
Actually, I just went to Amazon's site. It works the same as mine. No green bar or padlock when you first go there. Probably when you go to buy it will initiate the SSL. Sites always used to work this way. It's only recently that I've seen people adding SSL to the whole site… even for simple browsing of the marketplace. But, as you said, perhaps Google is wanting it for everything now. I did think there was some disadvantage to it… not sure what the disadvantage is though. I thought it was speed.
[quote name='wasootch' timestamp='1433808149' post='217918']
Actually, I just went to Amazon's site. It works the same as mine. No green bar or padlock when you first go there. Probably when you go to buy it will initiate the SSL. Sites always used to work this way. It's only recently that I've seen people adding SSL to the whole site… even for simple browsing of the marketplace. But, as you said, perhaps Google is wanting it for everything now. I did think there was some disadvantage to it… not sure what the disadvantage is though. I thought it was speed.
[/quote]
Back in the day SSL certs were very slow… Now a days its not an issue. We've tested it both ways with no difference in site speed… Amazon is migrating over to a fully secured site by the end of July… As you can imagine its a much bigger ordeal for them.
In my opinion and unfortunately, Google is God in the internet world… And those who ignore and disregard that suffer long term. Our website is our life line. It pays our bills therefore we cannot ignore what they want… Weather we want to agree or not… That's why when they say jump we say hi high…
Oh, I'm not ignoring it. Just more discussing how mine works now. It's not “wrong”… it's just not the latest thing that Google is demanding. Above everyone was telling me my SSL was not working. But it is working.
If you get a green bar in your browser that doesn't mean its working correctly for all your customers. You can test it here:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=lemonleafprints.com
Interesting. I just checked with the certificate company and they said there are things on the server that need changing. It seems to be a hosting issue. I'm checking with them. Thanks for the link.