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
-
With 301 Redirects Does Changing URLs Matter?
We are redesigning our website in order to give it a more modern visual look. For the most part all the content will remain the same. Our old site is hosted on .asp so all of our current URLs look something like this: www.example.com/products/food.asp We plan on using 301 redirects in order to update every URL and remove the .asp. Since we are going to be doing 301 redirects for every existing URL anyways, does it matter from an SEO and ranking standpoint, if we also change the content and structure of the URL? For example, would we see a ranking impact if we were to change the above example URL to www.example.com/food? Obviously we want to try to retain as much link juice and ranking factors as possible during this redesign. Another issue we are seeing is with the image file names of our existing website images. We are moving to a new CMS platform (WordPress) that automatically saves images using a folder path similar to this: wp-uploads/2015-08/food. Will that change affect our SEO or ranking at all? When Google crawls an image does it care about the full path? Any insight would be much appreciated! 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Update old article or publish new content and redirect old post?
Hi all, I'm targetting a keyword and we used to rank quite good for it. Last couple of months traffic of that keyword (and variations) is going down a bit. I wrote an extensive new post on the same topic, much more in dept and from 600 to 1800 words covering the same topic. Is it better to update the old article and mention that it's updated recently, or publish a new post and redirect the old post to the new post?
On-Page Optimization | | jorisbrabants0 -
How can i change my landing page title in search engines?
Hi SEO folks, Please help! I've changed my home page title 30 days ago, but my Google search results is still showing the old one! Why is that happening? can I've a brief explanation please so i can learn. thanks a million cRnPa6d
On-Page Optimization | | aptustelecom0 -
Wordpress duplicate titles - can't find original title tags
I added new code to rewrite the page titles <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title> But I can't find the normal title tags in the Header PHP file in editor so I now have duplicate titles tags in the source code This is the code - can't see what else would be titles? This is the website ... http://apexgenerators.co.uk/ <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title> eFavIcon(); ?> eCSS(); ?> enabled('Theme')) { ?> http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=PT+Sans:400,700,400italic,700italic" />
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Can you change meta description at any time without loosing rankings?
I'm wondering if it is possible to change the meta description of a page on your site at any time without it affecting rankings on google? Is it only changing how my SERP looks? Or could bad things happen to changing your meta description? Appreciate all opinions on this one, thank you guys!
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett0 -
Will a new domain name help rankings
If I purchase a domain name that links to my site with the new domain name being keyword specific....will that help boost rankings in Google? Reason I ask is that a particular website always ranks higher than ours because of their domain name (keyword specific). They are currently not even "open" and they still manage to rank high. I checked for links with the seomoz tools but did not see any high links etc.. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | teachcsg0 -
User experience regarding dulpicate content and managing this content with google.
Hi long title i know! We are moving on to magento and have chosen to allocate a specific colour to each category using corresponding tabbed navigation for user experience.All products within each of the coloured tabs then inherit the repective colour, giving the products a category identiy within the store. This layout has had a positive feedback from our "testers" As a lot of our products are seasonal and can be represented in different categories there is a significant amount of duplicate content. ATM i see our options as being: Alter the site structure so that the category is not shown in the url, therefore eliminating our duplicate products. The downside of this is that the colour co-ordination of the categories would not work at product level as its the category path that assigns the colour. create canonical links for every duplicate, can this be damaging? keep the duplicates and do nothing let google decide the most important version of a product. any guidance would be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Keyword issue
On this site filmeonlinenoi.com the keyphrase "filme online gratis" its auto-cannibalizating?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexsmenaru0