Cue4cheap wrote:The reason they are by brand is because the 'norm' is to have people shop like they do for a automobile. We find a lot of people do have brand loyalty if for no other reason then because they used the cue before or because of the hype. i.e. Use xyz cue brand because of our unique way of making the cue.
I get that - yours is a different market than mine though I do have some brand loyalty brands too. Just a suggestion though as filters do a lot of this too and to me, if I click a category and only see 1 or 2 things in it, I think it was a waste of time on clicking and they may think that is all you have for that brand when you have the cue, the cases, accessories, tc. Remember you also have brand pages built into opencart, so you could put a "shop by brand" in your menu and link to the brand pages for the brand loyalist customers you have which would show them all items by that brand across all product types. Just an idea - sometimes we don't think of alternatives to doing things because we get too close to our own products. A friend of mine has an anime store on opencart and she got hung up originally creating a subcategory for EVERY anime show and movie on EVERY product type and ended up with thousands of categories, often with a hand full of products in them. It slowed her store down and made it difficult for people to shop - people wanting to shop for products for a certain show wanted to see all items for that show, not have to go to figures > this show, then keychains > this show, etc. back and forth 10000 times. She is now working on changing it around because she has realized it.
labeshops wrote:
Also since your original thread was about traffic, you really need to work on things like category names and meta titles. "Athena" is a Greek Goddess to me. "Athena Brand Pool Cues" would be better for your seo efforts. Product names and titles too need work "Athena 04 - Blue Heart" means nothing. I would do more like "Athena Blue Heart Pool Cue".
Now this one is funny only because we just, about 6 months ago, got rid of all the additional "pool cue" and "pool cue case" text because on advice of a 'professional' they said we were spamming those keywords, especially on the category pages since all products had in their title "XYZ pool cue" and that was a reason we were not, and would not, rank any higher.[/quote]
And were you ranking better now or 6 months ago? There is a balance and you do need to vary the keywords up some - maybe pool cue, billiard cue, pool cue case, case for pool cues, just cue sometimes without the pool, or whatever other terms are commonly used. I would especially pay attention to this in your product pages though. Product pages need to act as landing pages and be able to stand on their own so the product names and especially titles which are indexed by search engines need to easily communicate what the product is. Right now, if someone searched for "athena pool cue" your site comes up on page 6 of the results:
Pool Cues - Cues Plus Billiards
(yourstore)/store/pool-cues
Pool Cues for all types of players. Pool cues from a LOT of manufacturers from 5280, Action, Athena, Balabushka, Blade, Cuetec, Custom cues, Dufferin, Elite, ...
So if pool players are like car buyers and concerned about brand, not ranking for one of them is a major concern. If you are concerned about the category pages being "spammy" - not a problem I've ever had personally - you can use a robots-noindex tag on the category page so it is not indexed and focus on getting your product pages and brand pages to rank well instead. Take a look at your competitors - they are are using some variation of cue or pool cue...at least the top ranking 3 that I lookd at from the above search. I use "gothic" a gazillion times on gothicplus and rank #1 or on page 1 for nearly all of my search terms (2 competitors and 1 battle each other for #1 lol), so what do i know? lol
labeshops wrote:
The description you provided struck me as funny, in the way of sounding provocative. (a genesis of me going to your shop, and you have a display issue when I am using safari: At least on this page:
https://www.labeshops.com/corsets-busti ... rset-dress it seems to lose all css formatting) I see what you mean though. Again I do struggle with the fact they ALL have smooth finished shafts. If they didn't they would be sent back asap.
The delineation between one cue and another is truly in the link I posed above (in another post) and in the specs of the cue. Maybe I'll discuss with a few others if that is the right approach. Maybe one could be like the other but it is more about the individual product and the appeal of that product versus specification of what makes a cue (or case, or product) on paper a good playing cue. That is going to be tough to change that paradym since we do think the specs make the playability and a lot of the rest is design.
lol well, I do sell clothing, lingerie and shoes along with home decor so that is the way I think I guess
But people buy benefits and appeal, not just hard facts which was my point. Find your own voice of course and write it perhaps from the sports point of view instead like how well it handles, reacts with the balls, etc. - that's not my area lol. Look at your competitors. And remember google loves content and your product description is the main content on your product page, so boilpoint specs don't give a lot of content for the search engines to love.