I’ve not mentioned it on this site yet, but I’ve created a small t-shirt brand called The Home T that is an extension of my fashion blog Fashables.
The website is TheHomeT.com and it was my first experience with building an ecommerce site. To make life easier I went with an out of the box version called Shopify that has a number of themes and makes it remotely easy to add products and take payments.
But the fun stops there.
The website had been up for a few weeks, and “The Home T” was nowhere to be found in a Google search. And that seemed crazy given that the keyword was the websites domain name.
See, the problem, as I see it, is that Shopify doesn’t have a meta section on product pages, regular pages or blog pages, and that’s a problem. If you aren’t familiar with SEO, just know that the meta information helps Google find you.
Shopify has an application network that does offer meta description plugins, but they come with either a one time or monthly fee, and that’s not exactly acceptable given that it’s a standard feature on so many other platforms.
With that said, I spent last night blowing up the site and transitioning it back to WordPress, and am now using WooCommerce as my ecommerce platform. So far it’s been a pretty easy transition and the flexibility of the platform has been very much appreciated.
Hopefully the transition will improve the SEO situation, and if it does, that will likely have a direct impact on sales. No, I don’t think it’ll drive gazillions of dollars in sales, but it will allow the site to come up for those proactively searching for the product.
And look, blowing up the site and redoing it was a pain. But don’t let an inconvenience allow you to settle, especially when you know things aren’t right. Put in the extra effort and it will payoff in the long run.
Oh, and hey, if you live in New York and want to purchase a t click here. If you don’t live in New York, we have other states on the way. Click here to be notified when your state is available to purchase. Had to give it a little plug. 🙂
