SEO on a mature site - diminishing returns?
-
I have a site that has been indexed in Google since 2002. Back then, I secured all of the highly recommended links of the time, like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, and got just a couple very high PR links from highly relevant sites. That was enough to get us top listing on our best "niche" keywords and many long tail searches. Once we got to that point, we got lazy and have just relied upon our original links and any natural links that came our way. We also have a very highly detailed Adwords campaign in which we bid on almost any keyword that has every resulted in an organic conversion.
A few months ago, I decided to kick our SEO efforts up a notch and hired a company to do an aggressive link building campaign and target some very high search volume terms that we had previously given up on. The campaign has been very successful in getting high ranking for several targetted terms. However, I am seeing zero impact on our site traffic or sales.
I am beginning to wonder if Google's algorithms are so efficient that all of this extra SEO work is to no avail. Is there a point of diminishing returns where it is not productive to optimize a site's organic listings any further? Between our Adwords campaign, our already pretty good organic results, and google's ability to divine a searchers intent and lead them to the most relevant results, how do you decide when there is little benefit to further optimization? It is an important question for me because I have been considering putting a lot of work into adding content to our ecommerce site and I would hate to do all that work for nothing.
-
Are the keyword terms this "SEO Company" is ranking you under receiving any actual searches?
-
"The campaign has been very successful in getting high ranking for several targetted terms. However, I am seeing zero impact on our site traffic or sales."
Something is wrong here. Does analytics say that you are getting traffic for these new terms?
Your statements address total traffic. The traffic through these terms might be up but down elsewhere.
-
Are you saying that having both paid and organic results on the same SERP page only results in 1%-20% increase over just one or the other? If that is correct, it would explain why I am seeing such diminishing returns.
-
Research has been done which shows that having a top ranking for both the organic and paid versions of a search term results in a higher click through chance. The increase is usually anywhere between 1% and 20%. Nothing dramatic, but it helps.
People are more likely to click on an organic result over a paid one, though. Searchers are generally slightly distrustful of paid ad results. So I'd say your problem may lie with my 1&2 advice tips.
Check your adwords account to be sure of the search terms your ads are displaying for. Are they displaying for very broad searches, and not the exact keywords you specified? Are they being clicked on and converting for those broader searches? If so you might want to change up the exact keywords you use both for Adwords and your Organic SEO.
-
I avoid personalization of search results by searching in Apple Safari and clicking Reset Safari before each search. I find that my results match what various rank checkers report, so it seems to be working.
I am optimizing for keywords that convert well for us in Adwords but are expensive to bid on. I think part of the reason we are not seeing big results is that people searching for what we sell may be just as likely to click a paid ad as an organic result. I have always wondered if having a high ranking on both paid and organic results on the same page has a benefit over just one or the other.
-
The campaign has been very successful in getting high ranking for several targetted terms. However, I am seeing zero impact on our site traffic or sales.
I am beginning to wonder if Google's algorithms are so efficient that all of this extra SEO work is to no avail.
All you're setting out to do with SEO work is impove your rank though, if that's happening but you're not getting traffic then it's possible you've been targeting the wrong keywords.
Can you see your clickthrough rate in webmaster tools for these new keywords? Are they exceptionally low? Perhaps your meta description isn't appealing and you're ranking are all for nothing.
I would work on bringing those people who see the results to the site by testing the meta descriptions, supplementing the link building with some social stuff to distribute your new content and a bit of conversion rate optimisation to capture those who do click through.
I would say you're never done with SEO though, just need to change the focus of your efforts to capture visitors who are going to make you money. If you stand still somebody will eventually beat you
-
Are there diminishing returns for optimizing a site? No. At least not as far as being penalized for organically achieving new rankings.
Now then, you say you're getting good high rankings for various search terms, but you're not seeing increased traffic. Let's figure out why that could be.
First of all, when you're checking you're rankings, make sure you're not receiving personalized results for having clicked on your own website too many times. Do things like make sure you are logged out of any Google accounts you may have, and add the code &pws=0 to the end of the URL for the searches you do.
If personalization is not affecting you, and you are achieving those ranks, then you likely have some other problems. There are 2 things most likely affecting you.
1st) Are you using the right keywords? If you're a company that offers a 'credit card fraud investigation service', you don't really want to be ranking for terms like 'credit card fraud'. That term isn't specifically related in its intent to what you are needing. Someone searching for credit card fraud is probably looking for information about, can you guess it, credit card fraud! They're probably not so much looking for people who investigate credit card fraud.
- Your search description snippets might not be working well for you. Make sure you have meta descriptions declared on every page that is ranking, or is of importance, which clearly describes the content on that page. If you don't have meta descriptions when someone see your site in a search result, they could be seeing a description that looks something like "We have been in service since...... keyword is what we do if..... we don't think that way". Basically they're seeing something that makes no sense in relation to what they searched for.
If you declare targetted meta descriptions, you're likely to have a better click through rate, and thus more traffic.
-
Mhkatz,
I would refrain hiring agencies to do link building for me if its a mature website. There are other legitimate ways to obtain SERP results.
1. Social mentions and retweets (Google ranks them well if some influencial profiles retweet it).
2. Blog mentions with backlinks to your website.
3. Wiki mentions
At the end of the day, if your website content is growing, I am sure Google will rank you for related keywords. Backlinks shouldnt be the only idea behind SEO.
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
-
SEO implications of using Marketing Automation landing pages vs on-site content
Hi there, I'm hoping someone can help here... I'm new to a company where due to the limitations of their Wordpress instance they've been creating what would ordinarily be considered pages in the standard sitemap as landing pages in their Pardot marketing automation platform. The URL subdomain is slightly different. Just wondering if anybody could quickly outline the SEO implications of doing this externally instead of directly on their site? Hope I'm making some sense... Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | philremington
Phil1 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0 -
How to create SEO budget?
If I see the site which has 8,000 links from unique domains (RDD in Market Samurai). How much could it cost to build such amount of links? How long does it take? What SEO budget will be based on these data?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rboychuk0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Can you advise why my site get outranked by sites with way less authority and so on
Hello SeoMoz, As a new member I first want to thank you guys for your service, seomoz is by far the best resource and toolbox I have ever found. I have a question, or more of a request if you could advise me on what I do wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DennisForte
I have a website: www.letsflycheaper.com with a Domain Authority of 80, and my target keywords are keywords like: cheap business class, business class flights.
My target page is: www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php. With all my keywords I am page 2 and I have a real hard time getting on the first page, but if I look at my competitors like: www.wholesale-flights.com with a Domain Authority of 'just' 50, crappy backlinks and so on, they are all on the first page with almost all of my keywords that I want to target. What do I do wrong? Can you maybe give me a couple tips on where I should focus on more? Hopefully you guys can help me... Kind Regards, Ramon van Meer0