Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Rob, That really does help tremendously. Your point about Google being 2-4 weeks behind the curve makes a lot of sense, so I hope that the work we're doing at the moment will start to bear fruit. That said, I can still see a lot of merit in the points you have raised.

Yes, anything you can suggest to give me more to work with would be really helpful. Perhaps we can have a conversation away from here?

My skype is: sushihosting

Perhaps we can have a text chat there?

Many thanks again,

Bob

Rob,

Thanks so much for your really helpful insights. This highlights areas I need to hone my skills on.

To respond to some of your queries, I should clarify the category tag issue. WooCommerce by default inserts the slug "product" or "product-category" into the URL. and by that I mean those actual words.....so we would have had the URL as follows:

https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/sunglasses/mens-prescription-sunglasses

So we had a completely useless element in the URL that meant nothing. So we emplyed the following plugin to remove the problem:

https://www.perfectseourl.com/

Hence our URL's now have no irrelavent elements in the structure. We took care to redirect any deleted categories.

Re. unique content, this is something we are addressing, we have started to create relevant blogs which offer help and advice to potential customers. New unique content is something we know we need to improve on so this is the focus over the next few months.

I take your point on the product descriptions, however there's only so much detail you can provide on a pair of glasses, and it's easy for it to become very repetitive as the differences between frames are not massive and don't give much material to work with creatively. We're currently working on the product page construction and making amendments which include adding more tabs with more information on each individual frame.

I take your point on the keyword stuffing issue, this is something I need to research more. Sadly Yoast does not seem to downscore my content for keyword stuffing, maybe something they need to address as it's clearly an issue.

Rank tracking, I take your point on this, we inherited the seo from someone who left us no notes on what they were focusing on so it's very much been a case of trial and error. We did find a lot of keywords being optimised were for very low traffic.

Regarding the submission of new links, we have the site linked to webmaster tools and sitemaps generated by Yoast have been submitted... should we be manually submitting these links too?

The industry does lull around this time of year, mainly due to the drop in sunglasses sales as the holiday period ends, but never to this extent. The drop off in sales was almost an overnight phenomenon which did make me wonder if it was down to some penalty or other.

Thanks again for your help!
Bob

I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further.

• Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings
• Search visibility is also dropping week on week
• On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter

We have made huge improvements on the following;

• Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%.
• Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support.
• Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures.
• Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium)
• Amended on page structures to include correct H tags.
• Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements

These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings.

One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else?

Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper.

Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious?

The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk

Thanks in advance

Bob

Thank you Rob, that really helps!

Does Google differentiate between keyphrase structures such as Mens Sunglasses & Men**'**s Sunglasses? I.e. does the inclusion/exclusion of an apostrophe make any difference when optimising your main keyword/phrase for a page?

Keyword explorer appears to give different results..... I.e. no data for Men's Sunglasses, but data appears for Mens sunglasses. So if I optimise my page to include the apostrophe, will it screw the potential success for that page?

Thanks

Bob

Hi,For some reason, on my tracked keywords summary page, the URL shown to the right of each keyword appears to default to my homepage and not the page I want that keyword to rank on.

How do I resolve this? I've tried looking around but can't see how to change it so that the correct URL is shown against the correct keyword.

Many thanks!

Bob

I am running a WordPress/WooCommerce site for a client, and Moz is picking up some issues with URL's generated from WooCommerce product attribute filters. For example:

..co.uk/womens-prescription-glasses/?filter_gender=mens&filter_style=full-rim&filter_shape=oval

How do I get Google to ignore these filters?
I am running Yoast Premium, but not sure if this can solve the issue? Product categories are canonicalised to the root category URL.

Any suggestions very gratefully appreciated.

Thanks

Bob

Further to the above, I think I've solved that issue. There was an error on that product you used as your example, it was loading an attribute as a variation that didn't exist.

I've removed it now.

Hi Vijay, this is really helpful.

We recently changed the product options framework for the website, and I know the previous options solution had a pop up warning for the completion of the prescriptions fields.

We are now however using a completely different solution for the prescription form, and it's possible that there is some code left over from our previous solution.

I am no longer using the developer who created the previous options framework, so can you tell me if there is a way we can track down where this code is?

For our current options, this is all handled by Gravity Forms in WordPress, so I don't think that will be causing the problem.

Thanks again for your helpful suggestion.

Bob

Yes, this is an ongoing issue, my client manages their own inventory so they often make changes without me knowing to stock levels/availability.

I manage a store selling prescription glasses, many of which are unisex or apply to more than one category.

I have already assigned the canonical URL for each category, but my question is, if a product appears in more than one category, do I need to set the canonical URL in each product to reflect the category I want it to index under? Therefore, any additional categories that product appears in simply refers the link value back to the canonical URL.

I note that in Yoast, under each product, there's note in the canonical setting to leave it empty to default to permalink, so this has confused me a little. I'm just concerned that by applying a product to multiple categories, it may be causing duplicate content, as I have a lot of duplicate issues which I'll raise in another question.

Thanks!

Does Google differentiate between keyphrase structures such as Mens Sunglasses & Men**'**s Sunglasses? I.e. does the inclusion/exclusion of an apostrophe make any difference when optimising your main keyword/phrase for a page?

Keyword explorer appears to give different results..... I.e. no data for Men's Sunglasses, but data appears for Mens sunglasses. So if I optimise my page to include the apostrophe, will it screw the potential success for that page?

Thanks

Bob

Thank you Rob, that really helps!