Fresh set of eyes on this page please. Why isn't it ranking?

[Confetti_Wedding]

Morning all, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a quick look at this page and see if I'm missing something here.

The targeted keyword (wedding favours) is pretty competitive and the rank had been slowly improving until recently and we've now slipped to 25th on Google UK. I've added a "Pay with a tweet" button for our eBook which has been pretty well received (around 100 downloads) so far so the social side is better than our competition.

I've also written a few guest blogs with links back to the page from a variety of sources.

Here is the page analysis on OSE.

If you could take a quick look and let me know if I'm missing anything here, it would be most appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[blacey]

Hi Brendan,

Are you still having difficulties with this thread or have we managed to solve the issue you've been having?

[loopyal]

I don't think having a subdomain is a problem in itself, but the problem is that the internal URLs are relative and so is the canonical link, and if someone gets a shop URL and removes shop or replaces it with www or a browser mishandles it, then you will end up with people getting 404 errors.

At the very least, whatever is handling the www side, if it gets a shop URL, it should 301 to the shop.

Whatever it was that Ben and I drank, it isn't good for us.

Favours it is.

Your H1 has spurious whitespace:

  <h1> Wedding Favoursh1>

[blacey]

Personally I don't see a problem with the shop being on a sub-domain if I'm honest, long as you have good pages on /www.confetti.co.uk with a logical heading structure and good keyword usage in the page then it should be fine.

[Confetti_Wedding]

Thanks for the replies guys. Unless I'm going crazy here, the H1 tag is for wedding favours and not wedding flowers.

I take your point about the canonical link. Unfortunately this is an issue with our CMS which I'm looking to resolve shortly. Do you think that could be one reason for the ranking?

I also completely agree with you on the sub domain issue. It's something I want to resolve in the long term but in the short term, it's not really an option I'm afraid.

Thanks again guys.

[blacey]

Good answer Alan. Sadly I posted a reply before going to work and didn't have much time for a really in-depth look so I provided (what I thought) was a good on-page starting point.

I agree with your comments and would say this is probably another good reason for the poor rankings.

[loopyal]

Brendan,

yes, what Ben said, plus, if you want to rank for wedding favours, then not having it in the H1 isn't helping you.

You are #15 for Wedding Flowers - which is most important to you?

Your Canonical tag is relative, which is allowed, but an absolute path leaves no room for misinterpretation.

Plus, you have a big problem:

You have shop.website and www.website and if you try the www version of that URL you get a page not found, so you are throwing away traffic.

Your system needs to be smart enough to realise that is a shop URL and do a 301 redirect.

• and this is the reason you really need the canonical URl to be absolute.

[blacey]

One thing I would say is that the on-page seo could be improved. Your main heading

is "Wedding Flowers" and there are no h2 tags on the page. I would recommend that you use

tags for the products like

Favour Bags

or

Seed Wedding Favours

that will give google a bit more to play with.

You might want to add a 2-3 line description of what the products are to entice people to click through to view the product page, this would allow you to potentially bold keywords or at least provide more textual content for search engines to use to rank that page.

You can add more keywords into the title and alt text of the images, but its good to see you're using the alt and title tags, most people forget that!