Content Rewriting and Page ranking
-
Lets say that a prior writer did a horrible job with more then a few pages on your site and you wanted to rewrite the content for each landing page. A few of these landing pages are actually ranking pretty decently would it be ok to rewrite them as long as you kept the keywords and the density some what equal?
-
Make big improvements to a few unimportant pages. See what happens. I think that this is relatively safe.
-
The pages in question are between 500-800 words long with a keyword density of 1-3% in variations. I am nervous about losing ranking on 1 in particular but it def needs an over haul.
-
I frequently rewrite short pages that were published many years ago with totally new, substantive content, with more and better images. They usuelly move up the SERPs within a few weeks.
-
Ryan's advice is solid. I'd also keep a close eye on the page level metrics for these landing pages. If the copy is horrible, I'm guessing that most of your KPIs aren't great either. (My point being that high keyword traffics are great when they bring in qualified traffic that leads to conversions, but are no good to you if the traffic doesn't convert.) Best of luck!
Christy
-
This would make a great split test from a UX perspective but also be a good way to slowly introduce the new content.
Just from search, If the page changes dramatically it might bounce out of the rankings briefly, but if the content topic and contextual relevance is mostly the same it should reappear. You could try introducing parts or all of the new content as an update to the top fold of the page as well, monitor rankings, then remove the parts you don't like. Several ways to test it out... cheers!
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
-
What Service Page Strategy Should We Use to Target City-Specific Local Intent Service Keywords?
Hey guys! We are targeting a number of cities in the Nassau and Suffolk County areas for foundation repair, insulation, and mold remediation keywords, and we were debating on creating city-specific pages for each location and service, or creating one service page for each type of service that contains all of the services and solutions within that service category for each city. Example: City-Specific Pages for Each Service: One page for say foundation repair, one page for foundation crack repair, one page for foundation problems, etc. (for each target city) Service Category Pages for Each City: One page for foundation contractors that lists all services on one page in sections. Which one do you think is better for local SEO and rankings? Both seem to have their advantages and disadvantages to me. Just to throw a couple out there, the category pages may not rank as high as the city pages for each individual service if our competitors have a whole page designed for that service and we only have a part of a page covering the topic. At the same time, they would save labor hours, technical issues would be less, and they would be condensed, and we would have WAY less mess on the backend. I appreciate your expert opinion on this one. The site is www. zavzaseal.com in case you want to check us out.
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
Local Site stuck on page 2 for years. Can’t penetrate page 1! Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette. I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/ If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1. When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening. We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results. To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page. Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!
Local SEO | | Seanthewood1230 -
After Maccabees should I consolidate some of my content?
I'm a local dentist and have a very successful 'veneers price' blog page. People really want to know the cost of veneers and it gets hundreds of visits a day locally and nationally. I also have a main Veneers services page talking about how you get veneers and what they are etc. This gets lots of local visitors but less nationally. I have recently tried to replicate it's success with 'dental implants price', 'tooth whitening price' and others but they've just bombed. I replicated the style and the blogs are similar in structure, same links etc - but obviously totally unique content and topics. The price articles get no search and it's seemed to hurt the main services pages too. They are all linked to one another in a systematic and helpful-to-the-user hierarchy and structure. Maccabees doesn't seem to have made any difference to the veneers traffic but should I consolidate the other price articles into their respective main pages or leave it and see what happens. They have been at less than position 20 for months now. Whereas if you type in Veneers Cost UK, you'll probably see us in the featured snippet and position one or two. How do I know whether google regards the price of something to be a different topic from that thing and worthy of it's own page? Do they just want everything all on one massive page? That seems a bit clumsy to me. Thanks! 🙂
Local SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool0 -
Domain Forwarding and Rankings
I recently purchased two custom domains (www.greenvillencshredding.com and www.shreddinggreenvillenc.com) that are being forwarded to a page on my site (http://www.crmi-online.com/shredding-greenville-nc.html). The purpose for this is because I am trying everything I know to get my rankings above my competitor for shredding services in our market of Greenville,NC. I thought that purchasing a custom domain might help but I have not seen any results and they are ranking in the bottom 50's. Any suggestions to help get my rankings up for my service/area? Thanks a bunch!
Local SEO | | CRMI0 -
Does blocking traffic from a country via a firewall affect my ranking?
The main conversion point on my site is a contact form completion. Approximately a third of my conversions last year were from an international country we don't sell our services in, and all those conversions were attempts to sell us services. We are considering blocking the traffic to the site from that country. I'm trying to figure out if that will negatively affect my SEO rank here in the US before we proceed with that plan. Does anyone have any experience with implementing this tactic?
Local SEO | | Bear.Group0 -
Geo content and where Googlebot crawls from.
Does anyone have experience with geo-specific content on their homepage and how the location of the Googlebot impacts rank and/or traffic? I ask because looking in Search Console today, I noticed the thumbnail image of our site is different than usual and it was pulling in a specific geo-location and wondered if there is any value/concern on how Google sees our site from different locations and if it could impact SERP's.
Local SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Local Pages for National (Service) Companies
Hi there, I was wanting to know the value of local pages for a service company that operates nationally. They do not have a phone number or address, but they do maintain employees in each of the locations and are thus, keen to emphasize this fact with location pages. The location pages merely explain that they have staff in each of the locations and experience working there, alongside a variety of information that is relevant to the industry/market in that location. None of the location pages are currently ranking well at all - in fact, all of the ones I've looked at so far have had a page authority of 1. Most of the major towns, cities and counties for the entire UK have been covered which means the location pages constitute a significant proportion of all of the pages for the entire site. My questions are: Is a national service company likely to benefit from having location pages? And could it even be something they could be penalised for at some point down the line? Thanks very much, in advance, for your time. Kind Regards, Tom
Local SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Ranking http://www when its forwarded to https://www
Hello, I have a question about the best practices for assigning "https" and "http" versions. We have added https://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and was ranking. However I noticed with my other tools, that http://www.mysite.com version had better anchor text distribution and also had better Trust Flow were as the https://www.mysite.com version had no trust flow at all. Can I assign http://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and still have it do a 301 Redirect to https://www.mysite.com. This way I can capitalize on the better anchor text profile and trust flow, and still rank properly? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks
Local SEO | | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT0