Help with SEO and Product Tags

Hello,

I've been working on my SEO the last couple of months. I've been working with Google Console and also running speed tests, as well as trying to read as many SEO tips as I can. My website still doesn't seem to do well in Google rankings despite all the efforts I'm making to my site. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong?

For example, my shop products don't seem to show up in keyword searches on Google even though I have lots of specific product tags for each product and most of them have an SEO title and description also. Are product tags even SEO-related, or am I confusing them with a hashtag (like how one would use to discover things on social media)?

Would really love some advice on this, as I feel like I'm never making any progress, and in the meantime my site doesn't seem to rank any higher, or at all, in Google searches. My website is here. 

Many thanks in advance,
Rachel

There are many, many components that go into ranking higher in search results. Without doing an analysis of both your site and your ranking competitors, it's hard to say what you can do.

Generally, there are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. You can further break on-page into technical SEO and content, especially keywords. The examples you give are mostly technical, but a superbly architected site alone isn't going to get you ranked in the top pages nationally or globally unless you operate in a very small niche or your competitors have terrible SEO.

For example, one of the key components is "authoritativeness." Google measures that with backlinks, which is a key component of off-page SEO.

The best advice I can give in a short space like this is to see what your high ranking competitors are doing. It would be easy to say "and do what they do," but that's only true to a point. If they have lots of keyword-optimized high-value content, you probably want to have that as well. But if they're very entrenched with certain keywords, for example, you'll want to find a point of difference. Copying theirs won't necessarily yield anything.

If you haven't already, check out Semrush or Ahrefs. They're leaders in the field and have some good introductory videos on the types of SEO and keyword analysis. They're trying to get you to buy their services, of course, but they're not wrong in what they say.

Hi @Rachillustrates,

@qosmic has covered some excellent points here.

I looked at your site - authority is something I see missing on many sites, but you certainly have enough backlinks to get your site off the ground and get some significant traffic.

You can see on the attached screenshot your "domain authority", i.e. the score Google gives your site based upon how much "authority" it has, is 13, which is more than enough for lower competition keywords.

Based on this, I have some recommendations which I think will help:

• Assess your keyword strategy: You mentioned that your products don't appear on Google searches. What keywords do you want them to rank for? Often I see ecom sites suffer a lot of "keyword cannibalization" - i.e. where two or more pages compete for the same keyword. 
  Once you map out the keywords to the pages, this can help develop your strategy - each page should have at least one keyword, and each page shouldn't overlap but complement each other. For keyword research, I recommend https://keywordseverywhere.com/ or my SEO plugin.
• Address low hanging fruit: In the early days, you're going to naturally find it harder to rank for certain keywords. For example, on your greetings card page, the term "greetings card" gets over 301000 searches/month, but it's also super competitive (as my plugin shows). Do you have any more niche products which you could aim for first?
• Add content: Each page on your website should have >300 words. Now you know your keywords, how can you add content and value to your pages so that Google has text to crawl and rank you for? 
• Focus on your collection pages: Collection pages can be the best way to rank in ecom and drive significant traffic - have you optimized these pages? You should also "internally link" to your collection pages, i.e. add links from other site pages to your collection page. 
• Ensure your search console is connected correctly: Ensure you have submitted your sitemap and requested that important pages be indexed. Below you can see a video of how to do this and the most common pitfalls I see with Squarespace websites (most of these are covered above): 

On 4/10/2023 at 5:01 AM, qosmic said:

There are many, many components that go into ranking higher in search results. Without doing an analysis of both your site and your ranking competitors, it's hard to say what you can do.

Generally, there are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. You can further break on-page into technical SEO and content, especially keywords. The examples you give are mostly technical, but a superbly architected site alone isn't going to get you ranked in the top pages nationally or globally unless you operate in a very small niche or your competitors have terrible SEO.

For example, one of the key components is "authoritativeness." Google measures that with backlinks, which is a key component of off-page SEO.

The best advice I can give in a short space like this is to see what your high ranking competitors are doing. It would be easy to say "and do what they do," but that's only true to a point. If they have lots of keyword-optimized high-value content, you probably want to have that as well. But if they're very entrenched with certain keywords, for example, you'll want to find a point of difference. Copying theirs won't necessarily yield anything.

If you haven't already, check out Semrush or Ahrefs. They're leaders in the field and have some good introductory videos on the types of SEO and keyword analysis. They're trying to get you to buy their services, of course, but they're not wrong in what they say.

Thank you for your suggestions, I will check them out 🙂

On 4/12/2023 at 7:18 AM, SEOSpace_Henry said:

Hi @Rachillustrates,

@qosmic has covered some excellent points here.

I looked at your site - authority is something I see missing on many sites, but you certainly have enough backlinks to get your site off the ground and get some significant traffic.

You can see on the attached screenshot your "domain authority", i.e. the score Google gives your site based upon how much "authority" it has, is 13, which is more than enough for lower competition keywords.

Based on this, I have some recommendations which I think will help:

• Assess your keyword strategy: You mentioned that your products don't appear on Google searches. What keywords do you want them to rank for? Often I see ecom sites suffer a lot of "keyword cannibalization" - i.e. where two or more pages compete for the same keyword. 
  Once you map out the keywords to the pages, this can help develop your strategy - each page should have at least one keyword, and each page shouldn't overlap but complement each other. For keyword research, I recommend https://keywordseverywhere.com/ or my SEO plugin.
• Address low hanging fruit: In the early days, you're going to naturally find it harder to rank for certain keywords. For example, on your greetings card page, the term "greetings card" gets over 301000 searches/month, but it's also super competitive (as my plugin shows). Do you have any more niche products which you could aim for first?
• Add content: Each page on your website should have >300 words. Now you know your keywords, how can you add content and value to your pages so that Google has text to crawl and rank you for? 
• Focus on your collection pages: Collection pages can be the best way to rank in ecom and drive significant traffic - have you optimized these pages? You should also "internally link" to your collection pages, i.e. add links from other site pages to your collection page. 
• Ensure your search console is connected correctly: Ensure you have submitted your sitemap and requested that important pages be indexed. Below you can see a video of how to do this and the most common pitfalls I see with Squarespace websites (most of these are covered above): 

This is super information, thank you so much for taking the time to look through my site and send me the above recommendations and advice - I really appreciate it! 🙂

No problem @Rachillustrates!