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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.
We have made huge improvements on the following;
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
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.
Hey Thomas,
Thanks for your feedback. This is a planned update actually. We have a unique requirement where our products require a lot of options to be provided as you have seen. Unfortunately, due to the way the product page is constructed in the theme we are using, it puts those options prior to the checkout button in an area that should only take up the header.
I am about to update the theme to a major update released last week. Once that is done we are going to have a custom product page template created to put everything back in the right place Currently, because of the options placement, if we activate the tabs section, they appear at the foot of the page!
Complete nightmare!
Thanks Patrick, that's really useful info. I'll try some of these suggestions
Hi Vijay,
No significant changes were made in the period that we feel would have the impact that we have seen.
The website/checkout experience tests fine, we are still receiving a trickle of orders, but not the volume we were enjoying before.
Please see my response to the above reply, it appears we are not the only player in our sector who has seen a drop, several competitors have seen a similar drop in search visibility too.
The website is www.glassesonspec.co.uk.
If there is any other specific information you think would be useful, then do please let me know.
Many thanks
Hi,
Thanks for your quick response, interestingly, our main competitor saw a 15% search visibility rise, and a few other competitors like us saw a large fall. Does this lend weight to your theory that perhaps it's external factors and the biggest competitor raising their game?
I am working with my client managing/maintaining their online store.We have been making big improvements to onsite SEO, improved URL structures (complete with re-directs) etc, we use Yoast Premium to optimise pages for search and Yoast Local.
We have a bounce rate of around 20%, however, suddenly in mid August, our revenues virtually vanished overnight. Moz is reporting a search visibility drop of 51%, while visitor levels remain fairly average, certainly no drops that can be compared with the sudden loss of conversions.
I am at a loss and cannot fathom why our sales have dropped.
Can anyone suggest where I might look?
Many thanks
Bob
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response and suggestions. I think I've found a solution to all of the issues I'm currently experiencing!
https://www.perfectseourl.com/
This should fix the -2 problem, as I can now dispense with the "product-category" slug completely and also follow your suggestion of going with the "womens" category name etc.
Many thanks!
I am managing a woocommerce store selling prescription glasses/spectacles.
We have a lot of categories with similar names and I want to adopt the best possible naming convention to get the best from search.
So we have a number of similar categories for both Men's and women's glasses. Currently they are named as follows:
Women's Glasses-Women's Rimless Glasses
-Women's Semi Rimless Glasses
-Women's Plastic Glasses
-Women's Metal Glasses
-Women's Retro Glasses
Currently, this results in the following URL structure for sub categories:
https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/womens-rimless-glasses/
(For some reason WooCommerce is adding -2 to the end of the primary category name, it will not let me change it for some reason, this is the subject of a further investigation!)
So first question, is there too much duplication of the word glasses on the sub items? for example, should they read;
Women's Glasses
-Rimless
-Semi Rimless
-Plastic
-Metal
-Retro
Hence giving this URL structure:
https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/rimless/
OR, should we change the top level category name to just Women's and let the sub categories complete the picture?:
Women's
-Rimless Glasses
-Semi Rimless Glasses
-Plastic Glasses
-Metal Glasses
-Retro Glasses
Giving this example URL structure:
https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/rimless-glasses/
This would solve my hyphenation problem, however my fear is the top level category on it's own is not descriptive enough when viewed as stand alone:
https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/
The second part of my question relates to how to deal with the change in URL structure. I am using Yoast Premium, so will that pick up the changes and automatically redirect to the new one as it does when done manually? Or will I need to take a different approach using HTACCESS commands?
I hope the above makes sense,
Many thanks,
Bob
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!