New site, SEO well considered, no traffic :/ What next?
-
Hi There!
We've built whatphone.com.au with SEO at the top of the list but things are not going as expected.
Yes, there's still a lot of work to do, but I was hoping to get some guidance on what to do next to make sure we keep the right focus.
This is what we've done to date:
-
Added lots of unique and relevant content, particularly to our blog (and will continue to do so on a weekly basis)
-
Ensured internal linking is strong
-
Optimised each product page around product name (and relevant internal links pointing to it)
-
Ensured the code is clean (ok, we are not a 100% but in a good place)
-
URL structure, metadata, page titles, file names and alt tags following best practice
-
Named the company and registered our domain around one of main keywords we are currently targeting "what phone"
What we're working on:
-
Link building
-
Site speed
-
Social signals
-
Rich media (videos, more images)
Not a bad effort right? No love from an organic traffic perspective
Ok, the site / domain is no older than 2 months old, it's a very competitive industry, and no inbound links yet, but come on!
Questions:
-
Are there any benefits of engaging external providers to help with link building? I'm talking about outsourcing from elancer or similar.. Or is this playing with fire?
-
Have we missed something obvious here?
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
PS: we currently have some issues with our pricing tables, but will fixed as soon as possible..
-
-
A quick look at the SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool tells us that is a 68% - Highly Competitive search term and you are just not going to rank a new site for that term overnight.
This is not a perfect science but just take a look at some of the commercial sites that do rank
- 500 linking domains, 100 linking domains to the page itself
This is the kind of ballpark you are working in and you are just not going to do that overnight.
You need to look at a long term strategy, start with long, long tail and work backwards over time - this kind of thing:
what phone to replace htc desire
what phone for an old age pensionerThen when you have this kind of level dialled in come back a notch in terms of competitive keywords and slowly but surely (over a year or so) work towards your bigger terms.
Also, remember, phrases like 'what phone', it probably shows big numbers but just how good a term is that? What is someone looking for? An informative breakdown of which phones are around maybe? Maybe you could do that and provide a truly authoritative look at the phones around and update it each qtr on your site.
Look to become known for your content, seed it out in other ways, be the best possible result for 'what phone' and keep your eye on the prize and you will get there but.... it's going to take time and effort and some content smarts.
Oh, and don't buy cheap links, that's just going to smash this ship into the rocks before you even leave the port!
Hope this helps
Marcus
-
Even if this might not be a very helpful comment.... but that's the experience I've made every time. Unless we have some coverage from major media sources it always took a minimum of 3 months, but up to one year until we got some decent traffic to our site. So I don't think it's that you're doing something wrong, it's just the name of the game..
As you say, it's a competitive business, and unless you get some great link magnets on your site, Adwords might be the way to go for starters. Oh, and of course looking for niches in the long tail.
-
I think you are playing safe till now... depending on your link building, content marketing and Social Media efforts you can measure the time and impact of your success.
I think asking out for outsourcing is great unless you know that service provide is going to help you instead of getting a shit out of the money you are investing.
I recommend you to go for a freelancer or company who have a good name or have done something for community... and have good idea for your company to work on...
Keep that in mind if all idea they have is directory submissions and article submissions and Yahoo answers then you are wasting your time indeed!
-
For new websites, Google imposes a "sandbox" penalty so it will be at least a few months before you can rank competitively for keywords. Read more here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
One keyword optimization for the whole site
Hello Folks at MOZ, I am new here and I am glad there's this section of the site where newbies can get help for SEO. I have a specific keyword which needs to rank as well as possible, and all other keywords, well they are automatically in the description text alt tags and in couple of page titles. So my keyword which I would need to rank as high as possible is "24k gold iphone 6" and it has quite lot's of searches per month, and my site is now one second page of google results. My question is: I don't care much about other keywords right now, so would it make sense to make on one or two pages which sell the 24k gold iphone of my website the title, the page url, headers, alt tags, image names, to be exactly "24k gold iphone 6" and /24k-gold-iphone-6.html etc. without any other text. I believe there is a difference in having exact same page title name etc as the keyword, without any additional text is good for ranking? Also I guess there is limit on how much this naming of files, titles etc can be used before google might give a penalty for it... so I guess I have to be careful. Many thanks for anybody who takes time to respond.
Image & Video Optimization | | bidilover0 -
Looking to hire an SEO for a Technical Review of my site
Hi I am new to SEO. I am the photographer and blogger behind the photography blog ShootTokyo. I am looking to make sure my site is optimized the best it can be for SEO. My site is a hobby for me but has really grown. I am looking make sure I have best practices implemented. I am not looking for quick fixes or try to cheat the system but to make sure I have a good solid foundation in place for SEO. I don't have a lot of experience nor a lot of free time so I want to make sure whatever free time I spend on this is really productive. I am looking to initially hire someone to do a technical assessment of my site and identify any fundamental issues I should address first. Once I have the assessment I am looking for advice on putting together a work plan on what I need to do and the best way to approach it. How can I best use the tools Moz is offering me? Which things are higher value that I should work on first, specific to my site? For more technical things I might hire this person to implement them or teach me how to implement them. If this is your business can you please let me know what your qualifications, experience, a link to your site and give me a range of what you might charge for something like this (you can email me details if you don't want to post here). If this isn't your business but have a recommendation I would love one. I am Tokyo based so ideally someone either in Asia, Europe or West Coast of US as it makes it easier to connect live if needed. Thanks Dave
Image & Video Optimization | | ShootTokyo0 -
Can i use base64 images (URI) for better SEO performance - faster site loading?
Hi, Do you think the use of image data URI is SEO friendly? I got 20 JPG icons on each site, but use too many HTTP requests. So can i use base64 (URI) images for my small icons? Thank you for answer!
Image & Video Optimization | | Termex0 -
LOCAL SEO: Franchise --> One storefront. Multiple territory. Multiple listings?
An interesting problem came our way, and I'd love your help in solving it. An individual I'm chatting with owns and manages a number of territories of a service-based Franchise business around Eastern Iowa.**His territory covers multiple cities and zips. He services all of those places, but does not have a physical presence in all. There is one company office. But he has local numbers for each territory.**The corporate franchise's website is dynamic. It shows the 'local' number and information based on the visitor's location. Basically, little microsites for each franchise territory.Three years ago he set up individual Google Places pages for each territory, using a PO box address and the local phone numbers. The Google listings are set up not to display an address. The kick is -- those addresses are now expired. Those Google Local listings still exist, and drive considerable traffic in each target city. As you can imagine, this also causes havoc on his other citations. There are scattered (YP, Yahoo, Yelp, etc) listings for each address. Their name in GetListed brings up all five different addresses, each with a number of web properties already claimed.Now that I've offered to help, I need to determine the best way to move forward. Suspend the verified listings with hidden addresses and move to a single listing for the office location? We could add all of the zips in manually, but it would cover a very wide range, and could lose its rank in local SERPs. Even with a well-optimized description. And the local numbers would likely not show up. Keep the listings. Don't touch them at all. The owner is looking to maintain the look and feel of a local business in each of his territories. That is difficult to do with a single listing. Assuming we decide not to touch the active listings (option 2), what will we do for other listings? Do we claim a local Yahoo listing for each location? Just for the corporate office? Would love to hear how others have attacked the multi-territory franchise problem, or would in this case.Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | SocialJosh0 -
Vimeo Pro, video SEO and rich snippets
Hi All, we are producing product demonstration videos. One major aim with these videos is to help our rankings for these specific product pages and associated keywords... and to get rich snippets displayed on Google results pages against our listing. We have used schema.org markup in the product pages body code along with / next to the embed vimeo video code on the product page in order to hopefully get us rich snippet listing... we used schema.org markup as this seems to be the main current markup for rich snippets we have hosted the video via Vimeo Pro so that it is served quickly and not affected by speed of our hosting server or any possible bandwidth issues on our hosting server and ensure sthat the traffic comes to our site pages rather then Youtube or similar Vimeo Privacy settings for the video have been set so that we have not allowed it to be embed anywhere except for our own domain and the video is not displayed on Vimeo.com to ensure that the video is not duplicated anywhere else... so that this is unique content on our own site for maximum value for our domain We have used the "old code" from Vimeo Pro for embedding the video on our product page rather than the current iframe code as from what i understand Google cant follow very well and doesn't necessarily trust content displayed in iframes. Video and schema.org markup code used is on product page is: <div itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">video</a>" itemscope itemtype="<a class="attribute-value">http://schema.org/VideoObject</a>"> <p ><strong>Watch our <span itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">name</a>">Click 7 Lite Duo demonstrationspan>:strong>p> <meta itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">thumbnailURL</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/img/products/nextbase-click-7-lite-duo-thumb.jpg</a>" /> <meta itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">duration</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">T2M23S</a>" /> <span itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>">A product demonstration showing what's included in the box when you buy a Click 7 Lite Duospan>...:<br /> <p align="<a class="attribute-value">center</a>"> p> <p align="<a class="attribute-value">center</a>"><object width="<a class="attribute-value">500</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">281</a>"><param name="<a class="attribute-value">allowfullscreen</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">true</a>" /><param name="<a class="attribute-value">allowscriptaccess</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">always</a>" /><param name="<a class="attribute-value">movie</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0</a>" /><embed src="[http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0](view-source:http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0)" type="<a class="attribute-value">application/x-shockwave-flash</a>" allowfullscreen="<a class="attribute-value">true</a>" allowscriptaccess="<a class="attribute-value">always</a>" width="<a class="attribute-value">500</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">281</a>">embed>object> p> div> Page this code is used on: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/proddet.jsp?id=2016&cat=1 Could anyone confirm whether the above seems to be what we need to do / should be doing to get the most value from these videos for helping our web site rank better with Google / search engine results pages as well as getting rich snippets displayed? Lastly does the above code seem correct and include all the necessaries for rich snippets? Thanks for any pointers.
Image & Video Optimization | | jasef0 -
Local SEO: Can you add citations too fast?
Should you spread adding citations out over several weeks or can you add them all at once?
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Off-Page Local SEO for a Home-Based Businesses?
What are some ideas for optimizing for off-page local SEO when you're working with home-based businesses that don't necessarily want to share their physical address, and using a PO box is not an option for major local SEO directories?
Image & Video Optimization | | Inturact0 -
New Directory
I have been doing SEO for almost 10 years. I deal with mainly Industrial B2B Companies. I am entertaining starting a "Directory" It would be a a "local directory" for a tourist town I just moved to. Ther eis already an existing directory that seems to do very well....has been around quite q while with a PR of 5 and lota of good content. Am I kidding myself? I would like to think "long-term" since I will be living here but realize the obstacles. New Domain No trust No links Lots of content to develop. Any advice or suggestions? Possibly a way to buy an established domain? Platform to use? Ways to generate gest content etc. Thanks for any advice...positive or negative..
Image & Video Optimization | | Reportcard0