E-commerce Platforms and Seo Doubts
-
Hello There,
I plan to launch my online store with products soon via one of the saas hosted based platforms like shopify & bigcommerce.
The issue is am trying out to see how this works for us. But then simultaneously we would work towards seo efforts to bring in relevant traffic too.
Later once we grow and I decide to change the entire website based on custom design etc so that means again all the seo work has to be re-done?
How can I avoid this since I have already invested capital and time in building the current saas hosted website and its almost ready to roll out.
Can someone advice the best way forward and possibly a relevant solution
Thanks
Aditya
-
In my opinion, go with Magento or BigCommerce.
Pick one and stick with it as migrating to either a custom or another cart will be extremely expensive and time consuming. Your cost for migration depending on how big your store is can cost the same as the custom cart itself!
In terms of SEO your best options are those two. Shopify and carts like Volusion are not that great at SEO.
I really believe you can suffice on platforms like Magento and BigCommerce mainly because this is what they do. In terms of all in one carts like BigCommerce, you don't have to worry about backend problems and always have some sort of support.
Magento while extremely customizable you will probably run into problems and need to pay for support or customization.
If you have the budget go with Magento since you can customize everything and it will look similar to what you consider a custom cart. Sometimes these custom carts end up being more costly and troublesome than you would like.
-
Hello Chad,
Thanks for the detailed response. I really appreciate your point of view. At this point of time I am trying to take an offline medium of selling products and create the online store for it. The offline sales model is being converted to an online model and we would eventually only reply on the online sales model.
In india we set forth ahead with saas based hosting model - the problem is that I don't yet know what response is going to be like. We are going to be niche in our segment and not provide a host of goods to ur consumers unlike a regular e-commerce store.
The problems comes when I suddenly decide that since now am getting traction I would like to give a better overall experience to my users and then comes the bitter part of it.
So according to what you just suggested , I should then move ahead with one solution in mind and keep that constant throughout and rather make smaller changes there after.
Another issue is on the hosted environment I can never get back the design / codes etc only the data later on in csv values which is all the more useless.
That would be again a re-build of the entire store online if I decide to get my own open source system in place.
I would also like to ask whether an e-commernce store intended towards a niche segment should be based on some open source app like magento etc and go ahead since i dont have time , resource skills and financial help to build a custom one my self.?
At this point of time I certainly dont have the above hence the saas hosted model was the choice. Tomorrow I may have the revenue to offer a really expansive model and better experience to my end users what then?
This is really scary - can you suggest the best way out
Thanks
Aditya
-
This would be a mistake; you don't every really want to try and adapt a project down the road. You can do it, but it will be painful! The biggest investment really is the time you put into the project. Right now time might be your friend and you have plenty of it. But once things start rolling time can become a valuable commodity to your project time lines and task activities set with certain cost. You'll have to start buying time and maybe hire someone to handle some other task you cannot do on your own to solve upgrading your website.
*I suggest planning the scope of your content, product paths, and list them on a white board or piece of paper first.
*List things (in human code) you want and would like to have and come up with a date to upgrade. This could be options, graphical appeal, and many other site usability issues.
*You'll find this to be more manageable and goals set for yourself and business.
I once tried to change the design of a website I ran years ago and it was a very hard process, because I had to keep up with content development, adding custom pages, doing pictures, videos, custom landing pages, competition analysis, link building, content syndication, social bookmarking and other email campaign filter programs and much more.
The SEO part of adapting your site design can also cause some problems too. Typically you want to avoid sudden changes to the complete layout and look of your e-commerce store. You can certainly make small changes overtime (aka upgrades like framework, style of elements and navigation structure).
*If you do decided to redo anything avoid deleting directories, or files that Google has crawled; instead just use 301 redirects to avoid missing pages. Google can be weird. I remember when I launched SecurityCameraWarehouse dot com website, Google took interest in my discount cctv dvr page and other similar ones and ranked them. At the time I decided I wanted to offer a better page that targeted a different keyword, and different design. I actually ended up doing that for like 30 pages and it caused my website trouble. Like Google eventually deindexed my website. This was like 6 years ago!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page optimised and SEO ranking
Hi SEO is new to myself and I'm still trying to get my head round it. My friend and myself run a DJ company in our spare time but we are desperately trying to rank higher to increase our visibility. we have worked hard on our page optimisation and scoring high 90's, we'd love to invest in someone to do it, but simply dont have that kinda cash at the moment. I'm aware that some pages need meta description and alt image text, which is what I'm now working on, but even other sites with lower percentage are ranking higher. is this due to recent changes and google not ranking our pages? Will our ranking improve over time and how long should it be before we see any changes.
Branding | | Bluice0 -
What is the best SEO friendly way to combine two websites.
I have two websites, eg: widgets.com - sells expensive widgets as gifts everydaywidgets.com - sells cheap widgets for everyday use. I would like to combine them both under the widgets.com domain name, because its easier to run the SEO campaign for one rather than two. But i still want two different product collections, and two different sites. widgets.com is by far the larger of the two sites so my current thought is to have that the main landing site, and have a button at the top to take the user to widgets.com/everydaywidgets where they have a similar but different site, and different products. I can set this all up no problem with the correct 301 redirects from everydaywidgets.com, but is it SEO friendly? Does anyone know of a real world example of a business doing this? Cheers
Branding | | SEOhmygod0 -
Brand Name Cratering - possible N-SEO or Black Hat Attacks
Hello to the Moz Community, Let me start by saying, we are not an SEO company. We are the in-house agency for our parent corp, and the 7 companies in their portfolio. We manage their PPC and other digital items. None of the companies use an SEO company. Their "SEO strategy" is to not have one. They internally post on their own Social Media account, their own Blog, and send out their own Press Releases (which we help write the copy sometimes). One of the accounts encountered a very bizarre, and serious ranking problem around Dec 25th-30th. In the past when you Googled the company's brand name you would get 5-6 pages of internal content show up at the very Top of the results. Pages like Home Page, Blog Home, Contact Us, About Us, Client Reviews Page, etc. (core pages). There were then several other non core pages that would show up in the Top 20 results (my recollection is they controlled about 12-14 of the Top 20 results for the brand name). Unfortunately, around Dec. 25th this all cratered. And the only internal page that would display when you Googled the brand name was the Home Page (totally gone; even checking 100 rankings deep). So the question we have spend weeks trying to figure out is, what in the heck happened? We got together with the company to find out any and all possible changes or things could of happened since the first of December, which could have contributed to this cratering. Here is what we found: #1 The company made an acquisition of a smaller competitor in 2014. Around Dec. 10th they sent out a great press release announcing the acquisition. Since the press release was involving someone in the TV/radio advertising agency industry it was very popular (the best release they ever put out). The release was picked up by over 100 high page rank local TV stations, all across the U.S. (along with the normal companies that pick up online releases). The headline of the release was "Brand Name Reviews Assets of TV Ad Agency Competitor." Most of the stations that picked it up placed "Do not follow" links, but it was still an amazingly successful release. #2 Around Dec. 15th this 8 year old company received their first negative "client review." The review was not from a real client though, it was posted on Rip-Off report by a fake client, the Internet Mafia (reputation management co.) or a former employee/contractor. The posting was deliberately optimized. The URL and the Title Tag contained all sort of words like "Reviews" "Complaints" the "Domain Name," and the Company Brand Name (whoever did it, knew what they were doing). #3 Towards the end of December and into January the company received 6-8 bizarre root domain links. The links show to of come from domains that were just registered in November/December. Yet the domain name was already voluntarily forfeited by the beginning of January. Google Webmaster Tools is still showing the links, but when you go to the domain "all it shows is "cannot be found." WHOIS has screenshots of all of them though. Here is one: http://www.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history/lizardeyephoto.com/ The domains themselves had nothing to do with the type of business this client account operates in, but the information after the / contained partial pieces of the company brand name. Here is an example: http://www.martygraveyard.com/buying-inexpensive-vehicles-at-on-line-community-automobile-auctions/ I personally don't think 6-8 new root domains could crater a website with 290 root domains (and 1500 links), but maybe those domains/sites are somehow "cloaked;" and they are actually showing bad information to the bots/spiders, but us humans can't see it? I honestly am not educated enough on the subject to know... #4 In mid January, three of the brand name pages returned: Home Page, About Us, Blog Home. However, the other pages are nowhere to be found. The companies Contact Us page, Client Reviews page (which used to rank 2nd), and all of the other Top 20 pages are totally gone. They are still indexed if you do a "site:brandname.com" search, but they won't show up when you Google the brand name. #5 Search results are almost identical with Bing and Google. So, here is the million dollar question: was our client's Brand Name deliberately attacked via an N-SEO Black Hat attack, in an effort to get it their internal pages to drop out of the rankings? Or did Google and Bing incorrectly issue some sort of partial penalty on certain pages due to the amazing success (and them believing it was some sort of link buying scheme) of the Press Release that was sent out at the beginning of December? If you read to the bottom of this, I am grateful for you doing so. Thanks in advance for anyone who tries to help us and our in-house client. Jake
Branding | | SBIM-Jake0 -
Looking to hire an SEO/Reputation manager
We are looking to hire an SEO/reputation manager or firm to complement our existing marketing efforts. The goal is to take up the front page of Google on 3 branded keywords. We will create the content but need someone to come up with the strategy on what content to create, where to post it and how to link to get it moved to the front page of Google. We went through MOZ's recommended list of service providers but would rather work with an individual freelancer than a large SEO company. Please advice where we can find such consultant or email [email protected] to apply. Include your experience and some samples of projects you have worked on. ################## UPDATE ################# Here's the keywords' difficulty based on MOZ's serp analysis tool and top 10 ranking pages for the first term http://i.imgur.com/zqktjuU.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LB7i4yz.jpg
Branding | | vmotuz0 -
What To Do With Content From SEO Perspective
With all the SEO focus now on creating and sharing unique and high quality content I ensure that is exactly what we do, however... All we seem to do is add this content to our blog with some good quality images to break up the text. Our articles are at least 800 words in length and they are always informative... Once added to our blog we share the content across the 'big 3' social platforms (Facebook, Twitter & Google+) I also do a little bit of 'internal linking' from the blog post to a relevant page on the main website - the blog is actually part of the website! So, my question is... in light of the recent 'guest post' scaremongering and the fact that every blog owner I seem to 'reach out' wants payment should I look at Web2.0 platforms such as; Squidoo Hubpages Quora Triberr ...and the many other similar sites that exist to add some of our content to? Also what about Article Directories? Ezinearticles GoArticles I know this seems like a 'throwback' to 2-3 years ago but I just wondered whether the above still have any credence? Obviously I would be very selective with regard to 'back linking' and would ensure that I vary the anchor text - to be honest, as much as a link would be useful, it's more about brand exposure ... Any advice \ recommendations would be greatly appreciated! Andy
Branding | | TomKing0 -
Can anyone advice us on how we can improve on our SEO ranking?
Hi, We are the leading home cleaning and maintenance company in Singapore. We are trying our best to go online to expand our business. The thing is we are weak in internet marketing and we need to get some traffic to our website. Can expert advice us on how we can improve on our Google ranking? Our site:
Branding | | chanel27
http://www.absolutesolutions.com.sg0 -
List Quick and Dirty places to seo-tag images/content for new brands
I'm helping a new brand (service industry) to try to dominate the first page for their own name. They have a name that also exists in another state AND a negative Yelp review which (shows up #4, whilst they show up #1 on google unpersonalized search). Aside from Linkedin/Facebook/twitter, what are good places to Tag Images and have them show up under the search for this company's name. This is a picture/heavy industry (jewelry) and I'm looking to create profiles on several sites that would immediately show up if I tag the content properly. Are quora/pinterest good choices? I need to grab-bag as many properties as possible. Secondary question: would these properties on quora etc, respond well to exact-match anchor text links to shoot them past the negative yelp rating that is showing up #4 for their brand?
Branding | | ilyaelbert0 -
Benefit of Historical PDF Press Articles for SEO
Hello Is there SEO benefit to keep PDF news articles from 2/3 years ago live on our website? We have a page displaying positive press/pr articles to our visitors. Some of the articles are now from 2009 and I am unsure if these should remain for SEO benefit or should they be taken down or archived? Are they good content? Are they read by Search Engines? If they are old do the count against us with Search Engines? Look forward to some advice Gary McDonald
Branding | | DonaldRussell0