Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
-
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives.
The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam.
The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO.
Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate
I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks in advance!
-
You're probably not using google.ca. It ranks slightly lower on google.com.
-
Hi Keri,
See my response to Andy below. I agree that the keyword isn't essential, and not even that great, I'm just more curious as to why; actually ranking it for the term isn't as critical as my initial question made it sound
-
Hi Andy,
I fully agree with both of you. I should've prefaced the question by saying that this isn't a big issue on my end, just something I found very strange. Still hoping to diagnose it, just so I know how to deal with the problem if it comes up down the road with a more relevant intent-heavy keyword. Sounds like the consensus might be 'it's just too broad.'
-
Hi Josh,
Keri has asked the same question I was thinking about when reading this.
One thing to consider around this is that SEO isn't just about getting people to your site - it's about getting the right people. I personally would be looking for phrases like "charitable donations", "charity donations", "donate to charity", etc. Those people that are searching for those phrases have one clear action in mind, whereas "donate" could be anything, including people just looking for general information.
-Andy
-
I'm going to answer your question with another question. What kind of value does a referral for 'donate' give you? Is such a broad keyword one that is going to bring you in the right type of person, or are you better off building content regarding the terms that convert better or target more qualified searchers?
-
Personalization?
I have you at 5-6
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
-
Ecommerce category pages & improving rankings
Hi Moz 🙂 I work on an ecommerce site & am getting stuck with how to improve rankings on category pages. I have a competitor who writes loads of content for their category pages under tabs & they perform very well. The content isn't particularly helpful, more about their range and what they offer. I have tested adding similar content under a tab to some of our category pages - with some performing well & others not as well. I know this isn't ideal, and I'd like some help with an alternative. Does anyone have tips on improving rankings on category pages? I don't have much control on the layout, this is controlled by our parent company which restricts us. I am researching writing user guides, but these will be on other pages not directly on the category page & the way we have to add them is a lot of manual work for our webmaster, so I can't get them up as quickly as I'd like. I have seen REI have a small bit of content at the top of their pages that link to guides e.g - https://www.rei.com/c/static-and-rescue-ropes But obviously their domain authority is so high already, that they don't need as much help as me 🙂 At the moment I have some new Chair pages I need to rank, these are competitive and any ideas would be great 🙂 Here are some examples: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ergonomic-office-chairs http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/executive-office-chairs Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Why our page not ranking even searching for exact h1 tag?
Even I search for exact h1 tag heading from our homepage, it's (homepage) not been showing up on TOP of the results. Other websites with partial match of search query are ranking above us; why this is happening? And other website with same text as normal paragraph is ranking on top. But not out h1 tag from homepage? How come normal text of unrelated website is ranking above h1 heading from homepage of own website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
I have removed over 2000+ pages but Google still says i have 3000+ pages indexed
Good Afternoon, I run a office equipment website called top4office.co.uk. My predecessor decided that he would make an exact copy of the content on our existing site top4office.com and place it on the top4office.co.uk domain which included over 2k of thin pages. Since coming in i have hired a copywriter who has rewritten all the important content and I have removed over 2k pages of thin pages. I have set up 301's and blocked the thin pages using robots.txt and then used Google's removal tool to remove the pages from the index which was successfully done. But, although they were removed and can now longer be found in Google, when i use site:top4office.co.uk i still have over 3k of indexed pages (Originally i had 3700). Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and more importantly how i can fix it? Our ranking on this site is woeful in comparison to what it was in 2011. I have a deadline and was wondering how quickly, in your opinion, do you think all these changes will impact my SERPs rankings? Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Re-platform effects on Page Rank
We are performing a major replatform for an ecommerce client who has many top listings on page 1 in Google SERPs for very competitive terms. We are implementing a 301 redirect for all existing URLs that they have now to the appropriate new URLs, but the client is concerned with how deploying a new site with 100% new URLs and site structure will impact their Page Rank. From our experience, the 301 redirects should cover it but wanted to see if there is a way to predictively forecast page rank effects as a result of re-platforming.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bucktown0 -
High number of items per page or low number with more category pages?
In SEO terms, what would be the best method: High number of items per page or low number with more pages? For example, this category listing here: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/90/fsx-civil-aircraft/ It has 10 items per page. Would there be any benefit of changing a listing like that to 20 items in order to decrease the number of pages in the category? Also, what other ways could you increase the SEO of category listings like that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Why does this site rank on the 1st page
i dont mean to be calling any site out im just scratching my head on this one.- I can't see any signal that would make it worthy of ranking on the first page for keyword loose diamonds. page http://www.jewelryexchange.com/DiamondResults.aspx Am i missing something all tools seem to say the site isn't worthy- All help appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0