Almost no organic traffic
-
Hi,
We have an online store, it is up & running since January 1st. Since then we really didn't see any improvements on our organic traffic at all. About 10% of our traffic is coming from organic search, and more than 20% of organic search actually coming from branded keywords.
We haven't paid a lot of attention to SEO so far. I mean, we paid attention to the practices, however we focused on a better customer/user experience more than SEO. We improved our product pages, reduced checkout process to one step, used bigger icons / buttons. According to our customers, our website is pretty easy to navigate and shop. We haven't received any major complaint so far.
Except couple of products, all the content we have is original, we didn't use any manufacturer product content or copied from another website.
However, looks like all these efforts don't mean a lot to Google, unless we have a solid backlinks.
- Currently i am considering to make category pages NOINDEX and implement microdata from schema.org. However, Is it good idea to make category pages NOINDEX for an ecommerce website?
I would like to hear your comments/recommendations what else we can do to create some organic traffic.
-
Category pages can cause duplicate content, but major categories do often have search value, so it's a trade-off. Typically, it makes more sense to go after duplicate URLs (like product options), search filters, sub-categories, and things like that. It depends a lot on the scope of the problem, though.
My gut reaction is that technical SEO isn't the core problem, though. Ultimately, search traffic doesn't just happen these days. You do need links and social mentions, and you need to actively market and promote yourself to start ranking for non-brand terms. There's no on-page trick to that. Something like schema can help your listings stand out, but it's not going to magically help you rank for terms you don't currently rank on.
Without understanding the site or industry, it's really tough to give advice on where to start, but trying to control how link equity flows through your site only makes sense when you've got a solid amount of link equity to work with. Actually, I wrote about this general issue a while back - you may find it useful:
http://moz.com/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building
-
Hi Serkie,
If they had duplicate content, then I understand. Most category pages I've been on are not duplicate, so I hadn't though of that.
In regards to the link juice distribution, I wouldn't spend too much time trying to sculpt and control link juice. You're usually better served spending that time producing content that will bring more link juice into your site. It's not a problem to do it, you just may get more benefit from getting more link juice into your site than sculpting what link juice you already have.
Kurt
-
Hello Kurt,
Thank you very much for your comment. Well, there are couple of reasons why i want to noindex our category pages:
1. eliminate duplicate content / page title / meta description etc.
2. I see that we barely receive traffic to our category pages.
3. Preventing Link juice distribution to too many pages -
Hi Serkie,
Is there a reason you want to noindex your category pages? I don't know of any SEO benefit you would gain from this. I guess if you don't want people going to those pages or finding them in the search engines, then you can noindex the category pages.
Setting up schema is good. I'd recommend you do that.
It's also good that you are spending time focusing on user experience. Getting traffic to a site that has a bad user experience can actually be worse than not getting traffic at all. People remember bad experiences...and good ones.
As to your main issue, no traffic, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- You are in a competition for the rankings of relevant keywords. If your site is only 6 months old, it's not going to be very authoritative and, considering that the pet supply industry has some pretty tough competition, it shouldn't be surprising that you aren't getting much traffic yet, especially if you haven't done much SEO work.
- Links are still very important for SEO. On-page optimization is important, too; so you should do that, but on-page SEO will only get you so far. You need links and social shares to build up the authority of your site which will allow you to rank for more competitive keywords. The best way to get links is to do a great job with your company (and have a good user experience on the site) and then produce interesting, quality content to share with people.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
No one has an opinion or feedback to give? Anyway, We just put Noindex, follow to the category pages. Especially seeing duplicate content issue on Campaign Crawl today
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
-
Thousands of 503 errors in GSC for pages not important to organic search - Is this a problem?
Hi, folks A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly. My question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)? If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem? Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this 🙂 Sigurd0 -
The review stars for my ecommerce site in the organic search disappeared, how can I have them shown again?
We run www.prams.net, an ecommerce store for strollers and other baby products out of the Uk. We always followed schema and the stars appeared in our product snippets in the organic search, helping us a lot. A couple of weeks ago the stars stopped appearing. When I do the site:www.prams.net they appear but not in the search results anymore. We have a french site as well. www.poussette.com, their it still works. Has anybody got tips what we can do to make the stars appear again? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
How do we better optimize a site to show the correct domain in organic search results for the location the user is searching in?
For example, chicago-company.com has the same content as springfield-company.com and I am searching for a general non-brand term (i.e. utility bill pay) and am located in Chicago. How can we optimize the chicago-company.com to ensure that chicago's site results are in top positions over springfields site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aelite1 -
How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ? For eg 1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rajeevEDU0 -
Schema.org for Organization Logos
Hi, We have 4 different sites on four different domains. each domain serves a different market and sells different products. However, all 4 sites have the same logo. we are thinking of implementing the logo schema.org for our logo - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/05/using-schemaorg-markup-for-organization.html Does any one know if Google might see the identical logos (even if Google cant actually see an Image like a human) for different domains as something spammy? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0 -
Is traffic and content really important for an e-commerce site???
Hi All, I'm maintaining an e-commerce website and I've encountered some related keywords that I know will not convert to sales but are related to the subject and might help becoming an "authority". I'll give an example... If a car dealership wrote an amazing article about cleaning a car.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Obviously it is related but the chances of someone looking to clean his car will go ahead and buy one now are quite low. Also, he will probably bounce out of this page after reading the piece. To conclude, Would such an article do GOOD (helping to become an authority and having more visitors) or BAD (low conversion rate and high bounce rate)? Thanks0