SEO companies for OpenCart - ideas, discussion

I have my store online now with opencart for ~> 6 months.

I have SEO URLs, meta tags that include description, keywords, the microdata schema http://schema.org/docs/gs.html , SEO URLS, and Title that match the H1 in the set-up.

I tested the website with a couple of the free seo checkers:
http://seositecheckup.com/
http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
Using those tools they say I have too many keywords but that is part of the problem. One of the keywords that shows 11% density is because I have a lot of brands that seem good to include those words.
Example: Products are case or pole with the same manufacturer.
So I have
Bg Case
Bg Pole
And
True case
True Pole
etc. etc. for a lot of different manufactures. So what we end up with is the keywords "pole" and "case" having a lot of keyword density.

Beyond that I score pretty well with SEO marks with a few other sites that give SEO 'scores'.

So is the answer to hire a SEO company?
Does the keyword density cause a big impact?
Has anyone had good success with SEO companies and Opencart? Was it worth the $$? What types of things did they do? Etc?

I have read a few posts on here about how to optimize for SEO (including one of the latest by labeshops) but I am to the point that I need to see how we can get some sales back as we have dropped to fewer then a few a month.
Any thoughts are welcome.
Mike

First off, take the advice of tools with a grain of salt - they don't always read things correctly and aren't always right. SEO is a moving target - I'm constantly refining things, reading, taking webinars, etc, to learn more.

I've never hired an SEO company, but I guess it depends on what you want to hire them for. I feel you can do everything yourself and I prefer to as I feel it gives me more control. But of course if you don't have the time, hiring someone to help can be a good plan. I would honestly put the money into hiring an advertising/marketing agency over an SEO firm.

I would NEVER hire a company to create backlinks as 99% of the time, they are links that can actually ruin your rankings as they tend to be on low quality sites. And google is penalizing sites that suddenly get a ton of backlinks.

We all struggle with sales from time to time - if you need to increase them fast, I suggest trying PPC which I'm getting ready to do myself. SEO is a very slow process - it can take months for your rankings to change. Only 1 of my stores is really ranking the way I want it to - I'm working on my other stores. Some sites are easier to rank for than others of course and not knowing the niche of your store, I cannot comment on that.

PPC, for us at least, is almost $2 per click to be on the top of google (the last time I looked).

I would honestly put the money into hiring an advertising/marketing agency over an SEO firm.

I have thought of adding an ad to a few magazines that deal with what we sell but the magazines are going away or their advertisement costs are pretty hight up in price. Even though I might look into them again just to update my knowledge of costs.

What is your knowledge of how much ad space costs? Or better you do you know of any good advertising/marketing agencies that wouldn't mind just chatting with a perspective client and can tell me what they can offer. I talked to one SEO company, I'm a nice person, BUT I laughed right in the phone when they gave me the "what we do for your" and then told me the monthly price. I had to hang up as I couldn't keep my composure. ($500 / month for what I basically have done already = Titles, keywords, microdata, and submitting to search engines via their free 'list with us' pages -- Seeing an ad for our business in a magazine three times a year would be much more worth it to me.)

Mike

I used to be the art director of an ad agency (pre internet days...yes, I'm old lol).

Any decent agency will work within your budget to determine the best way to market your products in your niche. Not knowing your niche, I really cannot give you a lot of suggestions, but to do it yourself, just contact the publications or websites you think would fit your niche and ask for their rate kit. Rates are going to depend on a lot of factors including their distribution and reach, but you should be able to get a small ad about business card size for $200 or so. Most publications will give you a discount for multiple ads run thru the year - ask for their editorial calendar to see what the best issues will be for you to advertise in.

If you cannot do the ad yourself, check fivrr or your local community college and see if you can hire a graphic designer to create it for you. Students often will create ads for cheap in order to build up their portfolios - I did this a lot in high school and those jobs actually got me the job with the ad agency though I never got around to going to art school

I haven't tried PPC either though am thinking about it. I have tried Facebook ads and haven't seen any results in it - picked up a few extra fans and a bit of traffic, but no increased sales.

Check with your hosts too - a lot of times they have free coupons they can pass to you for $50 towards your first Google or Yahoo campaign, etc.

PPC works, but it can cost you a lot of money if you're not careful when preparing your ads!

You have to make sure that your ad is not too vague otherwise you may have people clicking through (and costing you money) who will never buy your product. For example, if you only sell Red Widgets, don't have an ad saying "Lowest Price For Widgets", because people looking for Green and Blue Widgets are also likely to click.

Also, the landing page has to be enticing enough to persuade them to part with their money. Don't send them to your home page where they will have to search for your product all over again.

cool_sean wrote:I have also faced same problem of keyword density in my website. But, I have hired a reputed SEO company for online promotion of my website and now I am getting sufficient traffic on my website. This also helped to avail increased sales for my website. So I will suggest you to hire any reputed SEO agency and I'm sure they will increase the sale on your website.

cool_sean,

What does your keyword density look like now? what percentage? Also what did they do? Did you tell you?

Mike

DO NOT hire an SEO company.

They will hose you hundreds of dollars for simple simple things you can do in a couple hours. Most of them are NOT skilled, have no modern SEO knowledge, and have no concept of semantic web. Many handfuls more use "greyhat" techniques...they say "we are not blackhat" but they are close enough to still wreck your site rank in a matter of days.

Here are the 4 simple rules to SEO in 2015:
- incorporate full schema.org and clean urls everywhere on every page
- write good content that includes relevant natural language (make good LSI)
- make your site clean, fast, mobile, and secure SSL (everywhere)
- Forget all the other 500 rules that people tell you

Here is all the help you need:
- http://searchengineland.com
- http://moz.com
- http://www.seobook.com
- http://webmasters.stackexchange.com
- http://www.keywordspy.com
- http://www.semrush.com
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
- http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets



PPC is different -- when it gets into adwords and things, look to a marketing agency based in the USA, UK, or Germany. Stray away from all the amateurs and look for a firm that has big clients too. Ask them to check in weekly with performance reports, changelogs, and general thoughts on momentum.

I agree with not hiring a SEO company no one cares about your products as much as you do and they will try anything including Bad practises so you part with your money. You can see by the people saying use a reputable company but only ever posting once from India.

I also have a problem with Keyword density on my site with my most dense Keywords being "ADD TO CART" any way to fix this would be nice.

With PPC I find it very effective but on my campaigns I sometime have hundreds of adds set up focusing keywords and landing pages. You can make as many adds as you like so if there is a Keyword you think is good make an add just for that keyword and make sure it is pointed to a strong landing page.

Yes, after 7 years of providing clients with SEO services - it really upsets me that 90% of my clients have paid extortionate fees of anything up to £1000+ a month for SEO services only to feel let down. They come to me and I discover and show them that very little if any work has been done at all for these peoples/businesses websites and they have been paying for the pleasure, and their faces/reactions say a thousand words as I am sure you can imagine or have experienced yourself, these companies need to be stopped as from the comments above it is perfectly understandable that you all feel this way about outsourcing your SEO.

One of my clients has invested over £10,000 in SEO in the past 2 years using two other SEO service companies and their business not only made a loss overall due to this heavy investment but they have on a personal level been unable to sleep at night for months, which pretty much says it all. They feel embarrassed to say the least! Baffled by technical science and thought they were signing up for a good service, I am not sure if these SEO companies have any humanity at all, it is sickening.

Everyone always says that content is KEY, but if your own website does not conform to a wide range of standards in terms of coding and many others, off-page link building efforts will be hampered - notice that very few mention this fact (as they don't offer the service). Yes the content is of importance as is some of the general coding tags, but there is so much more in the background coding to put into the mix. So many companies simply refuse to touch another web designer/developers code that none of them offer the full spectrum service, they just want to change your meta tags, header tags, page titles, alt tags and link title tags. So Opencart covers most of these aspects and there are extensions to help along the way - but the thing they are all missing is making sure that not only the code is all error free - but that ACCESSIBILITY STANDARDS are adhered to - my team of developers fix this and before any off-page backlink building - this gives organic SEO a really good boost alone. The good thing about Opencart is there are many developers to bridge these gaps - just need one to code the accessibility standards into their SEO package extensions.

It is no wonder that so many businesses opt to learn more about SEO then employ an in-house member of staff that can be monitored, sadly however, they may only be able to perform the basics and not adapt the code correctly to meet today's web standards unless they are highly skilled and experienced in web development too, if this is the route you choose - get an SEO expert and Web Developer in one, but one who really knows their stuff, but again that will cost you in terms of salary!

To do it yourself you need to do your research, it's not just about cramming in the keywords, you need to ensure you are making an informed decision on your keyword choices for searches local to your geographic target market and that potential visitors are actually going to find you based on those search terms (keywords), then you need to ensure you put them in the proper placements within your websites code and content. Ensure you have your social media integrated, your Facebook OG and Twitter V Cards and that you have validated them and your backlinks are following suit and from relevant sites.

If you are worried you are being ripped off - ask me and I will give you an honest response backed up with reports that you can understand, you can then make an informed decision as to whether you wish to take on a different SEO provider or look into learning it for yourself, (my services are optional of course and my 50 strong team are stacked out with work so space for new clients is limited).

Just remember:
No-one can guarantee you a top of page 1 position for your website, unless of course it's Google themselves (who do not offer an SEO service), they want you to pay for the Adwords Pay Per Click advertisements at the top and down the side of the search results, so they will regularly change the way they index websites in their directory/results to craftily force you to pay for their advertising service, therefore your website will always experience movement up and down in the results (hence why no-one can guarantee you top of page 1 results), a website needs to be strong in its web status to hold fast throughout these search engine "algorithym updates". The internet is just one big marketing playground and too often the "big boys" are getting rich making others die trying!

This does not mean that SEO should be ignored after all a natural (organic) position in the search results saves lots of money in PPC advertising, which is simply a short-term fix and many find they pay out more in advertising than they profit each month from using this service.

There ARE hundreds of factors to proper SEO and it IS a long term process, everything needs to be natural and relevant or you face your website being blacklisted and totally disappearing altogether, but you should not need to sign into a long term contract - 3-4 months is acceptable then you should be able continue with a 1 month notice to quit, take a break and start again when your budget suits - or just to see what happens to your website if you stop SEO for a while, (if it starts dropping off, you need more SEO).

You should always allow 3 months of SEO work to see movement of your website in the search results, so please do be patient. However if you have an SEO Service provider that actually properly corrects your code initially, then works on the general on-page SEO and off-page link building, you will see movement much faster, me and my team have been playing with sites for years testing what works and what doesn't and certain tweaks really make a massive difference to the speed at which your website ranks.

Some websites however.......may benefit better from a full re-write - now again.....I hear you screaming in your mind.......yeah, yeah another way to con more money out of my business.....and I have no doubt some companies most likely do just that. Always get them to provide proof as to why your website needs to be rebuilt. For Opencart users you just need to ensure that your code is conforming to the relevant standard or consider an upgrade on the version - to make a positive difference as the search engines lean toward current coding standards over dated coding practices.

Some of my clients do not want to pay for a website rebuild, as a result I refuse to say that SEO services will provide good, positive results. The full picture needs to be there to progress efficiently or they are paying for a service that will not produce the results they expect. Its an honest approach, the type that you really should look for in your chosen SEO service provider, (some of us do care) and please do insist on receiving regular reports if you use an SEO company - monthly will suffice to update on links built and website changes made and you should get a weekly ranking report to see where your website sits in the search results - and it should be explained to you so you understand the information you are being given.

I hope this makes sense and has helped some of you website owners out there!! I have my own Opencart store and am thoroughly enjoying playing with the SEO and monitoring the changes in rankings for thousands of products, taking responsibility of your own SEO where you can is always a good thing to keep some form of control and certainly look at the links in the post above they are very helpful!

glennmaxewell wrote:Self SEO is not so well compared to SEO Company experts, so you need find best SEO Company in Chennai for upgrade your business through online. If anyone need seo companies in Chennai contact us (removed) for best results.

infinix - arent you those annoying mail spammers that flood everyone daily? http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=129778

"Greetings of the day, i am DAVID (fake name) lead top manager SEO tech executive (fake job). We are a team of 200+ employees (fake company) that have worked with over 3000 companies (fake number). I thought you would like to know why your site ------- (amateur script) is not performing. We can get you to #1 position in Google (no you cant) Blah blah blah"

Yes those are spammers, even blindly spamming the same ad twice in this thread.

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Said that, in general, there are 3 components to placing well to search engines.

Usually the SEO wannabe will read a number of sites. He'll read he's meant to minify resources, to re-compress images to optimum, to adopt SSL and in general be high on PageSpeed and YSlow.
He'll also read about the importance of putting keywords here and there, H2 and H3 tags in perfects spots and so on.

Really, 90% of the online tutorials about SEO say this.

People shall waste a lot of money on this, just to discover how they moved from page #40 to #35.


The real truth? Open a number of super-popular websites, a la Stack Overflow, some very famous blogs and so on.
Look at the sources: they are generally terrible. Not optimized. Not sprite-fied. They'll have H1, H2, H3 etc. all messed up. On PageSpeed or YSlow they could easily rank well below your little site.
This alone shows 90% of the SEO tutorials on the net are worthless, they are mainly copy paste cheap marketing stuff often posted to convince you to subscribe to some newsletter.

The real truth? It's some hard numbers. Domain rank and page rank and frequent updates. If your website becomes an authority in a certain niche and the right pages become an authority about a certain topic then you'll slowly (months) rank up. In this regard, a well made marketing campaign brings in far more results than the equivalent spent in SEO consultants.
Those #1-#5 ranking websites did not become famous just because somebody placed a couple of words in certain places and a proper H1-H3 structure, but because many people and third party websites talk about them and link them.

How do you get known then? SEO can help you but it's NOT a substitute for YOUR work. You have to put in that "something special" that slowly makes your site famous.

Even AdWords can do just so much. With appropriate tricks you can be listed at a fraction of the price Google shows. Yet 80% of those coming to your site shall leave it in 5 seconds. It's a sign you won't earn a nickel from them.
Your website has to be excellent even if you use AdWords.

Now, think about what I have written, because it's not what the average SEO consultants and marketeers will tell you, yet I have been through all of this. You can easily experience this, it won't be free though. This is what I can assure you.

dfumagalli wrote: You have to put in that "something special" that slowly makes your site famous.

+1 and amen! So many folks wonder why their jewelry store or designer clothing store will not rank....so many of them are just clones of the other 50,000.