Frustrated with 20 hits a day & only 56 backlinks after a year

[Midland Motorcycles]

Hello i am new to this forum and my post may seem very amiture so please bare with me.

I started building my website in December 2014, ive got around 1000 products on there so far which i know isnt much, i have 45,000 to add so am going to have to start adding them by csv to be quicker. The reason ive been adding them 1 at a time is to make sure my SEO bar is 100% on my dashboard. But its not bringing me any traffic let alone sales so i may aswell bash them on with CSV files..

So firstly a few key things you may want to know.

My website provider is 1& 1 internet. I have an E-commerce package (£47.99 Per month)
I offer sage pay & paypal as payment methods
i have a free contact number 0800 (so customers can call me free)
I have a facebook business page linked with around 400 likes.
I have 1206 pages indexed in my webmaster tools.
I have between 10-20 hits to my site per day (according to google analytics)
I sell motorcycle parts
my home page has lots of key words relevant ones
i have 56 back links (about 46 of which are Yell dot com. ) so yes pretty rubbish when i read on here most people have 3000 +++

I really really need some help. When i started my site i had NO idea what i was doing, ive learned everything by trial and error, ive only ever sold on ebay etc so im used to that simple dummy proof kind of sales platform.

I have designed my site myself, ive added products myself, ive created all the catagories myself.

I really need someone to shed some light on why im getting sod all traffic, why i have such low back links, what am i doing wrong? Ive asked 1&1 to check my site and see if theres any issues they are as thick as me and are no help what so ever.
Im currently paying £47.99 per month for my site, £30 a month to sage pay, £16 per month to Elavon + My 0800 phone number. and im seeing no return back.

I have a lot of empty catagories on my site, because the 1st thing i did when i designed it was make ALL catagories for all the different bikes, then when adding products ive started with ''pistons'' and am now onto crankshafts'' but for every bike, so basically every section called engine parts in every bike cat is full now of pistons and cranks. but all the other bits are empty like ''brakes'' , frame, electrical'' and so on. So i understand that this does not help, but ive seen plenty of sites with empty catagories and they are selling items.

<snip> the rules above says that i cannot post URL in threads so i dont know what to say?

As i say im very in-experienced & confused to the point ive considered chucking it in. I feel like im throwing money at it for nothing and more importantly my time! It takes me around 5 minutes to add ONE product so you can imagine how long it will take to add 45,000 products!

At the bottom of my home page i have links to different pages on my site, is that bad will that make me rank lower, higher or just the same?

If i type in ''Honda CR125 Piston Kit'' im on page 2 of google near the bottom, even though i have lots of Honda CR125 piston kits on my site at good prices and they are top quality ones, with long detailed descriptions and my SEO bar says 100% on my dashboard.

This is a function that 1&1 offers as part of my package where it shows a bar along the top that turnes green and says the percentage of SEO completed, when it says 100% its a good quality page. I try to do this for all my products but its hard to do that and have enough time to add products so a lot of my pages recently are 83% because i skip out the cross selling because im not too bothered about that.

I also noticed that alot of my URLs contain ''mywebsite/28y3826489237092387239-0823epages98378937i7738389EPAGES/mycatagoryblablabla

Basically a load of JUNK. I asked 1&1 about this and they said it cant be changed and its to do with cookies, they said google dont index the page like that they index it using the short URL. are they fobbing me off or is this true?

I really need to start making this website work, i have a lot of kids and an expensive house to run, ive put in a lot of hours work, and intend to put in a lot more, but feel very dawnted this weekend with how much traffic im NOT getting, the non existent orders, and the ridiculous amount of back links i DONT have.

<snip> perhaps advise me on what i can do to improve it.
I have been paying Yell £50 a month for a listing at the top too, aswell as tryng a week with google add words once which cost me £250 and then i turned it off and also facebook adds.

A friend of mine runs a company that has a website but not a webshop you cannot buy anything off his site you have to call him to order and he turnes over well over 100k a year so i havent really imagined that empty cats on my site would be an issue as i have been advertising my company name which is the name you can ring and order over the phone if you want.
Very frustrating!

Any advise will be very much appreciated.

Kind Regards
Matt

[edited by: goodroi at 8:26 pm (utc) on Nov 1, 2015]
[edit reason] Please no public site reviews [/edit]

[goodroi]

What is unique & valuable about your site? What makes your site special when compared to thousands of other websites selling motorcycle parts? Having 1,000 parts isn't special or valuable. I could have 1,000 different colors of paper clips that are all the same size but that wouldn't be very valuable to most customers. Even if I had 1,000 unique office supply products by republishing a data feed from a national office supply company it still isn't special, that is just redundant. Take a product description like from your page for the Honda CR215 Piston Kit and see if over 350 other pages are publishing the identical information.

Be brutally honest with yourself. Why should someone link to your website or click on your listing in the search results? What is special? If nothing is special and you are willing to get into a pricing war, then list your products on Amazon and keep it on Ebay and let those companies worry about attracting an audience while you focus on pricing & order fulfillment.

I would focus on building a loyal customer base outside of Google. Those loyal customers will eventually generate the quality signals that will lead to Google rankings. Ask yourself what do customers want that no one else is providing. Don't try to match the competition. You need to surpass them and surprise customers with something that is unexpected and helpful to them. Good luck :)

[tangor]

goodroi provides good thoughts. I have to ask if you aren't pushing too hard for a first site. The cost of business you describe is very brutal just to see if it works.

Own your own domain and static IP. That will clean up the ugly URL. Scale back from your current hosting to something you pay by the year (shared or dedicated), Forget about paid placement (for now), and get your site operating. Locate a payment processor that will work with you (and won't bleed you dry). Find your best cost/profit items and list those first... you have to develop some income to keep the rest going. The more common parts, etc, you add LAST.

Sounds to me that you are working too hard and too expensive and getting little in return.... BTW, for any site to gain traction in the SERPS expect at least six months if not a year for any consistent placement. Your niche is pretty competitive so you will have to beat the others by fulfillment or service.

[buckworks]

I have a lot of empty catagories on my site

I'd wager that's a big reason for the site's disappointing performance.

Both search engines and human visitors would look around and think, "This site isn't ready!"

Having a ton of empty categories is a low "signal of quality" that is likely undercutting any benefit from the care you've been taking with the SEO scores so far.

45,000 to add so am going to have to start adding them by csv to be quicker

I would encourage you to do exactly that. Get the empty categories populated, pronto! You need to give the search engines something to work with, and your human visitors something to look at.

You can work at sprucing up the SEO scores as you go along, but don't obsess about it. Set yourself a quota for doing a few pages every day, but invest the bulk of your energy in promotion. These days, a vital ingredient in effective SEO is good old-fashioned marketing hustle.

you can ring and order over the phone if you want

Look at that from the users' point of view - how are you presenting that? What would invite them to do that? Especially if they can't see all your products?

Get your categories all populated then work from there.

[Hoople]

All great observations above that I totally agree with. A few good links that bring visitors are worth more in comparison to links from directories (Yell).

A quick look at your site and I see some things you need to fix ASAP:

Based on the search query you mentioned that page load time was 8.9 seconds the first time and 4.5 seconds the second with 99 page elements. All about double the top end of what many quote as an acceptable range.

The page does NOT detect mobile on it's own. You have provided a button to click but 'don't make your users work' can drive away users! Most will hit the back button and choose another site.

Clicking 'mobile view' on a product page results in a top level page not a mobile version of that particular product page. Page Load Time 3.8s Total Page Size 710KB Requests 51. For mobile that's in the realm of the 800 pound gorilla!

Many of the images on that mobile category page were over 150kb, A mobile page in TOTAL should be less than HALF that.

A lot of the images have LOTS of invalid HTML in their src attribute. Is Google indexing your product images?

Grayed out smallish text on the bottom. Seems like you prefer it not to stand out? To some this seems a bit like you are NOT as real as you say you are.

Since you are new I can't see your site listed in your profile so excuse me if my observations are of another site. Last two digits 75. Correct site?

[Midland Motorcycles]

Hi all thanks for all the replys very much appreciated.

Yes i need to get the cats filled fast, yes i know it would be great to change provider and change a few things to bring my costs down but i dont have time and i feel the best thing to do is keep going hard.
Ive decided to go back to doing parts for certain bikes that i used to do parts for which are ''Hot'' and i know will sell, so im currently working on that for the next couple of weeks then i will go ahead and fill the motocross categories up.

Just checking now yes google has indexed some of my images but not many atall.
See this is why i am on here right now asking for help, when you write -

'''Based on the search query you mentioned that page load time was 8.9 seconds the first time and 4.5 seconds the second with 99 page elements. All about double the top end of what many quote as an acceptable range.
Clicking 'mobile view' on a product page results in a top level page not a mobile version of that particular product page. Page Load Time 3.8s Total Page Size 710KB Requests 51. For mobile that's in the realm of the 800 pound gorilla!
Many of the images on that mobile category page were over 150kb, A mobile page in TOTAL should be less than HALF that. ''

^^^^ That means nothing to me thats how clueless i am. Least im being honest, i do not know what your saying i should do? I do not understand the image HTML ? I just upload them from my computer.

Im sorry im that in-experienced that even that has lost me.

Yes the site you found must be mine if the last digits are 75 of the thing at the top - So well done on finding me.

So all the images on my home page that lead to other categories should i loose them? Shall i loose that flash image banner on top of my home page? It all loads up pretty quick on my laptop so i assumed it was fine.

Also all the links at the bottom of my home page (that i think looks like a load of junk) maybe i should loose them too? I just was told that google would like that thats why i did it.
The reason why some catagories are empty is because i am concentrating on listing one set of things at a time so i dont loose where i am, i cant work in dribs & drabs i wanted every single piston kit on there for every bike so i know they are all done, then i moved onto crankshaft, when every single one of those is on there ill move onto panels or something thats just my way of dealing with organisation of what ive done.

What i THINK will make my site different is that i offer/will offer a very wide range of UPGRADE / Aftermarket parts, i can get a lot of parts that i dont see very often. Also my experience with Motocross bikes i was hoping will give customers peice of mind that when they speak to me they feel comfortable buying parts off me because my hearts in it, nothing worse than ringing up a company and they dont know what an earth they are on about, you just think '' yeah hes just in it for the money he will proberly send me the wrong part'' where as i wouldnt.

Ah i dont know, im very tired....how does one man add 45,000 products quickly enough to get the site full enough that it doesnt look ridiculous....

I wish i could get some hands on help with the problems you mentioned above because i wouldnt know where to start to correct them :-/

[Midland Motorcycles]

I have just found this lot in my webmaster tools i had a feeling it would be this thats not helping .... Because for quckness i made certain cats like ''engine parts top end'' Then duplicated those pages and moved the duplicates into other bikes,,,, then renamed each one but only quickly by the bike model soooo basically heres an example....

Yamaha YZ125 Engine Parts top end rebuild spares, Yamaha YZ piston kits, cylinder kits, big bore kits, cylinder head, barrel.
Yamaha YZ250 Engine Parts top end rebuild spares, Yamaha YZ piston kits, cylinder kits, big bore kits, cylinder head, barrel.

See how all i changed was the YZ125 to YZ250 therefore googles picking them up as duplicate pages....


Heres what my webmaster tells me ....


HTML Improvements
Last updated Nov 2, 2015
Addressing the following may help your site's user experience and performance.
Meta descriptionPages
Duplicate meta descriptions42
Long meta descriptions0
Short meta descriptions13

Title tagPages
Missing title tags0
Duplicate title tags44
Long title tags0
Short title tags0
Non-informative title tags0
Non-indexable contentPages
We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.



Is that bad? Or not too bad? Says i have 1209 pages indexed in total so from 1209 i have that many issues above?

Hmm i wonder what ill be doing tonight faffing around through each page trying to make each page unique i guess.

As for the image thing mentioned above ive done some reading up and have now learned about this issue and understand what you said now sir.

I will now compress my images

Thanks again chaps, and please keep the answers coming because i would still value any help possible....



Regards
Matt

[Midland Motorcycles]

We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.

[piatkow]

What offline marketing are you doing?

Are prospective purchasers seeing your name in motorcycle magazines?

[Midland Motorcycles]

As someone said above i need to explain whats different why come to me so ive scrapped all that junk off my home page & replaced it.

Heres what WAS on home page

We specialize in the distribution of motocross parts & accessories, both genuine & aftermarket spares for both 2 stroke & 4 stroke MX & enduro bikes.
WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION! 45,000 PRODUCTS TO ADD! IF YOU CANT SEE WHAT YOU NEED ON OUR SITE, IT DOESNT MEAN WE CANT GET IT... JUST DROP US AN EMAIL OR PHONE CALL & WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO PROVIDE THE PART YOU REQUIRE.
We offer a few services including cylinder work - reboring, wheel building, Engine Rebuilds & Crankshaft Rebuilds.
NOTE: We are now taking on engine rebuilds ( two stroke only at present ) we can arrange for the collection of your broken engine, and Re-delivery once rebuilt. Please contact us for more info.
We offer a wide range of motocross parts - Engine Parts - Crankshaft, Piston Kit, Clutch Parts, Racing Exhausts, Boyesen Racing Reeds, V Force, Samco Hose Kits, Irod, Water Pump Parts, Clutch Kits etc.
We Offer A Range Of Body Parts -Plastics Kits From UFO, Racetech & Polisport,, Chain & Sprocket Kits, Wheel Rims, Hubs & Handlebars.
Renthal, Talon, VForce, Boyesen, Italkit, FMF, Pro Circuit, DEP, DID, Polisport Are Some Of The Leading Brands Within our Range Of Products.
Performance Parts, Aftermarket Replacements, And Genuine Parts.
HONDA KAWASAKI Yamaha SUZUKI KTM MX STOCK LIST
Used MX Parts Tools / Workshop
Honda CRF250 Honda CRF450 Kawasaki KX250F Kawasaki KX450F Yamaha YZ250F Yamaha YZ450F KTM SXF250 KTM SXF450
KTM ENDURO TRAIL / ENDURO PARTS
Kawasaki KX125 Kawasaki KX250 Honda CR125 Honda CR250 KTM 125 KTM 200 Yamaha YZ125 Yamaha YZ250 Suzuki RM125 Suzuki RM250 Suzuki RMZ250 Suzuki RMZ450
Honda CR85 Kawasaki KX85 Yamaha YZ85 Suzuki RM85 KTM 85 YAMAHA DT125 KAWASAKI KDX125 KAWASAKI KDX200 KAWASAKI KDX250 YAMAHA TTR125 YAMAHA WR Yamaha PW50 Yamaha PW80 KTM 50 Suzuki LT50 ATV
Click HERE to see a directory of motorcycle repair shops & parts suppliers in the UK.
We do not take on repair work! For Repairs, Service, MOT & More Please Contact XXXXXX

Heres what ive changed it too hoping it looks a tad more professional


We specialize in the distribution of motocross parts & accessories, both genuine & aftermarket spares for both 2 stroke, 4 stroke MX & enduro bikes.
We offer a few services including cylinder work - reboring, wheel building, Engine Rebuilds & Crankshaft Rebuilds.
Why choose us?
We put customer satisfaction first, a happy customer is more important to us which is what keeps our good reputation.
We offer a huge range of aftermarket parts, genuine parts, custom parts & a reliable service.
We open our phone lines from 8pm-10pm monday to thursday to enable customers that work long hours a window of time to call in & make telephone orders / Enquire about parts.
We sell to enthusiasts, we are enthusiasts, this creates a friendly & reliable customer service as we take pride in what we do, in other words our heart is in the business.

[timemachined]

I struggle as well as there's as many ex spurts out there as there are experts, but mate, cut the Yell advert out and invest in local google search instead if anything. Get off of 1&1, stick with 0800 if worthwhile and a hot number, consider if you need sagepay as that's costly when not doing much money. Unless save money on transaction costs.

With your new found £1000 a year you just saved by cancelling sagepay and hosting, get a site built for you that imports datafeed products, renames urls, resizes etc - you'll have change left over. Even if not just starting out, nothing wrong with being on shared server for £20 a year. When I hit £5000 a month profit, I'll still be on a £20 shared server. £50 a month? You're wasting money.

Cut your costs, get that datafeed up, even hide some if you don't want google on to too many products and support it with unique content, internal linking and build social. You can't be good at everything so play to strengths and areas of product strength. A lot easier for you as niche too. 50 articles into the project on a specific field and you'll notice a difference.

I have a big problem with google indexing pages it shouldn't have and getting them removed and also empty pages I chucked up. Unfortunately while everyone else did similar they built external links to offset the damage. If you're concerned about the cookie links, pop into urlparameters in webmaster tools.

But save your money, new projects do not need such high overheads unless you're trading well from the beginning. I only just upgraded from £10 a year to £25 a year hosting. I'd faint if paying £600 a year on hosting. I could fully automate my site for that amount or get on a professional link farm for a month.

[ergophobe]

You say you have 1200 pages indexed. Think of your category pages as "branch" pages and pages with actual products that people can buy as "leaf" pages. Generally, I would say you want your leaf pages to be the ones that rank if possible.

Go in and do a site:yourdomain.com search in Google and see what pops up. Branches or leafs? If branches, try to figure out why. If you have 1200 pages and they are all branch pages (something you see a lot in Wordpress with people who use a lot of tags and potentially something you might see in your e-comm platform with a lot of categories). Since your categories are mostly empty, if a lot of those are indexed and a lot of those make up your first one hundred results in a site: search, you're not likely to see much traffic.

Are the titles good or duplicate? You nly have 44 dupes for title and meta, but see if any of them pop up in a site: search

[lucy24]

WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

Well, that's one way to make visitors shrug and decide to come back later...

The fact that this line was buried in the middle of a bunch of legitimate text suggests that you genuinely overlooked it for who-know-how-long before overhauling the entire page. This, in turn, suggests that you might benefit from having someone else-- not an "SEO professional", just a normal human like your wife or brother-- have a look at the site and tell you what they don't like about it.

[Midland Motorcycles]

Thats all been removed now, the text has been replaced and shortened.
I have found when googling my site, that you above are right they are branch pages (cats) all indexed not products, so last few days been working on site swapping it all round. Before i would have this...

Motocross parts - Kawasaki - KX85 - Engine Parts top end
Motocross parts - kawasaki - kx125 - engine parts top end
Motocross parts - kawasaki - kx250 - engine parts top end
Motocross parts - kawasaki - kxF250 - engine parts top end
Motocross parts - kawasaki - kxF450 - engine parts top end

Then goes onto honda, then suzuki & so on. What ive found is that for maybe the 70 + different bikes i have in my site, they all have duplicate cats.
Done some research on other well indexed popular sites, and found that ok there cats are not as well organised as mine, they are a bit of a mess but it obviously works for google.

so i am changing it all

Engine parts top end - Honda
engine parts top end - kawasaki


see ^^ only 2 clicks in instead of 4, and no duplicate pages.
Only problem is where as before id have KX85 piston kit in its own section completely narrowed down, now it will just be '' Piston kits - Kawasaki'' ...... and thats it. Kawasaki KX80, KX85, KX125, KX250, KXF450 Etc will all be mixed into one section .
But apparently thats whats more google friendly.

So i have to chose, make my site very simple to use for my customers, then get a crap ranking on google, or make it google friendly then have customers have to sift through loads of pistons to find the one they want.

I have to chose the second option or i may not have a business lol.

Thanks for everyones support, im learning .... slowly!

Regards
Matt

[tangor]

In the paradigm of motorcycles, your best break points (catalog pages) is by PARTS, not manufacturer. Google will show that in their index because it is there, but your user is actually looking for "pistons kawasaki" which will lead to a pistons page on your site which might have 70 mfgs and x number of models from each mfg (in alphabetical order) and you're done. The G is happy, your Users are Happy and YOU as a webmaster are happy. After all, there are only so many parts on a motorcycle (and that is the number of CAT pages you will have!). In this instance you are not selling motorcycles. You are selling PARTS. Emphasis on Parts. That's your business. :)

At some point granularity becomes absurd. KISS (Keep It Simple, Sir!) is the best method.