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
-
Gradual Increase in Domain Authority After Domain Migration But No Improvement in Organic Traffic Yet
We migrated our domain in early April and simultaneously added an SSL certificate. Everything was done by the books. All redirects implemented perfectly, very few errors. Google notified via Search Console. Despite all steps being done perfectly our domain authority dropped from 24 to 8. Organic traffic dropped from about 80 per day to about 10. Each month domain authority increases by 2 or 3. We are now back up to a DA of 16. But no improvement in organic traffic yet. At what point should organic traffic start to return? Hopefully the consistent improvement in DA is a good sign. I have been told that adding SSL and moving the domain at the same time was a very bad idea. We are starting link building next week. Hopefully that will help further. Any ideas as to when this situation will improve? Needless to say it has been awful for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Is it possible to have organization markup schema for sub domain ? and how should it look like ?
Can we have organization markup schema for subdomain ? For example if my main domain is xyz.com and subdomain is sub.xyz.com If i plan to have organization markup schema for subdomain how should it look like ? Should the markup schema must have main domain url or sub domain url in markup schema ? Should it be like this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
List of SEO "to do's" to increase organic rankings
We are looking for a complete list of all white hat SEO "to do's" that an SEO firm should do in order to help increase Google/Bing/Yahoo organic rankings. We would like to use this list to be sure that the SEO company/individual we choose uses all these white hat items as part of an overall SEO strategy to increase organic rankings. Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to where we can obtain this complete list? If this is not the best approach, please let me know what is, as I am not an SEO person. Thank you kindly in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetractableAwnings.com0 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Regular Expressions for Filtering BOT Traffic?
I've set up a filter to remove bot traffic from Analytics. I relied on regular expressions posted in an article that eliminates what appears to be most of them. However, there are other bots I would like to filter but I'm having a hard time determining the regular expressions for them. How do I determine what the regular expression is for additional bots so I can apply them to the filter? I read an Analytics "how to" but its over my head and I'm hoping for some "dumbed down" guidance. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads1 -
Organic Links and Skimlinks Affiliate Program
Hi All, If you're not familiar with Skimlinks, what they do is turn organic links into affiliates links so that publishers can earn commission through our affiliate program. Pretty much every SEO's nightmare. myfashionlife.com/archives/2013/07/16/get-anne-hathaways-paper-denim-and-cloth-look/ anchor text "Floppy straw hat" Looking at the source code the link looks clean, but as soon you click on it you get redirected via a 302 to our site. My questions is; is it just users that get redirect or is it the same for search engines? Screaming frog recognises the link as a 200. Are we losing all the link juice, or is it fine? I've have half a mind to kick them out of the program. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
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 -
We're indexed in Google News, any tips or suggestions for getting traffic from news?
We have a news sitemap, and follow all best practices as outlined by Google for news. We are covering breaking stories at the same time as other publications, but have only made it to the front page of Google News once in the last few weeks. Does anyone have any tips, recommended reading, etc for how to get to the front page of Google News? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0