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20 Year ecommerce brand/name, seo challenges

by esb128
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello,

Up to about a year and half ago, we decided to take seo seriously. This past year and a half we have gone all in, our onpage seo, keywords, page titles meta and blogs have been worked on relentlessly, we check for cannibalizations, all tags are correct. Our competitive space is not seo savvy, we have reviewed alot of their pages, there is no real onsite seo, poorly done page titles and meta, except for a couple.

We have seen solid movement and wins, but for many pages we cant break the top 10 or if we do we are the bottom of the 10. Our pagerank is a 48 and on par with the competition.

I say year and a half ago for seo as we re platformed (all urls changed), which i believe hurt us. Many of our competitors have been on the same platform and out rank us, yet we 10 x the content and research the keywords and have spoken to seo "professionals" and they say we are doing it right.

While i will say we have seen progress, its not what i expected, again the industry we are in is non savvy, if i were in electronics and home goods i would understand the stiff competition.

Not looking for a magic bullet but at the same time, time is money and part of me wants to move on to other things.

Any help feedback, advice would be appreciated. Am i just expecting results to fast?

Signed frustrated
#brand or name #challenges #ecommerce #seo #year
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    It's funny that you closed with "time is money" because that's the one thing you never hear people talk about in SEO. The longer a site is around, the better it tends to do in search engines. I've seen it over and over again - a site that does nothing for getting backlinks and makes no content changes just keeps climbing the rankings, inch by inch, and every year, they rank just a little bit higher.

    Of course, SEO people don't ever talk about site age because it is nothing you can control, but it is definitely a part of the many, many factors that contribute to your rankings.

    Since you cannot do anything about that, all you can do at this point is get real, solid backlinks that are editorially placed by related websites (not ones you can place yourself). That's the only way to see major gains in a shorter time span. I didn't see anything in the original post about that.
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    • Profile picture of the author esb128
      Hi Dave,

      I have spoken to several different seo "experts" some say dont worry about backlinks, make sure your content is king, your blogs are good and your on page seo for the landing pages you want to rank for is better then your competitors. I feel like we have done some or most of that. I can tell you we do lack backlinks, thats the only major contributing factor i see missing. Having been around for 20 years, our backlinks are most likely pointing to urls of our old sites (multiple itterations). Maybe we can look to see if we can get those redirected? But i dont know what tools to use to accomplish that.

      Are we not doing the right thing to make sure our content is the best and page titles and meta are clean? We even optimize the page titles of our individual products to contain the keywords we are chasing in the landing pages of that specific catagory.

      Its frustrating to see older legacy sites with little to no seo just ranking to rank.
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      • Profile picture of the author DABK
        If they rank higher than your pages, they have better SEO. You seem to think onpage SEO has a lot of power. It has some but backlinks have more.

        1 backlink from the right page can outperform thousands of backlinks with the best onpage SEO. Internal links count too.

        Analyze what they've done again, more carefully, and outdo them.

        Your pagerank of 48... you do not know it, Google has stopped making it public. If you're talking about DA and PA, those are MOZ metrics and Google does not use them at all, so don't pay attention.



        Originally Posted by esb128 View Post

        ...

        Its frustrating to see older legacy sites with little to no seo just ranking to rank.
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by esb128 View Post

        Hi Dave,

        I have spoken to several different seo "experts" some say dont worry about backlinks, make sure your content is king, your blogs are good and your on page seo for the landing pages you want to rank for is better then your competitors.

        Those are SEOs I would stop talking to and I sure hope you didn't pay them money for their time. Links are the #1 ranking factor in Google. Any SEO that says otherwise, has no idea wtf they are talking about.

        It also sounds like you may have seriously fouled things up changing URLs. If 301 redirects were not put in place, that could have really hampered the site.
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        • Profile picture of the author esb128
          We didnt pay for that advice, we have just been speaking with some of them. We did do all proper redirects when replatformed, i was more saying that my competitors have been on the same platform for years so there url's havent changed.

          We are still fixing/cleaning our site from an seo prospective, we were waitng for that to finish before garning more inbound links.
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      • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
        Originally Posted by esb128 View Post

        Hi Dave,

        I have spoken to several different seo "experts" some say dont worry about backlinks, make sure your content is king, your blogs are good and your on page seo for the landing pages you want to rank for is better then your competitors.
        I don't disagree that content is king, but only because it is extremely hard to get quality backlinks to garbage (would you link to a crappy web page that offered no real value to your site visitors?).

        I have definitely seen websites climb pretty high in the SERPs without doing ANY link building. Those sites are usually 5-10 years old, have amazing content and despite them not actively building links, they have accumulated unsolicited links, little by little over time. How much time do you have?
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        • Profile picture of the author esb128
          lol, time? not sure, as i said before we have seen positive movements but top of page 1 is elusive on most pages only some that are more niche or not as competitive... should we be pivoting our efforts for more inbound eventhough we still need to finish onsite seo for certain catagories?
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          • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
            Originally Posted by esb128 View Post

            lol, time? not sure, as i said before we have seen positive movements but top of page 1 is elusive on most pages only some that are more niche or not as competitive... should we be pivoting our efforts for more inbound eventhough we still need to finish onsite seo for certain catagories?
            A website is really never done, so you can tweak pages until the cows come home but never get around to the truly hard part, getting other sites to link to you.

            How about this? ... Make it a goal to get just ONE solid backlink every week, or every two weeks. Work on the on-page stuff after you get that week's link.
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  • Profile picture of the author esb128
    Dave,

    Can I ask you a question about page titles, if im selling Test Pumps, normally we put "Shop Test Pumps" then our company name after that, does using the word "shop" degrade the value of "Test Pumps" keyword that we are chasing in the page title? We write shop in front of our titles to show intent. Is this worth it or leave it out?
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    • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
      Originally Posted by esb128 View Post

      Dave,

      Can I ask you a question about page titles, if im selling Test Pumps, normally we put "Shop Test Pumps" then our company name after that, does using the word "shop" degrade the value of "Test Pumps" keyword that we are chasing in the page title? We write shop in front of our titles to show intent. Is this worth it or leave it out?
      A decade or more ago it would have mattered. These days the algorithms are geared more toward the searcher's intent and it shouldn't make a difference at all. (i.e. if someone types in "test pumps", a place optimized around "shop test pumps" probably satisfies the query. If they typed in "how do test pumps work", maybe not.)

      I have to wonder how many people ever type the word "shop" before a product. I would think if people type anything in, it would be the word "buy".
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