Post by Mike Guenther » Tue Dec 03, 2013 10:39 pm

Can anyone explain to me why my home page ( http://sunnybunnyeastereggs.com ) is not ranking on Google (or any search engine for that matter) for the following key phrases:

plastic easter eggs

plastic easter egg

The home page used to appear on page 1 for both of these phrases, now it isnt listed for them at all. Other pages are listed for them, but not the home page.

Any ideas why?

I appreciate any feedback! Thank you!

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Post by MarketInSG » Tue Dec 03, 2013 10:43 pm

many things affect SEO. the first thing is, was any major change? Is there a robot.txt file to block their bots?


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Post by Mike Guenther » Tue Dec 03, 2013 10:48 pm

No there wasnt any major changes-hardly any at all over the last 4 or 6 months actually. There is a robots.txt file and it says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/

And it has been that way since the site launched over 2 years ago.

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Post by labeshops » Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:05 pm

Mike Guenther wrote:No there wasnt any major changes-hardly any at all over the last 4 or 6 months actually.
No new content can drop your ranking actually. You might want to include something on your homepage you update regularly - like a twitter feed, latest news from a blog, etc.

Google is also giving more relevance now to social media and natural links, so you might try expanding your reach on social networks like google+, twitter, pinterest, etc. Your store would be perfect for a pinterest board to post images of Easter egg hunts, perhaps sponsor a plastic egg decorating contest, etc.
Last edited by labeshops on Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Mike Guenther » Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:11 pm

well, the copy on the homepage changed a little over the last 3-4 months. I realize I need to keep things "fresh", so I do that every now and then.

I meant Major changes.

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Post by labeshops » Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:14 pm

Oops, I edited my post to include more after you saw it lol

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Post by Mike Guenther » Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:26 pm

Oh ok great-I will look into Pinterest-I have never used it before. LOL.

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Post by labeshops » Wed Dec 04, 2013 12:56 am

I get quite a bit of traffic from pinterest actually, so it's definitely worth adding. They have pinterest for business now which adds more features even.

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Post by Mike Guenther » Thu Dec 05, 2013 5:27 am

Anyone else have some insight?

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Post by cwswebdesign » Thu Dec 05, 2013 9:31 am

Mike Guenther wrote:Can anyone explain to me why my home page ( http://sunnybunnyeastereggs.com ) is not ranking on Google (or any search engine for that matter) for the following key phrases:

plastic easter eggs

plastic easter egg

The home page used to appear on page 1 for both of these phrases, now it isnt listed for them at all. Other pages are listed for them, but not the home page.

Any ideas why?

I appreciate any feedback! Thank you!
It's a loaded question and can't really be answered without more info. What have you done in the past to get it to rank? When I look at your on site factors, there is a lot of work to be done there. Long gone are the days of "build it and they will come". Google is way too smart and any site that wants to rank is going to have to work hard.

The keywords that you mentioned are extremely competitive as well. You're better off with less generic terms to build up traffic and a following.

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Post by Mike Guenther » Thu Dec 05, 2013 9:17 pm

I guess what I find odd is that my home page doesn't rank AT ALL with those key phrases on search engines is what I find very strange all of a sudden?

I have about 1000 or so links to my site, I have submitted to various sites and directories relating to my key phrases.

What would you suggest for different key words/phrases? I just went with those because I assumed thats what most people would type in a search engine to find products like mine.

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Post by labeshops » Thu Dec 05, 2013 10:01 pm

Google is always changing its search algorithms which is why you have to adapt and change your site over time to fit their new requirements. Ecommerce sites are much harder to rank than information sites due to our usually lower text count. That's one of the reasons SEO is such a pain to do - a necessary pain for either you or someone you hire, but a pain.

If you want to rank for "plastic Easter eggs" (which is the only way you have it phrased on your home page btw), you need to bump up the density of it, include it in alt tags on images, category names, etc. You actually only have it 3 times on your home page - it is in your title and description which is good, but you need to add it more to your page. It can be tricky to add keywords for SEO without compromising your design/readability for customers, but I would add "Easter" to at least one of your category names in the top header, make sure all your images have alt tags that include it, and add more text on your home page.

Perhaps you could do an information page about the origin of the Easter egg tradition with an excerpt on your home page (or a blog with articles such as this with excerpts pointing to the articles). The category links in your footer I would change to include the complete "Plastic Easter Eggs" phrase instead of just "Gold Eggs", etc. Use these phrases in links to your site from facebook, etc, and include them in your posts there (I see you added pinterest, though you are not using your key phrase in the posts there either and your board name is just "Easter Eggs", not "Plastic Easter Eggs" and you don't have a board description). You have a great built in resource with the wonderful way you are employing special people at your company - you could relate their stories and memories of their Easter egg hunts etc and have articles for a year at least! You could do a channel on youtube with a playlist of other peoples egg hunt videos - I'm sure there are a lot of funny ones. If you sponsor any egg hunts - even just for employees kids at Easter - video, photo, and post it. I really do see a lot of possibilities for your niche.

Use tools like google's keyword and seo quake to look at the density of your keywords and try to lesson the meaningless ones ("cart", etc) and up the ones you want to rank for. For the pages that are already ranking well, make sure they are totally self contained ads for your store meaning that if that is the only page a customer lands on and sees, will they have enough info to want to buy from you? Make sure they link back to your homepage - maybe a link like "See all our Plastic Easter Eggs" back to the home page.

There are a lot of articles and blogs dedicated to ideas of building seo, so you probably need to study up. Then just keep plugging away, changing little things until you get at least on the first page - trying to rank at #1 is nearly impossible, but within the first page is usually doable.

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Post by cwswebdesign » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:37 pm

I would suggest taking care of the basics first before you start any link building or deciding on keywords:

1) Fix your robots.txt file so Google can crawl efficiently and not waste valuable time crawling useless folders and files (/admin/, /vqmod/, etc)

2) Make sure you have a good sitemap submitted to them. If you have a lot of products, your server is going to time out trying to display them all on the sitemap and you'll need an extension for it that breaks the feed into groups of 500 and doesn't time out.

3) Make sure you have a 301 redirect to either direct the non www version to the www version or vice versa. Google sees your site as 2 separate sites without this (duplicate and spamming).

There's more but this will keep you busy for a little bit.

DL

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Post by Mike Guenther » Fri Dec 06, 2013 4:08 am

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone! I am going to get working on all of them!

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Post by Mike Guenther » Fri Dec 06, 2013 4:37 am

I still find it odd though that for the phrase:

Plastic Easter eggs

My home page doesnt rank ANYWHERE, but this page:

sunnybunnyeastereggs.com/store/Plastic-Eggs-with-Toys

ranks on page 11 of Google....seems very odd.

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Post by Mike Guenther » Fri Dec 06, 2013 4:42 am

Also, I disallowed:

Disallow: /store/admin/
Disallow: /store/vqmod/

But I am not sure which other folders are not essential for opencart in respect to Google?

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Post by cwswebdesign » Fri Dec 06, 2013 4:50 am

Mike Guenther wrote:I still find it odd though that for the phrase:

Plastic Easter eggs

My home page doesnt rank ANYWHERE, but this page:

sunnybunnyeastereggs.com/store/Plastic-Eggs-with-Toys

ranks on page 11 of Google....seems very odd.
This is why:

About 2,490,000 results

and you're competing against heavy hitters: ebay, amazon, toysrus, etc. That term is way too popular to rank quickly or easily.

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Post by Mike Guenther » Mon Dec 09, 2013 9:12 pm

I understand the competition.....what I am saying is the home page doesn't rank on ANY page out of About 2,490,000 results....understand?

And we used to be on page 1 and 2 for years against the heavy hitters....these two things make it seem very odd.

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Post by labeshops » Mon Dec 09, 2013 9:46 pm

Every time google changes its search algorithm, which it has done many times in the past few years, your ranking will change. Even if your site hasn't changed at all during that time, the way it is ranked and shown on google has.

That is why I suggested reading up on current seo and change your site accordingly. It's a pain in the a** but we all must keep doing this in order to keep ranking well. And don't freak out if you drop temporarily, just keep improving your store and hopefully the rankings will keep up.

This is one reason though why organic search alone isn't going to get you sales. You have to do at least some marketing.

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Post by Mike Guenther » Mon Dec 09, 2013 9:50 pm

Yea, We actually use Google adwords, constant contact email campaigns, as well as a physical mailer we send out yearly. I was just hoping to keep our organic search results up as well.

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