SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
-
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do...
MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have.
If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them?
Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the ArticleI want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff.EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.
-
Good advice. When there's a potentially large impact (organic makes up such a large percentage of your traffic) you really do need to tread carefully.
I've seen more than one site that rolled out sweeping changes in, shall we say an overly enthusiastic manner, and accidentally remove themselves from search completely!
I would recommend doing some research and identifying the real low hanging fruit. What queries/topics/categories is there the greatest search opportunity. If you're already doing well for particular terms then there's not much scope for improvement and the impact of getting things wrong is worse.
Can you look at particular pages that are performing badly. Look for landing pages for organic search traffic that have poor engagement metrics. This can identify poorly targeted keywords, or missing/poor content, miss-understood search intent etc.
- Make sure you document everything (with dates!).
- Don't try to do too much too fast. Small steady tests are safest and make sure you give your changes long-enough to see any impact.
- Make sure you have some kind of QA. Run checks before and after you make your changes. It's great if you can have some kind of check list. Watch out for unintended consequences.
- Are you tinkering with the live site or is there a development/deployment process you need to follow are there other people involved? If there is - stick to the process.
-
If the traffic is relatively stable on the site, then testing on newly published pages and monitoring their tragectory when compared to previous articles might work.
Also, I think 2 weeks is a bit short. I'd shoot more for 3 weeks to a month if you want to see where they settle. If you're using new pages, just use the same time frame for those as when you compare them to previous article data.
-
Thank you!!! That's exactly what I was thinking, but was unsure. How long would you take your sample for, though? Two weeks? They have a super high-impact site, but all their SEO is news-y, so the pages wouldn't have much time to live.
That's kind of my worry about testing, is that their pages are all entertainment news, so they have an expiration date. So declining on page-search that I track may be due to its age and not anything I'm doing.
Anyway, thank you SO MUCH William!
Any other suggestions more than welcome. Thanks again, guys!
-
Sounds like the site is big enough that you have the luxury taking a nice little chunk of pages, doing your tests, seeing what happens, and then deciding whether to make the change site-wide. Take a good sample of pages across you site to test on, make sure you know their baseline ranks and traffic to those pages, make the changes, monitor, test some more, etc. This way, no guess work
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
-
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
How can i embed my video into a table using SEO embed setting?
We use Wistia.com to embed our videos. They have different options for embed settings and we prefer to use the SEO embed setting, however, when we use that setting we aren't able to insert the video in a table side by side with another image or text. When we try, the video jumps out of the table and the table gets (for lack of a better work) out of wack. When we embed the video with the iframe embed setting, the video can be placed in a table with no issues, but then we don't get the SEO credit. We have our site in wordpress. I'm not sure if that has something to do with the tables getting messed up. Check out this link to see an example of how we want the video to show up. http://www.3000doorhangers.com/ Any suggestions as to how we can use the SEO embed setting within a table as shown in the above link?
Web Design | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Geo Tagging Your Website?
Is it worth it to do this to your site if it has a local focus? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Thanks! ~Ricky
Web Design | | RickyShockley0 -
Transitioning to a dynamic home page. Impact on SEO?
Home page redesign advice, please. We're a growing college textbook publishing company; a unique one in that we publish everything under an open license. Our homepage www.flatworldknowledge.com has a solid page score (80), and since our product serves several different customers/audiences -- students, faculty, bookstores -- we're transitioning to a dynamic home page approach. Returning instructors will be served a personalized faculty page, returning students a student oriented page featuring the books they've most recently accessed, and first time/anon visitors will receive a more neutral welcome page until we know more about them. Pros, cons with this change to a dynamic homepage? What should we be thinking about/concerned about from an SEO perspective? How do you address title tags? Will this approach dilute page authority? Thanks all!
Web Design | | JasonBilog0 -
Homepage Menu Change
For the site I work on we would like to make a change on the homepage from having categories on the left nav to a meta menu on the top nav. The reason we are doing this is an attempt to both make finding products better for the customer and we feel it is more aesthetically pleasing. Could this negatively affect our SEO and ranking even if we use the exact same links? Are there any other negative repercussions you feel could come from this? Thanks for any help!
Web Design | | ClaytonKendall0 -
What can this charity site do to improve SEO?
Hello wise ones, We have been working with the charity Volunteers of America to create a new site for their car donation program at carshelpingpeople.org They are a national charity with extensive local programs run by regional affiliates, so the site is divided into a small national section linked to Regional Affiliate sections. You get to the regional sections either by entering your zip code or clicking on your state in the bottom nav of the national pages. Right now we have developed regional sections for Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Delaware and the Philadelphia area. The site is about 2 1/2 months old, and while our conversion rate is pretty good (7%) our organic search ranking isn't improving as quickly as we'd like to see. Car donation is a very competitive space, and we would appreciate any advice on how to improve the SEO of the site. Thanks so much.
Web Design | | Phibnax0 -
Will my site structure provide decent SEO?
We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex
Web Design | | dbuckles0 -
What's the best SEO option for jQuery image carousels?
My client wants a fancy jquery carousel at the top of their home page, as is all the rage these days. I would like to add some nice SEO friendly text to that carousel, but I'm not sure how best to do that..I assume that by keeping the text which will appear in the carousel in divs on the page, which will be swapped out as the images cycle, it should still be easily picked up by search engines?
Web Design | | TroyCarlson1