SEO for Online Store

Hello,

I have three online stores. All three are in different niches:

Site 1 : over 2000 purchased back links and about 10-15 real product review back links from blogs/online magazines. I got my first natural link for this site about 2 months ago.
Site 2: about 500 purchased back links
Site 3: No back links at all

Right now all three sites are a bit more than 6 month old and:

Site1: 140 pages indexed by google
Site 2: 160 pages indexed
Site 3: 70 pages indexed

I have tried adding few lines of product descriptions to most products in Site 1, not much yet for Site 2 and none for Site 3. (There is not much to write really as they are all online stores.)

It has been a bit more than 6 months since all three sites were launched but traffic for all three of them have been quite flat. I do see tiny increase of organic traffic and increase of indexed pages for site 1 and site 2 so I feel that those purchansed back links are not doing damage and may be helping, but I do not see traffic increase like what other people say we can expect starting from 4-6 months. Should I count that 4-6 months from the time I get the natural back links or should I count it from the day the sites were launched? I have stopped sending out products for reviews as I want to know if they're really helping and will start again when Im sure that those are good investments.

There are quite a lot of articles that talk about getting traffic for blog websites but not much for online stores. Can someone please be kind enough to share your thoughts here? Many thanks.

Jeez man, that's a lot of links for 6 months old sites.

In the beginning, things are slow in terms of indexing and ranking for new sites. With time, the sites gain inertia and you can see the effect.

You should be focusing on building high quality links.

A few authority links will do you more than these 500 or 2000 you bought.

I'd suggest creating a blog on each of the sites. This will help you post related content and help the other pages rank as well.

6 month mark is when websites usually start ranking..do you do anything else besides SEO and link building?

Bentrepreneur said:

Jeez man, that's a lot of links for 6 months old sites.

In the beginning, things are slow in terms of indexing and ranking for new sites. With time, the sites gain inertia and you can see the effect.

You should be focusing on building high quality links.

A few authority links will do you more than these 500 or 2000 you bought.

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Yeah I am totally new to this and perhaps I was trying too hard to get links a few months back. Im glad that so far I dont see any damages been done by those links (or perhaps damages are already done but I just have not yet been able to tell? all of them are still too young to have enough history to show anything) I have been sending a lot of products for free for reviews. So far I have seen good back links created from sites that get 3000 to 30000 visitors daily and I am supposed to get one from a major US newpaper's website later this month. One thing that's really annoying with sending free stuff to bloggers/magazines is that we do not always get back links created. Many of them receive the goods and disappear without even telling me what's wrong. Most of them don't even bother to reply emails as soon as they receive the items. I decided to stop sending products for review for a while and see what those 10+ links I have already got can do for my site but so far google has been slow indexing my site 1, let alone ranking. About two weeks ago number of indexed pages started to go down because google was having some issues. The pages started to come back to where it was at 14 pages of site: search results but I havent been seeing any more increase for a few days now. Kind of feeling lost and hopeless at this point...

agetmant said:

6 month mark is when websites usually start ranking..do you do anything else besides SEO and link building?

Click to expand...

Well I was using a plugin to post automatically several times a day for a few months on FB but ran out of trial a couple of weeks ago. I decided not to buy it because it was bringing me like only 10-15 visitors a day and the price is just not worth it. I did purchase FB ads a few months back and spent a few hundred dollars for that. I decided not to continue as I only got one sale from spending so much on FB ads. Never tried google adsense based on similar experience for some other websites. I noticed that my competitor gets most of their visitors from pinterest so I have been working hard on building my pinterest account by adding at least 10 pins everyday. Right now my 1 month old pinterest account has about 10k viewers per month and nearly 2000 followers. Compared to my competitor's 10million monthly viewers with only total of less than 50 pins, I think I clearly need to either pin a lot more than my current 200 or save some money to buy 45k of followers like my competitor did, or perhaps buying repins work better in this case? How the hell do people get 10 millions monthly viewers on pinterest with 50 almost all the same pins only on pinterest anyways? The cooler thing is that my competitor follows no one even if they have 45k of follower themselve. It's magical!

fused6216 said:

I'd suggest creating a blog on each of the sites. This will help you post related content and help the other pages rank as well.

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Yeah I have read a lot about how adding blogs will drive traffic to your site but my research tells me otherwise. For example my competitor writes no blog and their product descriptions are usually 1-2 lines long with repeated words but they still do get like 5k visitors since their 5th month and 10-12k traffic each day since around the 12th month (I use Semrush). Their site is 2 years old now. How did they do that??

Hey!

I do run an online store, its a brand of mine. We have been selling goods since last 2016. Since August of 2018 i had been doing SEO of my store and I had been gaining revenue since march 2019 properly.

These were the steps I followed:-

1) I checked in GSC for the keywords i am already ranking for.
2) punched sites of competitors in Ahrefs and saw the keywords they were ranking for. Made out a list.
3) also i figured out if they were ranking product pages or collection pages. In my niche new category of products keep coming up. So we can always make new collection and rank it.
4) instead of focusing on what i could rank, i made collection pages for new product categories coming up.
5) its a large store, so i siloed it and did other technical seo.
6) each collection page has content of about 700-2000 words, targeting the medium competition keyword and LSIs. Onpage seo has been done in accordance with Backlinko's onpage guide.
7) i had also been building links to the store. Diversity and web2s. Recently I had purchased PBNs as well from Finn and Hetneo.
8) Rinsing, Learning and repeating.


Learnings so far:-
1) yes less guides talk abt ecom seo but the principles remain same.
2) seo needs to be slow, also if you are a fiesf timer, its even slower. You are learning a lot while trying to rank your pages
3) Good Onpage helps a ton. Also some pages used to rank without any work others would not even rank with a lot of onpage and offpage work. ( Same difficulty of keywords ).

Let me know of you have more doubts. If you are comfy, you can PM me the link to your store and maybe then I could help you even more. I also have @WebMinati as my mentor, who has helped me learn seo and not to make dumb mistakes in desperation to rank.

It's a good strategy to send out products for reviews. Why do you doubt if it's effective? You need to send products to influencers who are not very big. If an influencer write a review for your product on his blog, there will be a high quality backlink to your site, right? And have you set up affiliate program on your store? If not, you'd better to set it up so that you can invite influencers to join your affliliate program.