Not ranking for low competition exact match keywords after 8 months

[AndreaKropp]

I'll start off by admitting that I used to run an SEO business that worked on Wordpress sites. We got great results for clients and I sold the business in 2015. Now I'm creating my first eCommerce store on Shopify and the SEO is a disaster. I'm going after really low competition keywords, my on-page content is well optimized without being spammy, all my images have appropriate names and meta data, my Google Search Console shows no errors and the sitemap has been fully indexed. I launched the store in March 2020 and have been hoping that good on-page SEO would cause it to rise in the organic results with enough time. 

8 months later I'm still at position 40 to 50 in Google for my primary term which is "water polo tshirts" and between 30 to 40 for "water polo apparel".

The store is pololife.shop

Although there are always small tweaks and improvements to SEO, I'm thinking there must be something major that I'll failing to notice. After this much time with really good on-page work, I simply shouldn't be that far down in the results considering there are no other sites online devote exclusively to this niche.

Any help is much appreciated,

Andrea

[PageFly-Richard]

Hi @AndreaKropp, 

I wager the problem might be that despite the keyword itself has relatively low competition, the websites that are ranking for these keywords have strong domain ratings - this is one of the reasons why you could not compete with them. 

 

I also checked your backlink profile and you has no quality backlink - so the Domain Rating at the moment is below 10. So I would suggest you to: 

01. Invest in Quality backlinks - join this Facebook Group: The Proper SEO Group - I got a lot of advice on backlink building from the veteran in this group. 

02. Look into other SEO practices - I'd recommend: 

- Optimize IF-IDF - you can use Surfer SEO to optimize this factor

- Add Rich Snippets to your Product Pages to increase CTR - which can help you give a boost to your ranking.

Let me know if you find my answers helpful - with a thumb up or like - I'd really appreciate it 😄