Looking for SEO advice
-
Hi,
I have a website that has been built with SEO in mind from the beginning but it's failing to rank at all. We have checked everything and found nothing we see that would be negatively affected the SEO value.
The link is http://www.fancydoorsedmonton.com/
Any insight on anything you may find would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
-
Hi Anton!
EGOL is truly a content expert, and I second his suggestion that more content would be the top priority here. You mention ranking failures. What terms, specifically, are you failing to rank for? And are you looking at local or organic rankings? Do you feel you've built strong enough content for those terms? Have you gone through something like our Local SEO Checklist to try to identify problems, like citation inconsistency, reviews, technical issues, etc? https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist
The truth is, there are a couple of hundred factors that are believed to impact local rank. Auditing your own presence and comparing that to an audit of your competitors generally yields many clues as to why you are being outranked. Hope the Checklist will be a good jumping off point!
-
Just saying what I would do if this was my site.... and the attitude and panache that I would bring to this job.
If I click through to the "interior doors" page I see almost nothing. The page looks empty. I am ready to leave. Then I see those "+" signs and my mind is triggered... I wonder if those expand (this will not occur with many people). I click one of them and the content expands. Now I see that this page has a lot of content - but it's totally hidden. Lots of people (including myself) believe that Google depreciates this type of "hidden" content and does not give it full value in search).
We had some of this expanding content on a site and it failed to engage visitors and Google didn't respect it. We got rid of it. Visitor time-on-site increased. Long tail rankings increased. Traffic increased.
If this was my site I would get rid of the expanding content and get ALL OF MY STUFF out there in the open. Then when a visitor lands on this page he is hit with a flood of interior doors. I would take no chances that the visitor will figure out that there is a lot of content on this page. I would slap their face with it. Make them say... "WOW". To do that, I would significantly increase the size of the images, I would significantly upgrade their quality, I would probably have two photos per category of door and I would also expand the text and improve its educational value. Make the visitor say... "WOW! THAT's REALLY NICE. I UNDERSTAND. I WANT THAT."
Your products are visual elements of a home. You need to present them well.
You are supposed to be THE FANCY DOOR COMPANY but you are hiding it. Fancy design is making your site look like you got nuthin'. Ghostland. I was almost ready to leave your site when I discovered the .pdfs. If this was my site, all of that pdf stuff would be on html pages. And, I would make sure to promote and have bold blue link text links to that pdf content so they can print it, place it on the kitchen table and carry it around.
So, get ALL of your good content on the site with generous amounts of text. Tell the visitor everything. Show 'em your stuff.
You are also doing little to educate the visitor. "Hollow Core doors are made with interwoven corrugated hollow cells supporting the outer face of the door while keeping it lightweight and easy to install." HUH? Show me. I would make a separate page about every type of door. Show what they are all about. Help visitors understand. How they are made. How they are different. Show why and where they are used.
You are THE FANCY DOOR COMPANY. Kick up your presentation to match your name. Show people that you know your stuff. Kick up the content of this website so that it is 10x better than any of your competitors in the entire province - or All Of Canada. Right now you are just another door company - especially if they don't find your .pdfs. Do everything that you can to impress and educate and sell on the web.
If this was my site it would get hundreds of more hours of work to build up new educational pages for every category of door and other products. I would make this site match the impressiveness of that big building that you are in.
Finally this website is also r e a l l y s l o w because it has a lot of fancy code and features. That stuff would be gone if this was my site. It would have butt naked code and when you click the navigation the page would bust open. BAM!
You might be offended because I have kicked you in the butt and told you that this site needs hundreds of hours worth of new content. I have told you what I would do if I owned this website, the attitude that I would bring to it and the content competitiveness that would come with that.
I have not dissed the design. I actually like it. The only change is to put the content all-out-there all-of-the-time. I might get a fight when I told the designer we are going to the wide-open and all-out presentation. But, that is what we would be moving to without compromise. I would be betting the entire value of the current site and hundreds of more hours (maybe more) on the an all-out-there presentation and lots of new educational pages.
About your rankings.... I see you in the SERPs for your products when I use the word "Edmonton". You are there, but deep. Sometimes you are in the local results and on the map. If you get more content and a presentation that wows the visitor, I feel strongly that you will earn more visitor engagement and that you will earn a place in a lot more long tail searches.
Finally... I would add a little more language that invites the visitor to your store and tells him/her about the expertise and treatment that they will receive when they arrive.
And.... Your pdfs have FD+M on every page. I would change that to FancyDoorsEdmonton.com on every page. I didn't see your URL a single time in the pdf (I didn't search with a magnifier). You want people to be able to type in your URL. It should be ubiquitous on your marketing materials. I would also embed a few links in the pdf that go to pages on your website. Then if people link to the .pdf those links will flow power into your website.
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's your proudest accomplishment in regards to SEO?
After many years in the industry, you come to realize a few things. One of of the biggest pain points for us at web daytona was being able to give clients a quick keyword ranking cost estimation. After multiple trial and error and relying on API data from one of the most reliable SEO softwares in our industry, we were able to develop an SEO tool that allows us to quickly and accurately get the estimated cost for a given keyword (s) using multiple variables. Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before. Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month. The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally. So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal. That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise. Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too. You can see it for yourself here. Keyword-Rank-Cost-Ectimator-Tool-by-Web-Daytona-Agency.png
Local Website Optimization | | WebDaytona0 -
What Mystery Local SEO Factors Are At Play Here?
Absolutely perplexed on the ranking factors for Google Maps (hence also the 3-pack in normal search results). Are seeing search queries that return 3-pack and organic result like this and wondering why these sites are getting 3-pack preference?Not that sites 2 and 3 are no closer to the test user's location than Site 4. All 4 sites have a street address showing.3-pack result:#1 - Site 1 - No reviews. Same distance as Site 4 to user. #2 - Site 2 - 1 review for 1 star. Farther from user than site 4. #3 - Site 3 - 2 reviews for 5-star average. Farther from user than site 1, 2, and 4.#4 (not show in 3-pack) - Site 4 - 6 reviews with 6 star rating, closer to user than site 2 and 3.Organic results below 3-pack:#1 - Site 4#2 - Site 4#3 - Other site#4 - Site 1Sites 2 and 3 not in top 10 organic non-map resultsSo what would be the most likely ranking factors keeping making site 1-3 rank above site 4 in the 3-pack/map results?If on-page and backlink factors were at play, you'd expect to see sites 1, 2 and 3 higher than site 4, and in the case of site 2 and 3 at least in the top 10 of the organic results. All sites were similar distance to the user.
Local Website Optimization | | SEO18050 -
Question About Local SEO
Hey all, If a business operates in one city but works with associated organizations across multiple regions how would this impact a local SEO campaign? For example, a transportation company is located in Texas but services the Northwest and New England by outsourcing to smaller transportation companies in each of those regions. Would it be wise to create pages for each region they service on their website and then break that down in further into specific cities? Also, would it be worth targeting local search terms even though specific cities are serviced by the associated organizations and not the parent company itself? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Local Website Optimization | | mostcg0 -
Should I use pipe in title tags for local seo?
Hi, I've created a bunch of landing pages for local areas, reading, windsor, slough etc for the title tag I have for Windsor Emergency Electrician Windsor - BrandName should I be using a pipe in the tag to further help search engines learn/identify the location? Emergency Electrician | Windsor - BrandName Thank you Kev
Local Website Optimization | | otex1 -
Can to many 301 redirects damage my Ecommerce Site - SEO Issue
Hello All, I have an eCommerce website doing online hire. We operate from a large number of locations (100 approx) and my 100 or so categories have individual locations pages against them example - Carpet Cleaners (category) www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC12
carpet cleaner hire Manchester www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners/Manchester
carpet cleaner hire london
carpet cleaner hire Liverpool patio heater (category)
patio heater hire Manchester
patio heater hire London
patio heater hire Liverpool And so on..... I have unique content for some of these pages but given that my site had 40,000 odd urls, I do have a large amount of thin/duplicate content and it's financially not possible to get unique
content written for every single page for all my locations and categories. Historically, I used to rank very well for these location pages although this year, things have dropped off and recently , I was hit with the Panda 4.0 update which i understand targets thin content. Therefore what I am int he process of doing is reducing the number of locations I want to rank for and have pages for thus allowing me to achieve both a higher percentage of unique content over duplicate/thin content on the whole site and only concerntrate on a handful of locations which I can realistically get unique content written for. My questions are as follows. By reducing the number of locations, my website will currently 301 redirect these location page i have been dropping back to it's parent category.
e.g carpet cleaner hire Liverpool page - Will redirect back to the parent Carpet cleaner hire Page. Given that I have nearly 100 categories to do , this will mean site will generate thousands of 301 redirects when I reduce down to a handful of locations per category. The alternative Is that I can 404 those pages ?... What do yout think I should do ?.. Will it harm me by having so many 301's . It's essentially the same page with a location name in it redirecting back to the parent. Some of these do have unqiue content but most dont ?. My other question is - On a some of these categories with location pages, I currently rank very well for locally although there is no real traffic for these location based keywords (using keyword planner). Shall I bin them or keep them? Lastly , Once I have reduced the number of location pages , I will still have thin content until , I can get the unique content written for them. Should I remove these pages until that point of leave them as it is? It will take a few months
to get all the site with unique content. Once complete, I should be able to reduce my site down from 40,000 odd pages to say 5,000 pages Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks
Pete0 -
Multilingual site making new URLs, how to preserve SEO juice?
Hello! My site currently serves content in german and english, however without having separate URLs (it depends on Accept-Language and has a submitform for changing language based on set cookies). The site appears extremely well in the search engine, with many keywords ranking at #1-10. They appear on the german and english google search, with the first one bringing the best results. It's however the english site that appears in the results. I want to change to a better approach by having subdirectories for each language, as I'm extending the site, I know how to do this but I have found -nowhere- any infos on how to preserve my search engine ranks? If I keep the english version as homepage and send german visitors to /de/, might this kill my position in the german search engine which is very important, as the new frontpage under /de/ would become more relevant and the english one maybe less? Or should I keep the german version the default one and send english visitors elsewhere? What happens with my search positions, if I have no side on the / but visitors are always send to either /en/ or /de/? Every help is greatly appreciated, as I found a lot of articles everywhere on how to make a multilingual site, but nowhere anything on how it affects current search results.
Local Website Optimization | | innovacy0 -
Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?
HI,rategy. So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords. I was curious about this type of strategy. Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc. I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile? Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google. But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start. Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it? Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0 -
Local SEO Tools for UK
Hi guys I'm looking for any recommendations for local SEO tools in the UK? I keep stumbling across a variety of different tools but they all seem to cater for the US market only. Any tools or tips would be greatly received!
Local Website Optimization | | DHS_SH0