SEO disaster or admin error?

[Maury Markowitz]

I *think* I have the search engine statistics collection set up correctly - there's nothing I really have to do for Google etc, right?

 

I also have Google Analytics turned on, and I can see it tracking my movement through the site in the realtime page.

 

And finally, I checked Google Webmaster tools, which reports "no problems" with my site.

 

Yet in spite of this, according to the Presta stats, there have been exactly zero search engines on my site.

 

Is there a step I missed during setup?

 

[urecheatu007]

Hi, did you submit your sitemap in google webmaster tools? Of course after enabling the gsitemap module and generating one.

Also, generate robots.txt (SEO & URL-s tab in admin) to steer the bots clear off dead-ends and private zones of the site.

[Maury Markowitz]

Hi, did you submit your sitemap in google webmaster tools? Of course after enabling the gsitemap module and generating one.

Also, generate robots.txt (SEO & URL-s tab in admin) to steer the bots clear off dead-ends and private zones of the site.

 

I did submit a site map, and made a robots.

 

The issue is not "few hits", it's "zero hits". Zero is not the same as "a small number".

 

I suspect the stats aren't working at all, but I can't figure out how to test that theory.

[urecheatu007]

You can use Awstats if it is available (depends on the hosting, usually cPanel has it enabled) or you can see in webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-stats)

[Maury Markowitz]

Webmaster tools reports:

 

"No new messages or recent critical issues."

 

Lets say Google was punishing me because I had nothing but duplicated content (I don't), or my site was slow, or some other no-no that Google doesn't like. Would that show up here?

Edited November 1, 2013 by Maury Markowitz (see edit history)

[Maury Markowitz]

Urech, thank you for that hint on Awstats! That turned out to be simpler than Google and much more informative.

 

It turns out we're getting more traffic than I thought we would, about 1500 uniques a month. They tend to view many pages per visit too, which is a good sign.

 

But even more interesting were the search results. Almost every time someone got to our page from search, they were searching for our page! I saw "as solar", "as solar canada", etc. In fact, in the top 25 search terms, only FOUR were product related searches!

 

The good news is that those four terms are ones we consider important. The bad news is they account for a total of only a dozen clicks.

 

Many of these should put us on page 1, like "off grid solar ontario". There's maybe 10 companies doing that. But we're way down on page 3 - all sorts of US companies come up above us.

 

Now I have to figure out why.

[urecheatu007]

Well, at least is a start. I don't know how old is your site, but have you entered the meta title and meta description for the categories and products?

[Trip]

I recommend using better titles for you pages. For example title of your homepage is "as solar canada" 2 times. Use the 70 or what letters you have for your titles and repeat important words in the (product) descriptions.

You don't use title tags lists, strong tags or whatever in your product descriptions to give google a hint what really matters on your page. Some product descriptions are one sentence short!! Remember "content is king"

Most product categories are named unspecific. Kits, product, inverters, batteries and so on with very week title tags. Use solar kits, solar batteries etc.pp. or even more specific ones. These are very important indicators and you should put a lot of thinking into these details and I am sure you will get more out of the page when you improve it.

Best regards, Trip