Under-performing blog as part of main site
-
Hi
I was hoping to get some thoughts and opinions on our blog. It is part of our main site (not on a subdomain) but performs very badly, pulling in very little organic traffic (only accounting for 0.6% of our organic traffic).
Every page of the blog is listed in our sitemap, and using Screaming Frog I've done spot checks of several pages to see if they are indexed, which they have been. Looking at Google's text cache, all the content is visible.
Pages are often well shared on social media (for example): http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog/2014/10/antarctica-photography-safari-2014-updates.aspx
I'm aware that we do need more links coming into the blog but I still feel that it should be performing better than it is.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
-
I think that the blog has nice content.
Many of the posts are competing for queries where there is very little search volume.
Go to this page... http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog.aspx?destination=india read the titles of the posts. Are people are searching for those topics?
I think that the blog posts will get more traffic if their titles align with search volume or if their topics align with search volume.
-
Kata,
I would suggest the following. I am assuming you are using Moz Pro. What i would do is work with your client on a key word list. I would have them list the searches that they want to show up on and then enter these search strings into the key word tracker.
I would then work with the client on a content plan that is closely tied to ranking on these searches. This works well because the content that you or your client writes that ranks is then shown as the ranking URL in the key word ranking report. This visual feedback seems to really help clients see results form their work. I had one client go from 4 ranking URLs to 67 in under six months once they had this feedback look. This tool also had them go through the web site with the page grader and make sure they had pages on their main site ranking for their most important key word strings.
Hope this helps,
Ron
-
I am not sure the blog is the problem, if I search with a query containing the title of that article: https://www.google.it/webhp?q=antarctica+photography+safari
I can find it as third result. Which keywords are you after? Because if I narrow the search to just antartica+photography things change.
If I look at the keyword density in that article (like just using this tootl http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/), I get the impression without going black hat or irritate google copy could be a little bit more keyword focused.
The body is 900 words which is not so bad. But if I query for antarctica+photography competitors have a much larger copy and a probably better structure (headings are not just dates but do feed keywords to crawler).
Have you run a report on semrush for the domain? http://imgur.com/1pJ3G1i 229 positions is not much. Expecially given the 243 backlinks, which is not bad either: http://imgur.com/cuIwiLa
I would try to improve the copy of the articles, check the html in more depth, and review the backlinks profile for all the usual things (link quality, anchor diversity, deep linking, etc..).
-
Hi Kate,
From a quick browse, one slight improvement that you could implement is a template for your title tags and meta descriptions.
Google uses your title tags as ranking signals, and at the moment, yours don't seem to follow any kind of pattern. Best practice would indicate that you include the brand name at the start or the end, and that you could pull in the title of each blog post to use in the title. You should also try to include some sort of keyword for the page in the title if you can.
Although the meta description is not used as a ranking signal by Google, it is one of the first impressions a users gets, so the meta description should be enticing and make the user want to click through to the page.
Hope it helps! Good luck!
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
-
Blog.ledsupply.com VERSUS ledsupply.com/blog
Hi All- We had a security issue that started on out blog (ledsupply.com/blog) and moved into our shopping cart, so IT suggested and moved the blog to its own server. This means we had to change the URL structure. It's now blog.ledsupply.com/ instead of ledsupply.com/blog...Is there evidence or opinion on whether this will effect SEO/Traffic (assuming we set-up redirects, etc.)? I remember reading that Google suggests having your BLOG be part of your main domain and not a SUB domain, so I'm very hesitant to switch and also welcome any additional security measure suggestions we could set-up, so that we can keep the preferred domain structure. Thank you so much! -Brooke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saultienut0 -
Working around Dev Site
I am working around development site. All pages are 'nofollow'. What can I advice on, when it come to SEO and is there any good article or checklist that I can go through. One thing I wanted to know is how can I check for broken links or meta data or any other SEO analytics if the page is 'nofollow' and I cannot crawl it with screaming frog or any other tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atlanticocean0 -
My site has a loft of leftover content that's irrelevant to the main business -- what should I do with it?
Hi Moz! I'm working on a site that has thousands of pages of content that are not relevant to the business anymore since it took a different direction. Some of these pages still get a lot of traffic. What should I do with them? 404? Keep them? Redirect? Are these pages hurting rankings for the target terms? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Cooking Recipes Blog Links
Hi, I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc... I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout. Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Blog URL Canonical
Hi Guy's, I would like to know your thoughts on the following set-up for blog canonical. Option 1 domain.com/blog = <link rel="canonical" href="domin.com/blog"> domain.com/blog-category/general = <link rel="canonical" href="domain.com/blog"> domain.com/blog-article/how-to-set-canonical = no canonical option 2 domain.com/blog = <link rel="canonical" href="domin.com blog"="">(as option 1)</link rel="canonical" href="domin.com> domain.com/blog-category/general = <link rel="canonical" href="domain.com blog-category="" general"="">(this time has the canonical of the category)</link rel="canonical" href="domain.com> domain.com/blog-article/how-to-set-canonical = <link rel="canonical" href="domain.com blog-article="" how-to-set-canonical"="">(this time has the canonical of the article full URL)</link rel="canonical" href="domain.com> Just not sure which is the best option, or even if it is any of the above! Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan1e10 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Setting up a Blog - Guest Authors
I am planning on setting up a blog in the next couple months. We would like to have 10 different categories that professionals can write about and submit articles. Any suggestions on which blogging software to put on the site. So far I have heard of WordPress and Joomla. (Not sure which is the best version) We want it to maybe have the bloggers logo or pictures, date, etc. None of us have had any experience with this so we needed some input. I have been reading everywhere that blogging is huge for SEO and so I just wanted to improve ours plus maybe drive more traffic with a high level blog for professionals. Any ideas or even books that I should go purchase to study up. When we do this it would be great to get it set up properly from the get go. 🙂 Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0