Almost no organic traffic

[serkie]

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.

[Dr-Pete]

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

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

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

[serkie]

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

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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

[serkie]

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