Seo help for opencart platform

[wheresmymoney]

Hi,

We use an opencart platform with the openbay pro plugin for stock intergration. The site was designed by a local firm and they also give us general support moving forward. that all works perfect (well 99.9% of the time)

Our sales are approx 70% ebay, 20%amazon & 10% web/tel.

Now thing is, the site looks good, products are good etc etc. But on google we dont exist. We have tried using the local web firm to do our SEO and they charge upto £500 p/m for this service, we gave it 12 months, and still we are non existant on google... We have called many seo companies and they all look to charge the same, but from what work I saw the last firm do, it was minimal.

I have been reading lots and it seams we can do this ourselves in house, I have 2 people in mind to do this inbetween telephone sales and support...

Only thing is when we ask for advice we hit a brick wall, a secret code... We have been doing a lot of research and we 'understand' what seo is, but how do we maximise our efforts using opencart as our platform.

Can anyone on this fantatsic knowledgable forum give us some pointers and what we need to do in house to make it work. We also under stand seo is not a quick fix, so we want to concentrate on it long term...

Look forward to your replies.

Thanks
Shaun

 

[makeusvisible]

The first thing I would suggest....before you even consider SEO, is how your website performs.
i.e What is the conversion rate of your website?

The next question I would look at is,

Which keywords are you looking to rank for?

Ranking will depend on your current standings, and how competitive those keywords are.

If your site is converting badly, then spending valuable time and money on bringing additional visitors isn't really the right thing to focus on. If you focus on improving your conversion rate, it will also allow you to improve aspects of the site which are going to have knock on (positive) seo implications too. for example;

Menu structure
Mobile friendliness
Rich Snippets

Don't spend money on SEO until you have clear expectations with regards where you expect to rank, and what visitor numbers you can anticipate once you do rank... and if you also know what your conversion rate is you can estimate a return on investment.

Have you also thought about Adwords? Again, if you know your conversion rate the calculation will be pretty straightforward to work out the cost of paid traffic, and cost per conversion compared to commission fees on ebay and amazon. It's also far more instant than SEO, and allows you to build up meaningful stats about how your site performs much faster.

Rather than just SEO, I would defiantly consider paying for a few hours consultancy initially, to get a clear picture of what realistic expectations should be, and how quickly you should be able to generate a return from the site.

 

[wheresmymoney]

Hi

Yes Ad words we do, and they do get increased traffic instantly... But they cost £££. My main question is we want to do our own inhouse seo, whether or not the conversion rate is poor or good. Our seo is non -existant, no keywords etc have been infilled, nothing... What we really want is for someone to tel us/show us where to do what. We know and understand our product and we dont want to pay £££ for someone to put in irrelevant keywords etc. I have 2 staff member across the course of the day have a 2-3 hours spare inbetween jobs, and I want to fill their time, and I feel inputting SEO background work would be a good idea...?

or is it not as simple as that?

 

[makeusvisible]

If you already do Adwords, then you should have data about the keywords people are using, and the conversion rates of each. This data is what you should be using to choose target keywords from an SEO perspective. i.e focus on keywords with good volume, and a good conversion rate.

Optimise your landing pages for your target keywords... to start with, your landing pages will need good, unique content, which should be relevant to the target keyword. There are countless articles online about how to optimise a page for a target keyword.....but to start with focus on getting your content to be unique and informative, and make sure you have relevant meta data in place.

I would suggest an account with SEMRUSH or a similar service, so you can import all your adwords keywords, and track their current organic position...otherwise your outcomes are not going to be measurable.

Hope that helps.

 

[wheresmymoney]

If you already do Adwords, then you should have data about the keywords people are using, and the conversion rates of each. This data is what you should be using to choose target keywords from an SEO perspective. i.e focus on keywords with good volume, and a good conversion rate.

Optimise your landing pages for your target keywords... to start with, your landing pages will need good, unique content, which should be relevant to the target keyword. There are countless articles online about how to optimise a page for a target keyword.....but to start with focus on getting your content to be unique and informative, and make sure you have relevant meta data in place.

I would suggest an account with SEMRUSH or a similar service, so you can import all your adwords keywords, and track their current organic position...otherwise your outcomes are not going to be measurable.

Hope that helps.

Hi,

Yes we already know / have the good keywords. We have 3 option boxes in opencart.

Meta Tag Description:
Meta Tag Keywords:
SEO Keyword:
Do not use spaces instead replace spaces with - and make sure the keyword is globally unique.

Now we know how to sell each product we sell, we know what are good keywords, we know what keywords our competitors are using.

Are these 3 fields the only things we need to complets on each product to get seo moving? currently these 3 fields are blank! or is there something else we are missing?

 

[makeusvisible]

The meta decsription is extreamly important'. This is the text which displays in search results under your main heading. Google will sometimes, but not always display this. It is of critical importance....it is effectively your big chance to entice users to click on your site in the search results. Some advice about writing meta descriptions can be found here; https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

The other thing you will want to fill in, is the TITLE. That wasnt listed in your post above, but is hugely important....Im not sure how opencart handle this without looking myself at an opencart back-end.

Other aspects you need to consider are your H1 and H2 headings, your internal linking strategy and your copy and image tagging.

It isn't really viable to simply put 2 staff members on SEO duty and expect things to pan out. You really need to have an overall strategy before you start delving into the specifics....and nobody can give you a boilerplate strategy, as every industry and every website is different.

My advice, if you are wanting to keep it in house, is to send the staff on a comprehensive SEO training course, so they understand the fundamentals. Digging in at a technical level without understanding it properly risks doing more harm than good.

If you really want to put them in at the deep end now.....then they one thing you can get them on straight away is writing good unique content for all your landing pages....provided of course the are apt at writing copy.

 

[wheresmymoney]

The meta decsription is extreamly important'. This is the text which displays in search results under your main heading. Google will sometimes, but not always display this. It is of critical importance....it is effectively your big chance to entice users to click on your site in the search results. Some advice about writing meta descriptions can be found here;

The other thing you will want to fill in, is the TITLE. That wasnt listed in your post above, but is hugely important....Im not sure how opencart handle this without looking myself at an opencart back-end.

Other aspects you need to consider are your H1 and H2 headings, your internal linking strategy and your copy and image tagging.

It isn't really viable to simply put 2 staff members on SEO duty and expect things to pan out. You really need to have an overall strategy before you start delving into the specifics....and nobody can give you a boilerplate strategy, as every industry and every website is different.

My advice, if you are wanting to keep it in house, is to send the staff on a comprehensive SEO training course, so they understand the fundamentals. Digging in at a technical level without understanding it properly risks doing more harm than good.

If you really want to put them in at the deep end now.....then they one thing you can get them on straight away is writing good unique content for all your landing pages....provided of course the are apt at writing copy.

Hear what your saying. The thing is I was paying a local firm to do seo £300 pm, and never saw any results after a year. The fields are blank, obviously the titles etc are filled out.

The 2 staff members I am refering to are infact 2 directors... so they have the ability to write good quality stuff for our products, and also they are kean to learn becasue its their company too...

The thing is I know of a competitor wjo started online the same year as us 2006, back then you could manipulate market places, which we did, (we are now one of the largest in our sector) the competitor took a different approach and focused on their main website learning seo and adwords from back then.

Looking now we have superb sales etc via marketplaces and they dont, but they have much more sucsess from their website, & we dont... They have now started getting back into ebay and amazon and we can see by their feedback rate they are obviously struggling... But their truspilot reviews are soaring and ours are not... Can you see the picture...?

Ive spoken to a few google premier partners and all they are interested in is there monthly fee being paid... So hence the reason why I want to do this and learn inhouse... Hope you can understand the situation.

As far as business goes, its going well. But we want to organically make our own website better. the design etc we couldnt be happier, but you search on google for anything relating to us we dont exist... apart from our company name obviously...

 

[GraemeL]

Suggest you take advantage of this course http://www.freshbananas.co.uk/seo-costs.html It would cost ypu much less than a months SEO from your current provider.

At the very least, it will give you enough knowledge to know what onsite SEO is and how to about it. @Tin is a UKBF member and a thoroughly decent bloke.

G

 

[makeusvisible]

As far as business goes, its going well. But we want to organically make our own website better. the design etc we couldnt be happier, but you search on google for anything relating to us we dont exist... apart from our company name obviously...

I totally understand. I would be interested to have a look at your site if you can pm me it's URL.

The problem with SEO (paid or non paid), is that it takes absolute masses of time. If your going to sink hours and hours of your director's time into making changes to your site, you really need a clear direction as to what needs doing/when.

How much traffic do you presently have, and at what rate does it convert?

 

[Tin]

All the information to do it yourself is out there, granted but making sure that you sort the wheat from the chaff is harder to do. Yes, of course you can do it yourselves, in house, but you need to know that you are following the right advice in the first place or it is going to be a waste of your time and money.

It is impossible (and dangerous) to give you pointers without knowing anything about your website and to really get the sort of advice you are looking for you'd be better signing up as a full member and asking for a review in the private area. That way you'll get advice that is better informed and specific to your website.

To answer your question in the general sense and taking on board that you say you've already done your keyword research and know what your customers are searching for I'd suggest:

Sort out your Page Titles - each one needs to be unique, relevant to the page and to the keywords but not overdone
Fill in your Meta Description - this is your first sales pitch to your customer and should entice your customers in. NOTE: the description won't directly help you to rank but when you do rank it needs to sell the product the page is offering. Google doesn't always show the Meta Description you want it to but adding your keyword in there will usually help with this. Here's an example of a meta description that has strong calls to action and it only take a few mins of thought to write a decent one.

Meta Tag Keywords - either leave this blank or ONLY put in it the actual keywords directly relevant to the page.

Then you need to consider the content of the actual page which includes the copy, the headers, image alt tags, internal linking (both in the copy and your menu items). All of these areas need theming on a page by page basis throughout the site. To keep this work manageable, prioritise which are the important pages and work on those from the start, leave non-important pages until the very end of the work. You can use category pages to help your home page rankings and you use product pages to help the parent category pages to rank.

To be blunt here, if you want to do it in house that's fine but my advice to you is, like others have said, get some proper training as it is too complicated (and risky) to not have a good enough knowledge of the basics.

 

[StevePoster]

Its recommended to learn from the reputable SEO website in which will provide the basics and the advance method then you will be needing to optimize your pages according to your target users needs.