Expert site feedback required please

[ChrisAntoniou]

Hi all,

I would really appreciate some feedback on a site i have developed for a client. To give you a little background, we sell cheese and other associated products online. The site has been online for about a year or so but SEO only really implemented in the last few months.

The site visitors are low at the moment which is leading to low sales of course

I would love some feedback on the areas listed below. My goal is to improve visitor numbers, visibility of the site and sales. Not much then...

• Site design
• Usability
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Any other feedback / advice you would be kind enough to offer

The site address is: http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk

Thanks in advance, i look forward to reading your responses!

Chris.

[SEODinosaur]

Hi Chris,

The on-page factors are based on the keywords you want to target for each page. You can optimize them here.

Your site does not have many backlinks, I would recommend building a blog on your site with content that others will want to link to. The key here is to get traffic to your site that can learn from it, get entertained by it, or simply just find what they are looking for. I would also recommend getting involved with others in the same or similar niche. Follow them, interact with them, buy them a drink, and then ask them to help you share your article or contribute to it.

The design of your site looks good to me but I don't eat cheese. Unfortunetly there is no set it and forget it when it comes to design... It's more of a test it and then test it again to ensure that its converting. I like to use visualwebsiteoptimizer.com (A/B Testing) for this.

I also noticed that you don't have canonicals set up... I would recommend adding canonical codes to your pages.

Hope this helps.

[TheeDigital]

Chris,Donnie hit your question right out of the park, but one suggestion that I always suggest to all of my clients is spend some money and become a vendor/affiliate for other sites/companies.

For example, with your company Why don't you see if you can get a review on the food channel?  Or how about parterning with some wedding companies to provide wedding cakes?  This will allow you to get a link on your website and also help you sell orders.Also maybe looking into other online wine review sites.  Gary V's winelibrary.com springs right to mind.I hope that helps.

[peterthistle]

In terms of design, I'd say the site looks pleasant but not immediately engaging/interesting/exciting, there's no strong call to do anything. The gray on gray logo text at upper left is weak. I'd think about adding a strong tagline, or something else that sells the product right away, maybe a funny/informative 'top ten reasons cheese is awesome' or 'five reasons you need to know more about cheese' or some such.

[YvonneMartin]

I like your website but this quick changes can be added to already great suggestions by others

• Your site is simple but a bit bland ( white plate with white rice ).
• Its been scientifically proven that orange makes you hungry so you many restaurants use orange and I will suggest that too.
• When it comes to eCommerce I am a fan of a simple website but loud call to action button and super sharp images. (Orange buttons for add to basket and checkout). The yellow at the top may be orange
• Cross sell : Customer who bought this also bought.

[ChrisAntoniou]

Hi Donnie,

Thanks for your feedback, you make some very good points. Backlinks is a real issue at the moment so that's my next area of focus, the traffic to the site is too low at the moment to begin to draw conclusions from. I'll also take on board you suggestion of A/B testing and try out different versions of some of the key pages.

I actually thought i had canonical setup as i followed instructions on shopify website. How did you check to see if it was in place? Didi you also check on one of the product pages for canonical as well as a generic page such as 'about us'?

Thanks again for your help

Chris

[ChrisAntoniou]

Hi,

Thanks for your help. Wedding cakes is certainly something we have in the pipeline and we're just in the process of revamping our wedding cake service. I will certainly have a look at connecting and working with review sites.

Thanks for your help

Chris

[ChrisAntoniou]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your help. Your point about the site not being engaging is extremely valid and one that we had missed due to being so involved with the technicalities of it. Thanks for flagging this up and we'll be putting it right very soon. I also love you suggestions about top 10 lists and incorporating humour into the mox to make the content more engaging.

Thanks again

Chris

[ChrisAntoniou]

Hi Yvonne,

Thanks for your feedback and your colour suggestions. I also like the idea of an orange call to action button and add to basket button so i'll be speaking to the client about implementing these soon. The cross sell suggestion is great but would require a paid subscription to implement so ideally i' would like to get more visitors to the site before being able to justify additional cost of adding this.

Thanks for you help, very much appreciated.

Chris

[SEODinosaur]

HI chris,

I checked http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk/ and I did it in the SEOmoz report card: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

Just put the keyword you want to rank for and for which page. it will give you back a grade with instructions on correcting anything that is not best practice.

[ChrisAntoniou]

Thanks Donnie,

I'm still a little confused about how I would best make use of these reports. To give you an example, we have a product page for Isle of Mull Cheddar (very nice cheese!).

http://www.internationalcheese.co.uk/products/isle-of-mull-cheddar

Ideally, i would like this page optimised for keywords such as "isle of mull cheddar" and "buy isle of mull cheddar" and "buy cheddar from isle of Mull"

I may be going about this in the wrong way but it would be difficult to get all those keywords in the H1 tags and in the description and the title tags and make them bold etc as suggested by the reports. This leads to one report of A and 2 reports showing an F grade.

Should i only be picking one of those keywords? If so then the traffic numbers are relatively low for any given single phrase, i need traffic from a combination of phrases to make it worth while optimising the page.

Any guidance you can offer would be appreciated.

Chris

[SEODinosaur]

Ideally it's best to go after 1 keyword per page 2 max.  This is one of the reasons for it...

In your case I would target the keyword "isle of mull cheddar" it has the best search volume using: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

| isle of mull cheddar | 37 | 46 | 170 | 36 | 140 |
|
| buy isle of mull cheddar | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|
| buy cheddar from isle of Mull | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |

[ChrisAntoniou]

I see Just tried that out and my local (UK) search terms are a little higher as expected. Seems odd that no one would be searching for "buy isle of mull cheddar" Does it just round down to 0 if the number is quite low?

In your example, would 46 and 36 be numbers worth bothering with if you were optimising this website? I know this is treading dangerously into the "how do i pick the right keywords" territory, so i'll keep it just to this particular example

When you consider that there are over 200 cheeses on the site, is 40 and 50 searches per month worthwhile considering i'll only get a fraction of that traffic if i make it to number 1.

Thanks again Donnie!