Just tried this SEO Audit on my shop

Thought I would just give this a try to see how an SEO audit fairs up on my folksy shop, not brilliant, could be better. There are a lot of things I could do to improve it. I also did my own website and that’s not good at all. I think I need someone to help re-design the whole of my website but obviously that will cost.

http://www.completeonlinemarketing.co.uk/landingpage10/

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Forgive me for being cynical, but do the people who provide the assessment tool also offer to do the necessary work to raise your ranking? I suspect they just want to become “someone to help re-design the whole of my website but obviously that will cost.” I foresee some marketting emails coming your way! :smile:

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hmm, it looks to me as though the items in the top section of results would be something Folksy themselves should address? If not, I’d like to know what I should be doing there. I’ve run the same check on my own website, and the items in that section all come up as Excellent

In the URL section, the only thing marked as Needs Attention is Keyword (on both my sites) - I’m not quite sure what “Exact keyword not to this URL” means, or what to do about it.

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Thanks for sharing this Pauline, it’s really interesting. Although I don’t understand some of the blurb (and what’s H1, H2 and H3 tags?), I was quite pleased with the results overall. Interesting that it told me under “page link analysis” that having “1 links from other site” that needs attention. I’m guessing that’s the link to the Folksy gift guides.

Elaine

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Yeah there are quite a lot of things on there that I don’t understand. Just thought I would try it out of a matter of interest. @HelenCliffordArt I’ve already had the email saying they will be in touch within the next couple of days by phone. What gets me is on my website I haven’t included my phone number so not sure if they’ll be able to find it any way.

I’ve just ran this myself, I think a lot of issues are things that we can’t fix and would need to be done at a coding level, something hubby said when he started on my website about issues I had being found using a template site was that H1 H2 and H3 tags were something to do with coding or programming or some other technical stuff I don’t really understand.
I think, from looking at my results, if we make sure our keywords (terms that people would type into Google to find your product) are also in our product title and we find a way to reduce the image numbers for our products then we should rank higher in searches. Also increasing the amount of places your shop link appears in helps by the look of it too

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Thank you for putting this on here. I have done mine & so much needs doing (no-wonder I’ve not sold anything yet.) Only slight problem is half of it I don’t really understand as I’m not the most computer literate of people. Guess it’s over to my kids to help me again. Poor them! Still I’m learning!

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But make no mistake - this offer of a free audit is not for your benefit but in order to sell you professional assistance - Ok to improve your website but it will cost you and no idea how much - the website gives no clues on that.
This is a sales ploy. Suspicious I may be but I would suggest it might well cost more to make the improvements than many ‘sole traders / crafters/ artists’ website could financially benefit from.

This is the email you will receive after signing in for your free trial :

Thank you for using our free audit tool. We have been servicing the Online Marketing needs of companies all over the World since 1999. We would love the opportunity to help you improve all aspects of your Online Marketing and improve your report scores. For most clients this usually starts with a chat. We have a fabulous team of highly trained individuals who are the bedrock of our business. They will offer help and advice and discuss any requirements you may have. This can simply be showing you some of our Unique Software that your internal team or existing web design company can utilise. Training and advice you can implement yourself through to one of our many full service packages where we do everything for you. We have packages to suit every pocket from the smallest new business through to large corporations. So please email us or call now on 0844 669 611 for an impartial no obligation chat. Alternatively one of our team will give you a call over the next few days to see if we can help you in any way. Thanks Again John Bonney Director

Yes I gave my email address but I won’t be receiving more after this one as I’ve now blocked it .
And…
I have a rather handy email address which allows me to have whatever I want before the @. So the email address I gave them directly relates to this and if I receive any other mail on that address I will know exactly where it came from .

I’ve had a website for some years now and regularily receive emails offering to help with my SEO. I really don’t think I can or want to afford it.
Just saying…

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I don’t intend either to pay anything to them to update my website but just was intrigued as to what it was all about and if I could make the changes myself without involving any one else who charges to do so.
I will be either blocking any other emails from these people or just ignore them from now on.
I really didn’t expect them to send me an email asking me to get in touch with them for help.

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And a very nice website it is too. I managed to find it by following the link from Folksy to Facebook which is always a big plus. xx

Meant to say thank you for posting this as it is a very useful topic whether any of us want / can afford to pay for fixes or not :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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I also have just tried this. I wouldn’t worry about what it says about folksy page, as its rankings is on the whole of folksy not just your shop, so there is not a lot you can do about improving folksy!

However take note of what it says about your website (seek advice from someone on what everything means -personally I dont have a clue about most of the tasks I have been recommended to do!! I got an email pretty quickly from them saying how they could help - that’s probably how they are going to whoop you for a massive fee! Seek advice from other sources for instance I have someone coming from Cosmic to do a free 1 hour session on looking at my website - I shall show her the Rockfish results!

The other thing I am going to do is write to my website provider about all the things I have been tasked to do, to see what they say, after all I am paying them for a service!!

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Hi Elaine, H1 and H2 tags mean Header 1 and Header 2. I am a digital marketing specialist by day and a screen printer by night :wink: Your Head 1 title would be your page name and your Head 2 title your subtitle. These would need to be keyword focused for good SEO “juice”

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Thank you for that info. I’ve got that problem with my website so I’m going to have a go at updating it better at the weekend and rectify some of the problems.

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No worries, if you are unsure of anything just ask :wink:

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Funnily enough, we’ve just done an SEO audit of the whole site, and we’ll be implementing those findings over the next few weeks and reviewing them regularly over the next months. Google keeps changing its algorithms, so it something that needs constantly monitoring.

There are lots of SEO tools out you can use to help you, like Webmaster Tools and Moz (which you do pay for but has a free trial). Moz also has loads of useful advice on its blog. But rather than paying for expensive reports, there are some super simple things you can do as a seller to improve your ranking on search engines - and they’re all free!

  • Firstly when you list a product really think how people are going to find it – how you would describe to someone who can’t see it?

  • Write the words that you think are most important in your title and in the first line of your description.

  • Don’t just copy and paste listings directly from other sites, because Google doesn’t like duplication. Tweak the copy and title to keep the content unique.

  • Remember, Google is a bot and can’t mindread (or see your pictures), so if you want to rank on it, you need to have relevant words in your titles and descriptions. That’s what it reads.

  • Google’s job is to provide the best result for a particular search. It uses different criteria for doing that, not just the info it finds on the page, but where that page is (ie the authority of the domain) and the social shares, mentions and links that page has. So the more links you have into your page, the more Google will like you.

  • Having a blog, being featured on other people’s blogs or being talked about on social media, all helps improve your ranking, so make your product as shareable as possible - for example, if the photos are really good bloggers will be more likely to feature it and other people will be more likely to share it.

  • Another thing that might be worth noting is that individual product pages might not always rank as highly now. In its mission to return the most relevant results, Google is more likely to show a shop that has lots of items that meet a particular search than a single product page. For example, if you have a collection of cactus jewellery in your online shop, that collection (or your entire shop) is likely to rank higher than a single piece of cactus jewellery in another shop (unless that has a lot more shares etc). So if you want Google to spot you, it’s worth thinking about your shop as a whole, and creating a collection of products rather than just making lots of random items.

We’re going to be writing more about SEO and sharing more tips on the blog, but in the meatime this article might be useful.

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Excellent, thank you so much.

Not sure if anyone knows about this. I’ve just got this through from the same company who did my SEO Audit.

Google has announced that from April 21st 2015 it will favour in the search results all companies who have a mobile friendly web site. Protect Your Rankings Now!

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Hi Pauline,

Yes,as of end of April beginning of May, each year Google will change their algorithms. Google does favour websites which render quickly, and especially mobile websites. However, this has been the case for a couple of years now, so I wouldn’t panic! It is worth checking that your mobile website renders at a reasonable speed, but from your SEO breakdown I read through at the weekend, you have nothing to seriously worry about.

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Thank you. Is it a good idea to have your own website too? I created a wix account but then didn’t know what on earth it was asking me to do to actually build my site. I have so much to learn & really appreciate all of the help and advice I am picking up on these various forums.

Kindest Regards
Debby