SEO & Google rankings

Sorry I can't help with your issue as we started on Deco natively.

But we have had a huge drop in site visits in April and May, like half our usual total and I'm not sure why.
Has anyone else had similar?

Yeah, we are doing incredibly bad on the SEO front. We put a lot of work into it in V7 and managed to get it almost respectable for a very short spell. Since google updating their policies regarding SSL ranking. We are F'ed. Our local organic ranking went from bottom of Page 1 down to Page 4 + on most searches. THIS IS HORRENDOUS!!! In some browsers with certain settings a huge red X pops up when people visit our site saying it isn't secure...Grrrrrreat.

Deco is really good about being vigilant when it comes to billing us every month, but when it comes to fixing their "HUGE!!!" SEO and SSL problem, not a care in the world. Where is the sense of urgency? This is the ONLY feature DN should be working on right now! Until this is fixed everything else is worthless.

HOW CAN DN EXPECT US TO PAY THEM, IF WE CAN'T SELL SHIRTS ON THEIR PLATFORM?!

This has been going on for years and has been brought up many many many times and DN has acknowledged that they are "looking into it" or "a solution is in development" but every release, CRICKETS.... You can perfect the platform as much as you want but if prospective buyers cant find our sites then what is the damn point?

We have literally missed out on hundreds of thousands in sales due to
A) website not being responsive
terrible SEO ranking
C) SSL certificate issues
D) Deco being 2 steps behind on feature development compared to inksoft and the big online shops

Our only choice now is to create a whole new website with the proper SSL and SEO. We will have to somehow embed the designer feature into the new site and continue to use deco for invoicing, that'll be nice and complicated, but I don't see any other option, we have to be able to compete for business, which is not happening now. Thanks Deco!

I'm hoping some folk chip in on this one with their front-line experience. Take this link for example: www.google.com.au/search?q=custom+t+shir...ceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

It's searching for the fairly generic term "custom t shirt printing" from here in Sydney. The first page of Google has 4 sites which as are all running DecoNetwork. That's excluding the ads. I asked Marino of Printlocker what he does in terms of advertising to drive users to his site and he said only SEO. No AdWords, etc. By that he means ensures his page titles are optimized, URL structure, and content on his site. They also have unique and proper meta description on each page. While this doesn't affect ranking it makes it more appealing for the user so they are more than likely to click which in the end will affect your ranking (let Google know you're site is worth visitors).

Have you used a SEO firm or are you doing it in house? Interested to know what feedback you are getting so we can look at addressing any issues identified.

There are some things you should look at doing immediately on your site to improve your ranking.

For example:

On the Printlockers home page they have their page title set as "T Shirt Printing | Custom Design Your Own Online | Australia-Wide". Your title says "Home - Paradox Screen Printing"

Printlocker have deliberately chosen words that a searcher might look for. Obviously they want to attract Australian customer so they use "Australia-Wide". But they consider that someone might be looking for "printing", "t shirt printing" "custom t shirt" "t shirt design your own", etc so they included those phrases in their website title. The end result is their Google search result looks more appealing to users which results in more and eventual higher rank:

The end result is more appealing.



Your keyword density is also quite low. If you look at your home page it records a keyword density of:

templates - 4 times
create - 4 times
products - 3 times
design - 3 times
home - 3 times

Compare this to Printlocker:

printlocker - 13 times
tshirts - 12 times
quality - 11 times
design - 11 times
order - 10 times

This results in a fairly average keyword cloud which showcases how often key words are used on your site:





Compared this to Printlocker:






The large the word, the more it appears. As you can see PrintLocker use words that people would probably be searching for. custom, create, printing, shirts, tshirts, order, quality, etc. This comes down to the pure organic text they have on their home page which is driving their top ranking.

Your site also flagged for not having keywords in your meta description. What this means is the words that your clients will most likely search for are not in your meta description which will visually effect its appear to clients. This is determined by looking at the most prominent words on your actual page and comparing them to the meta description. In your case I think it is more that the page itself is lacking content so that would be my focus.


Another good and simple test is the COPY / PASTE text test. With this test you visit your website, do Control A to select all then Control V to paste the text into Notepad or any other plain text editor. Not word that brings over images. You want text only. This shows you the level of searching, indexable text on your site which ultimately leads to people finding you.

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A good test it look at your text and ask yourself 'Am I including the words and phrases that my potential clients will be using to find me on the web?'.

DN8 certainly has tools to make website page changes easier but these are things you can do now and will help your ranking. Hope it helps.

Good points there, Brenden,

but still the SSL certificate problem is there and you didn't mention any solutions,
I believe that the SSL certificate still is more important, it does not matter how well
a site is optimized if when they click to visit the site is going to be red flagged as unsecured?

SSL is very important, I have sites that rank for keywords already, but visitors get a huge warning page that the site is not secure. I wouldn't visit a site that I received a warning from google like that. I purchased a ssl certificate from godaddy thinking I could use it on the deco site.

Yes fully agree. The poster was referring to SEO and ranking and they need to ensure they make some changes to their website to address this.

SSL is well know and as we've stated something we are working a solution for.

I have only scanned through quickly biut one thing that didn't jump out at me from the replies and comments was redirection f old pages to new. When you mention that you carried out all the recommended SEO practices, did you set up 301 redirects so that the Big G knows where the old data shifted to? Pardon me if I am asking a basic question that you took care of right at the start but a disappearing act like yours sounds as if your old content vanished and the Spiders from G didn't pick up the trail to the new version.

Thanks Brenden,

Apologizes for my outburst, but business has been slower as of late and almost all of my direct local competitors have upped their game. Some using inksoft and some using other solutions. It is no longer viable to just have a fancy online designer. We all need to be better! Better stock designs, better more intuitive designer, websites that are both mobile responsive, and have better SEO handling. That includes SSL security.

My above post was more referring to the SSL issue and as of 2014 when Google updated their policies to bump up websites with proper SSL certificates running HTTPS all the way through. All of my local competitors are running secure sites, even shops operating out of their closets. So they receive 1st priority in ranking above my shop. Google claimed that they wouldn't penalize sites without it, but isn't promoting everyone but us, a demotion? And on most browsers our sites are red-marked with an X or the info circle stating "your connection to this site is not secure", you guys have to realize how bad this is for a business, don't you? Especially a business that relies heavily on online traffic to make sales. I pay out thousands of dollars each month to operate in a real building with expensive automated equipment on a platform like deconetwork and joe schmo down the street with a 2 color ryonet silver press and a shopify store is getting more hits / calls than me because his site is safe and secure. Ouch.

What about some built-in SEO optimization functions like other platforms have? As a matter of fact, why make us code at all? I know some customers want complete control, I get it, but we should be able to make unique changes past adding pics and text to a cheesy 90's template. We can barely handle production, much less editing websites constantly to stay up with trends and keep our site in the rankings.

The drag and drop editing functionality like "wix.com" has been around since the mid-late 2000's I used to have a few pagelines enabled sites that ran off of php via wordpress and there was zero coding involved after initial install and it was mobile responsive in 2009. You simply drag your picture in and the text moves around it. Text formatting? got it! Want to add a row or a column, no problem! How about a responsive full size banner, just click here and upload images, done! Buttons? yep! Something too big or small? Just grab the corner and resize. BAM! Hit, save and your changes are live.

I installed their software to a regular old wordpress site and voilà! I could edit without code. This was 8 years ago surely there are even better solutions you could implement now. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, just find a suitable solution and license the technology. Even large corporations license a lot of their UI and UX functionality. Not everything has to be proprietary. There are so many fish-to-fry with DN and you have such a small team of developers, I don't see how you could ever beat any of your competitors to market on new features without some outside help and more forward thinking creative ideas. That is what the 2-steps behind comment was referring to. If your clients had the best software around before everyone else, your clients businesses would thrive and grow and in doing so you would also reap the rewards.

We either need to be the 1st to offer something or have the best version of it. For instance: custom ink came out with the revolutionary idea to offer campaigns, they were the first and then inksoft and then deconetwork several months later. and Customink's version is still miles ahead of DN's its way more intuitive and straightforward it also allows for multiple items. So we were not only late at getting that feature out to our clients we also have a sub-par version of the feature.

It also boils down to the little details and aestetics that make sites like those superior. For instance: On customink when you browse their stock designs they show you a mock-up on a randomly generated garment available on their catalog. Also, if you hover over it, it zooms in on a high res version on the design. We just have squares and the design stays in whatever color it was uploaded in. Boring! I know I could mock-up my own garments save and upload the mock-ups, 1-by-1 and make this happen with coding, but say I had hundreds or thousands of stock designs, do you know how long that would take? I don't want to find out, but i'm sure, a long time.

I love this platform and now with .SVG designer, it has a brighter future. But we need to be ahead of the game for once, not 2 steps behind.

Also, thanks for your suggestions on my home page. I know my keyword density is low there and, this is a change that I recently made because customers complained that my site was too "wordy" and i'm sure it is effecting my search results negatively, but i made that change about a month ago, my ranking was still bad before when there was a lot of rich text mentioning "t-shirts" "tee shirts" "screen printing" "shirt printing" several times all over my home page. I appreciate the word cloud idea, that will help dial it in better. I have a lot on my plate and it is so hard to justify paying some firm $20k to optimize my website.when I can't even have SSL or a responsive designer.

Hi,

No need for apologies! These forums are here to share ideas and I'd love to share more ideas to help any business.

We absolutely know the importance of SSL. I've been putting pressure on my side to get this moving faster but there are some technical challenges to overcome being that it is a hosted solution for all. Be assured, we are aware and working on a solution

A comment to RaymondoBoss's comment. He is absolutely right and it appears there are no redirects configured. It's not that your website rank plummeted - it's more they were completely removed from Google all together. This is because the old pages you had in your old site no longer exist which affects your ranking. For example, maybe your create your own blanks product was once www.paradox.com/customize-products but in DecoNetwork it is now www.paradox.com/create

In your URL redirects you would have needed to configure one that says if someone tries to browse to www.paradox.com/customize-products send them to www.paradox.com/create . It does what's called a 301 redirect which means when search engines like Google hit that old page instead of getting a 404 page missing error they get a 301. They update their database with the new link and your page remains in Google, and if the content is as good or better will remain the same. If you don't do this google gets a 404 which said "page doesn't exist" and deletes that page from its directory.

It's the most important thing you need to do when changing platforms or updating any website.

You can access this by Manage Website > Store Configuration ? URL Redirect

If you know your original pages I would go add these for those who may have old links.

The contrast in content - just on the homepage is stark! it is much more influential on visibility than the SSL status whose importance IS growing but isn't yet the dominant factor. It will however influence buying behaviour with your more savvy customers.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I made some progress here, I have changed the home page drastically. Adding much more rich text including more specific terms related to what we do. Checked against a word cloud generator, it is looking better, still needs more work to refine.



I also changed the page's title in the meta description to:
T Shirt Screen Printing | Custom Shirts For All Occasions | Charleston, SC - Paradox Screen Printing

Editing HTML is a PITA without a WYSIWYG editor, saving and checking the results after every change is excruciating and having to flip back to the css stylesheet to make an adjustment that is located in another section of the menu is lunacy.

The 301 redirects I believe were directed at me but meant for the OP who's thread I hijacked. Sorry Bud.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I made some progress here, I have changed the home page drastically. Adding much more rich text including more specific terms related to what we do. Checked against a word cloud generator, it is looking better, still needs more work to refine.



I also changed the page's title in the meta description to:
T Shirt Screen Printing | Custom Shirts For All Occasions | Charleston, SC - Paradox Screen Printing

Editing HTML is a PITA without a WYSIWYG editor, saving and checking the results after every change is excruciating and having to flip back to the css stylesheet to make an adjustment that is located in another section of the menu is lunacy. Maybe there's a fix for V8? Or a better method?

The 301 redirects I believe were directed at me but meant for the OP who's thread I hijacked. Sorry Bud.

Hey guys I've been having very similar problems to Padadox in regards to white hat organic google searching. My site uniformme.com.au although looks okay isn't satisfying googles search algorithm. Iv'e looked over this post since it started and attempted to make a few changes but nothing has happened. As you can see from my pictures below I have changed my meta tag description but the google search is coming up the same. Is there something I have to do with the CSS or HTML?

Any help would be appreciated!

paradoxsc wrote: Thanks for the suggestions!

I made some progress here, I have changed the home page drastically. Adding much more rich text including more specific terms related to what we do. Checked against a word cloud generator, it is looking better, still needs more work to refine.

That's huge progress and on the right track

Make sure you record the dates you make changes to your site so you can go back and check traffic changes and align that to changes you made - good and bad!