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Mathore.com is the No. 1 electronic platform of power tools, parts, paints and DIY and Home Improvement products in Cyprus with a network of over 100 stores.

Mathore.com sells high quality power tools, safety wear, paints and DIY products home and garden improvements from Makita, Vitex, Oleo-Mac and Cofra.

The company was founded in 2012 and the website was live in 2013.

SEO SITE AUDIT: the challenge

The website was built by a developer through a mix of 3 programming languages and the blog was built under WordPress platform.

The challenge is that Google makes every month small changes to its algorithm, and every year 1-2 fundamental changes. What was a few years ago an important ranking factor nowadays it may be of insignificant importance…

Platforms like WordPress, Shopify etc have hundreds of developers which work constantly on the code to update it and adapt it to Google’s updates.

But, it is very difficult for a small business which has a website built with codes to keep up and ask all the time the developer to do the updates. At some point the code will become obsolete no matter what

Issues found on Mathore.com at the 1st SEO site audit:

No ranking on the images for the keyword “Mathore”. Search on Google images with the keyword “Mathore” showed that only one image from the home page was showing up.

It looked that after 4.5 years Google was not crawling the site.

No ranking on the images for the keyword “Mathore”. Search on Google images with the keyword “Mathore” showed that only one image from the home page was showing up.

No keywords strategy on the product’s pages or blog’s articles.

The site didn’t have SSL and the URLs were not dynamic.

Mathore Case Study

Very low site speed: 42 /100

Huge images which were slowing the uploading the pages.

22500 blog comments & Messages with spam links and Porn content

All content on the blog was “double content"

Many other issues detected:

  • No reflang attribute EN/GR
  • No backlinks
  • No pages meta-tags, titles or description
  • No images alt-tags
  • No content strategy
  • Pages with very low word count
  • No Social Media Signals (only Facebook page, but was EVEN NOT ranking)

Solutions proposed: 1st Step

  1. Created “digital strategy”
  2. Keywords research and keywords & hashtags strategy (volume, competition and bids)
  3. Connected Search Console and uploaded the HTML map
  4. We opened Google My Business account
  5.  Backlinks strategy (signing up on directories)

Observations after the site seo audit and 1 step implemented:

  1. Traffic started to come from Google My Business
  2. We started to rank on Google images
  3. We noticed that Google started to associate our website with Makita products: our first keyword target was “Makita Cyprus”
  4. We started to prepare content for the keywords targeted.

2nd SEO Site Audit: 2nd Step

  1. Compressing the images and re-naming the files and using alt tags
  2. Do the 301 redirects for the broken links on the blog
  3. Applied the “Nofollow” tag to the pages with double content
  4. Posting regularly on Google My Business and G+ (although G+ will be shut down in A few months our tests show that it still counts for Google algorithm)
  5. Meeting with the developer and assigned tasks: to solve the problem with the URLs, insert new fields for the pages for the “title”; “meta-description” and “tags”
Note: We have access only to the C-panel of the blog and not to the C-panel of the website. So changes to the website code can be done only by the developer.
 

After the 2nd SEO Site Audit:

  1. We started to get reports from search console with the errors that needed to be fixed
  2. We could have the first reports from Google Analytics with data to be analysed.
  3. We asked the developer to insert the title and the meta-description on the home page and to correct the H1, H2, H3..etc…
  4. Competitors analyisis

January 2019 Competitor Backlinks analysis

On the 3rd of January we first ranked for the keyword “Makita Cyprus” with a blog article (one of the pages from which we did 301 redirect)

A Few days later after the implementation of the home page title and meta-description we started to rank with the home page on the 3rd page.

After the 3rd SEO Site audit: further actions

  1. Get SSL licence
  2. Link building strategy

Google uses backlinks as a strong indicator of a page’s authority, relevance and ranking potential.

  1. Strategy for social media to increase social share.

Google has the Social Sharing high on its ranking factors since it is an effective way to drive traffic and build brand awareness.

  1. Developer should create a field for creation of custom URLs since the Greek version of the page IS an obstacle for the solution of the code reading automatically the title for the creation of URLs

Observations and further actions suggested for better optimization

Future actions: Optimize the site

  • Google Voice Search
  • Google Lens
  • AMP (Accelerate Mobile Pages)
  • Structured data
  • Schema markup

Further Recommendation

At this point was clear to all team that the invested needed to support the site on code was not worth. So maybe if you don’t have an in-house web developer maybe the best thing is to go to a platform like WordPress where the platform does all the necessary updates.
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