SEO Progress Report for European Online Glass Retailer

SEO Implementation Progress Report for European Online Glass Retailer

.Com Site Analysis

Website has gained SEO traction after it has been indexed by Google. Indexing rate has been good -- Google would accept and put on search results almost all pages that you suggest -- see here: https://www.google.com.ua/?q=site:eyerim.com and below.

Rise of number of indexed pages

Over the week (aug 7 -13) the daily traffic rose from 29 sessions to 276 (see below).

Rise in traffic due to a proper indexing by Google

Proportion of Organic traffic was more than 75%, which is pretty nice. I predict the traffic will rise further up in the coming weeks.

Search words that are mostly product name biased, for example, Prada PR16rs (current position: 8th).

The Average CTR (ration of Clicks to Impressions) is 4.78% and the Average Position is 9.8 per all keywords. The meta description of the average product page is OK, yet, it may lack: 1) votes and 2) price.

SERP results: snippet needs Votes and Price

Problems detected

1. Keywords are mostly product names. Сategory, gender or brand specific keywords, for example, ‘Buy Ray Ban glasses’ don’t show up. Impact: very high. Reason: faceted navigation settings, i.e. brand & form-specific landing pages are produced dynamically and are disallowed from indexing by system settings. Status: solution suggested, developer help needed.

2. Duplication -- pages appear in Google index with and without a trailing slash (‘/’ at the end of an URL). Impact: very high. Status: solution suggested, developer help needed to configure the htaccess file.

3. Inconsistent distribution of internal links. For example, noindex (invisible to Google) links on the menu, i.e. https://www.eyerim.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=aviator. Impact: very high. Reason: not effective structure of static (links) blocks on the footer. Status: solution suggested, developer help needed to create a stack of static pages and put links to them from the Footer menu.

4. Your other domains badly need inbound links. Impact: high. Status: solution suggested, developer help needed to put links to other domain on the Footer menu.

5. Google needs to know that the posts (pages) your other domains are the alternative versions of those on the Global site -- it will prevent ‘thin’ (non-original) content issue.

6. No accurate and /or original Titles and Meta description on Category / Features static pages. Impact: high. Status: fixed.

7. Create a Blog -- no fresh (frequently updated) content, for example, blog. Impact: high. Status: solution suggested, developer help needed to create a blog & put it on the menu.

8. HTML Sitemap generated. Status: done, need a server configuration from the webmaster.

9. Configure the URL parameters for Google. Status: done

10. Configure Secure URLs. Status: done

Solutions

Turn on faceted navigation settings

Presently, important landing pages are disallowed from Google.

Due to the Magento configuration many potentially lucrative pages like brands, other features and combination of features pages were disallowed from crawling. This produced the fact that organic search keywords were mostly product names.

This is the common ‘The Hatchet Approach’ to Magento configuration. For example, this is the method that Best Buy appears to be employing. The top-level categories are crawled and indexed, but once any sort of facet is applied the pages are excluded via robots.txt. It's the reason why their main "Sunglasses" page is in the index, but "Ray Ban sunglasses" is not.

And therein lie the fault with the hatchet approach. You might very well be missing out on some really strong organic landing pages.

Solution: Allow for indexation of particular facet combinations with high-volume search traffic.

How to do that: Turn the pages into editable, static pages.

Turning dynamic filter pages into static pages (with unique content and meta content) is by far the best option in my opinion, however it requires a lot of dedicated content writing resource and it can take a long time to add content to lots of existing issues.

The main benefit of doing this is that you’re extending your site architecture and creating very specific pages for long-tail queries, that most retail websites won’t have a targeted page for. In a lot of cases, depending on the platform, you will need to adapt the navigation to still allow filters on these pages (allowing you to make use of multi-faceted navigation), but these pages can be no-indexed and the static pages can be linked to within the navigation.

The other option, depending on the technology you have and how good your developers are, is to inject your content onto the pages (again, an editable content area would be better) and set title tags and meta descriptions somewhere in the back-end.

What’s the current situation:

Buy {brand} glasses -- NOINDEX, FOLLOW: https://www.eyerim.com/sunglasses/brand/boss-by-hugo-boss

Buy {brand} {gender} glasses -- NOINDEX,FOLLOW: view-source:https://www.eyerim.com/sunglasses/brand/boss-by-hugo-boss/gender/men

What static pages do you need:

1. each brand page

2. optionally, each brand page by gender

For example, Persol brand page: https://www.eyerim.com/sunglasses/brand/persol (currently, NOINDEX, FOLLOW).

Importantly, when pages have been created update the Custom design with Custom Layout Update declaration below:

// <reference name="head"> <action method="setRobots"><value>INDEX,FOLLOW</value></action> </reference>

Go to: CMS > Pages > Design > Custom design and put it in like below:

How to set Index, Follow declaration for a Magento shop

Duplication -- resolve the trailing slash problem

The trailing slash canonical issue is one of the most talked about technical SEO issues with the Magento platform, as most URLs on Magento sites render with or without a trailing slash – meaning there are two versions of each page. For example, see https://www.eyerim.com/sunglasses vs. https://www.eyerim.com/sunglasses/

This generally becomes a problem when large sites have links pointing to both versions, which can lead to both pages ranking and also means the link value is split between two pages.

Solution: at this [early] stage of website life, the preferred solution is to apply a rewrite rule (remove the trailing slash).

What needs to be done: add the following line to the htaccess file to to enforce a no-trailing-slash policy.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

Remove Dynamic (nofollow) links from menu

The Footer menu contains links to pages that does not exists as landing pages, i.e. produced through catalog search function, for example, https://www.eyerim.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Aviator

Yet, these URLs are rightfully disallowed from crawling by htaccess setting to prevent a massive duplication issue. So, a potent link power distribution instrument -- Footer menu -- does not perform its function.

Solution: similar to faceted navigation issue above, i.e. turn the pages into editable, static pages. It means you need to create a set of static pages with products and put Footer Menu links to them. For example, instead of https://www.eyerim.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Aviator put a link to https://www.eyerim.com/ray-ban/aviator (has to be created).

Put links to Alternative Domains

As noted above, the Footer menu is a very powerful instrument of distribution of the PageRank within & without the website. That’s why it needs to be used wisely. Since your other Domains lack links I suggest that you 1) create a column Eyerim Internation (for example, beside Eyerim below) and 2) put there links to your other domains.

Use the hreflang tag with Magento

Google needs to know that the posts (pages) your other domains are the alternative versions of those on the Global site -- it will prevent ‘thin’ (non-original) content issue. Google has provided a way for webmasters to not be penalized for duplicate content by creating the rel=alternate hreflang=X link attribute.

Status: Done

Setting up hreflangs in Magento store

Create Original Titles & Descriptions for Categories

No accurate and /or original Titles and Meta description on Category / Features static pages.

Status: Done

Create a Blog

Google values fresh and abundant content on topic. Your store may lack constantly updated (fresh) content. Also, you will need to improve your search presence against certain keywords -- with blog it can be done without further adding products or updating them daily. It’s done through publishing articles on different topics & spreading them thru Social media.

Suggestion: create a Blog and put it in the Footer menu, for example, below ‘About us’.

HTML Sitemap generated: yet, a mistake shall be fixed

I have generated the sitemap, yet, the sitemap page shows ‘403 Forbidden nginx/1.6.3’ error (https://www.eyerim.com/sitemap/ ). Suggestion to webmaster: -> Upgrade the NGINX

http://support.mageworx.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/11/4/html-sitemap-doesnt-work

Update Homepage Title Status: Done

Configure the URL parameters for Google to understand what functions do they serve.

Status: Done

Example of how to handle parameters in URLs for a Magento store

Configure Secure URLs

Due to the wrong configuration of secure URLs, SK domain was showing up in Google instead of the Global one, i.e. unnecessary competition between domains (see below).

Status: Done

Reference: https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/magento/magento_ssl.htm

Other Domains analysis

Domains:

• Slovakia

• Sweden

• Denmark

• Finland

• Czech

Analysis takeaways

Basically, all recommendations for the Global website pertain to the local websites as well. likewise, its vital to 1) put links to these other domains on the footer of ALL websites, 2) have the Social campaign in the language of each country (for example, through Facebook app) to make people share links to each domain, 3) ensure all IMPORTANT landing pages are allowed for crawling by Google, and 4) link most lucrative landing pages (features / products, etc) from the Footer menu and 5) HTML sitemap is in place and working.

.sk domain performance report

Historically, the website has been indexed even better than the International (.com).Over two weeks the traffic from all sources rose from 51 to 227 sessions (see below). Organic traffic has accounted for 58% of sessions.

Obviously, the competition in Slovakia Google is lower than with Google.com. So, the website gets even ranked against category-related keywords, for example, persol okuliare. Yet, even in this case the page ranked in Google for persol okuliare is only a product. not category one (see below).

Google SERP for persol sunglasses in Slovakia (local language)

So, here the problem is the same as with the Global site.

In addition to that the SK website has the greatest number of incoming links / domains (17 domains). Also, the website has the highest CTR (5.66%) with 12.2 average position. I think that SK domain has been positioned for organic growth at the highest pace.

.se domain performance report

Sweden's website faces a rather fierce competition, which makes it rank lower than for example in Slovakia. Likewise, the Average Ranking position here is 18.2 which is almost twice lower than that of the Global website (see below).

Here the traffic rises rather slowly (if at all). See below the graphs of All traffic (blue) vs. the Organic traffic (orange).

It’s clear that the low Average ranking position does not let the pages to get traffic. So, here where the competition is high, it’s really important to establish category / brand, etc pages as landing page with Google. Also, it’s very important to engage in region-specific Social activity and start an active blogging.

.dk domain performance report

The DK domain has roughly the same problems as the SE domain does: 1) low average ranking position; 2) low search traffic for product specific keywords; 3) inability to get ranked against category / brand, etc keywords, as well as 4) overall high competition.

With regard to SEO it highlights a need for country-specific 3rd party blogging strategy (blogging for links) as well as country-specific Social activity.

.fi domain performance report

Notable thing: the site has very high CTR, almost 9% (see below).

Another important thing: Google has only put less than a half of your page to its index -- 4,200 pages:https://www.google.fi/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:eyerim.fi . It’s extremely low as compared to other your domains analyzed (you can compare the mere path of crawling per day below):

VS.

Arguably, the Index Status will improve quite soon. I predict that as the indexing rate grows, the Average position as well as organic traffic will rise significantly.

Nevertheless, the FI website needs inbound links -- the more links will point to the website, the more often Googlebot will come to crawl it.

So, its vital to 1) put links to the alternative domains on the footer of ALL websites, 2) have the Social campaign in the language of each country (for example, through Facebook app) to make people share links to each domain, 3) ensure all IMPORTANT linking pages are allowed for crawling by Google, and 4) potentially lucrative landing pages (features / categories, etc) have lots of internal links and 5) HTML sitemap is in place.

.cz domain performance report

The CZ domain also experiences low indexing -- see here: https://www.google.cz/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:eyerim.cz Here again the crawling stats is low (see below)

Yet, the website has at least got some inbound links (9 domains).