Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.
-
Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated! -
Thanks all for the answers, we will create new content and start from there, probably create an internal blog for more content creation...
-
I would leave the existing ones alone and create new page(s) targeting baptism and link to them prominently from the homepage and globally on the site, submit the URLs in WMT and add them to your sitemap.xml file for quicker indexing.
-
"So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?"
No, you'll run the risk of cannibalizing your christening rankings and moreover may confuse your customers. Remember, develop for your customers NOT for the search engines.
For example, I work for a law firm and our homepage ranks for all sorts of criminal crimes (DUI, Drugs, etc.) So if I see an area where I want to improve my rank, say for "criminal defense attorney" - I'll write new content for a blog post or page around that set of KWs instead of trying to get the homepage to rank for that KW among all the others.
-
Thanks nsauser for the response. So it sounds like the best strategy is to add to the homepage but not mess with any existing content and add the baptism keywords to any new content and or products.
The problem is we have a fairly static inventory and add new products pretty infrequently, so our best bet immediately would be content creation using the baptism keywords and any new products that are added to start hitting them with the baptism keywords?
So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?
-
Generally I shoot for 1 - 3 keywords per page and definitely only one theme per page. I know that homepages tend to rank for a lot of different KWs but maybe it's possible that you could add a Baptism related kw to your title (and in the content) without removing anything then that might be worth a try.
Otherwise I would create new pages and content to target the baptism related KWs. If you can link your new content from the homepage it will give it a boost to start out with. Internal linking is a great way to get content boosted in the SERPs especially if you have a good Domain Authority. Also, track these changes, the easiest way is to note them in Google Analytics. You want to be able to look back in 2 weeks or a month and see if your changes have helped or hurt.
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
-
Hey guys so i changed my title on the website
The old one was very keyword stuffed and repeated words. see its now gone from search for those main keywords do you think its just playing now and it will be back ?
On-Page Optimization | | johan81 -
Page Title versus H1 title
What's the difference between the Page Title and the H1 title? It seems like both summarize the page. Is it a wasted opportunity to make them the same? Should they be similar but slightly different?
On-Page Optimization | | amybethmegjo1 -
URL SEO: Better directory structure vs. exact keyword phrase
I am trying to understand how to best optimise a url for a page to rank high for specific keywords. Example: a top keyword search is "rental properties in new york". Question is does this keyword need to appear as this exact phrase in the url or should it be broken up into different directories for a better structure e.g.: www.abc.com/en/properties/new-york/rental OR www.abc.com/en/rental-properties-in-new-york Which will help the page rank higher (given all other things on the page are exactly the same)? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MH190 -
Should I be using the town or city in url with my keyword or keyphrase?
should I be using the town or city in url with my keyword or keyphrase? So lets say I'm trying to rank for butchers in home town should i put the town in the url as well so www.website.com/butchers-in-mytown is that bad? Or would it be best to just put www.website.com/butchers?
On-Page Optimization | | genkee0 -
How to separate your - keywords - and | Brand name in the Title Tag
I have traditionally used hyphens (-) and vertical bars (|) to separate out keywords/brands in title tags. A client has asked if other characters will work such as tilde (~), apersat (@), forward slash (/) etc. Are there any special characters we should steer clear of?
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Keywords on title
hi, some pages of my website showing keywords attached in google as part of page title, but the title doesn't have that keyword in it. So basically when you search for "keyword (1)" , page ranks for the keyword with this title <address>Keyword (1) + keyword (2)</address> <address>but the keyword (2) is not part of the title, but shows there in google's index.</address> <address> </address> <address>keyword (2) is </address> <address>can anyone help us understand why this is happening ?</address> <address>I 'd appreciate any help.</address> <address> </address> <address>thanks </address> <address>nick</address>
On-Page Optimization | | orion680 -
Do product pages need unique content or does having duplcate content hurt on those pages?
We are adding product rapidly to our website but this requires allowing duplicate to exist on our product pages of furniture-online.com. From an SEO standpoint do we need to make this content unique for each product. Since we aren't link building to specific product pages and we don't anticipate product pages being found in a search result, are we ok leaving the duplicate content in place and spending our dollars elsewhere?
On-Page Optimization | | gallreddy0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5