Looking for site feedback

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Walden

New member
Mar 26, 2010
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Okay, I'll lay out my cards here:

Squash Racqueteering - Squash Racquet Reviews is a website I put up back in June. I've managed to get the site up to ~400 uniques a month, in the top 5 for a few keywords that I was targeting (the keywords are low competition with ~4500 searches globally, though not exactly lucrative - they have been a friendly introduction to SEO/AM I think). I get about a 10% CTR and a 6% conversion in Amazon.

I'd appreciate some feedback regarding site layout (wordpress, colours), content, or anything that some of the more experienced members would pick up on.

I'm fully aware that it is definitely amateur and as such I am open to some constructive criticism and friendly (on WF??) feedback.

Any advice to help me improve on this project (and future ones) would be appreciated!

Cheers.
 


<Starts building a Squash Racqueteering site>

On a more serious note, I'm in no position to critique but your site and what you've achieved with it is much, much better than 99% of sites out there.

Site content quality seems top-notch (whether you wrote it yourself or outsourced it) though you could try replacing the Amazon widgets with in-content links and see if that improves clickthrough/conversion rates at all.

Johnny
 
Johnny, Thanks, I've actually written the content myself. Whether I have actually used any of those racquets before or not, well that is not up for discussion ;) Appreciate the compliments.
What do you mean by 'in-content' links? I replaced lines of 'Click Here, Buy So and So Racquet at Amazon now' links with the widgets and they made a definite improvement on CTR.

Thanks Dchuck, it is good to know I am roughly on the right track.
 
Forgive my ignorance, but I hardly know about Alexa. I'm doing some research now.

According to Alexa: "We don't have enough data to display the traffic metrics for squashracqueteering.com".

Is there something that I am missing? Apart from Traffic of course.
 
Balls. I decide to ask for some feedback and for the first time in 5 months my website is down. Having serious server side issues. I'll be back when its working!
 
Gents, the site is back up. Pretty much lost everything so I rebuilt it quick smart and I'm liking the new version even better. With an alexa ranking too! If you have any additional comments (constructive or other) I'd love to hear them.

I am working my way to #1 for 'squash racquet reviews'. While it won't make fuck all money (which is why i am happy to share what my current market is!), it has been a damn good learning experience and with a few new tools & additional experience under my belt it should make the next project a lot easier. Any tips on how to smash the #1 position would be freaking sweet too!

Big ups to Aequitas for his RealVMS add in. Handy way of adding some content quickly and regularly while the real world distracts me from my websites.

Cheers
 
I'm not feeling the dark theme.

Any site that you're wanting to make money on needs to focus on the demographic. Compete and Alexa are your friends here. You take a site already doing well for your subject and figure out who visits it.

I'm choosing Squash Talk - Compete Page - Alexa Page

If the site owner had claimed the compete page, we could view their audience profile. Or, if you felt like paying for a Pro Subscription, you could see their figures about income, age, sex, etc. and get a good idea anyway.

Even without that, we should be able to get a decent idea from their Alexa Audience Snapshot:
Based on internet averages, squashtalk.com is visited more frequently by males who are in the age range 25-34, have children and are college educated.
Click to expand...
Now, what does this tell us? They are probably going to be business men. Based on films of people playing squash, they are likely going to be executives in large corporations.

Why is this important? It means that you need to be designing your site in a way that makes them feel comfortable so that they will respond. Dark layouts are a no no. These people are use to reading business reports.

There is a reason that news sites using light backgrounds and keep to a report theme. I suggest you do the same.
 
Rex, interesting view, I'd have never really thought of that. I read reports for most of my day and it still didn't click. I'll act on it with a lighter them and watch how the results react.
cheers.
 
pretty clean site you got there; had a look at the on page stuff and its mostly good.

Couple suggestions:

add a meta description .. Google would use this when they're listing links (if it matches up with the content)

for your permalinks I'd do
Squash Shot Tips : Digging Squash Balls Out of the Corner | Squash Racquet Reviews

instead of:
Squash Shot Tips : Digging Squash Balls Out of the Corner | Squash Racquet Reviews


Also since you have just a few categories, might make sense to show them all in one line, instead of making it a dd ... that's more of a usability thing
 
I'd add more text "buy now" links in content, above/blow the first racquet image.
Moreover you have an empty right column where you could place an Amazon deals widget pulling squash equipment on sale, or something else.
 
I agree with Icecube. I don't think you need to spam it up, but I just randomly picked one of your articles (great content btw!) and couldn't find one place that sent me somewhere to make the purchase:

Prince Triple Threat Sovereign Squash Racquet Review | Squash Racquet Reviews

You might be losing some conversions here. Generally if I ran into this problem I would appreciate the information, but would then go to Google and search on the product or manually go to amazon to find it there which means no cookie being generated for you to get commission.
 
rapidworkers said:
Your sites is really good but still you are dont hav alexa ranking.........
Click to expand...

Who gives a flying fuck about alexa? (Mentioned now twice in this thread about a site review.)

What possible motivation should he have for giving two shits about having a high alexa rank?

Is he selling his website? No.
Does alexa send visitors? No.
Does having a higher alexa rank mean he'll make more money or convert better? No.

Fuck off back to WaFo.
 
Thanks gents, comments and feedback have been taken on board and acted upon. I thought I did have meta descriptions in my post, it looks like they have in the admin panel but i'll dig a bit deeper. I'll work through my posts adding a few appropriately placed in context product links as well. Can see the advantages, but I will wait for the site to settle so I can see if it provides an improvement in sales or not.

Haven, people like you are why WF is fucking ace. Cut through the crap with good honest answers. Cheers
 
Also, as a hot tip, RealVMS added quite an interesting video to the site. Check it out before I take it down.

Enjoy.

Titties.
 
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