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
-
Technical Site Migration
Hello All- I have been in the SEO industry for about 4 years and feel fairly confident in my technical SEO; however, I am being asked to conduct a migration that is both a platform change (step 1) then a consolidation change (think of combining websites when a company is acquired) all within a 4-5 month time span. I feel like as I begin to create this multi-step checklist I would love to hear of others that have gone through something similar or have resources you could point me to form more of a process/procedure standpoint. Again - I feel confident in the technical output but I have a fairly junior team and want to execute this smoothly. Feel free to add recommendations or ask for clarification if my discussion question doesn't make sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instructure0 -
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
How much SEO damage would it do having a subdomain site rather directory site?
Hi all! With a coleague we were arguing about what is better: Having a subdomain or a directory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Let me explain some more, this is about the cases: Having a multi-language site: Where en.domain.com or es.domain.com rather than domain.com/en/ or domain.com/es/ Having a Mobile and desktop version: m.domain.com or domain.com rather than domain.com/m or just domain.com. Having multiple location websites, you might figure. The dicussion started with me saying: Its better to have a directory site.
And my coleague said: Its better to have a subdomain site. Some of the reasons that he said is that big companies (such as wordpress) are doing that. And that's better for the business.
My reasons are fully based on this post from Rand Fishkin: Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO - Whiteboard Friday So, what does the community have to say about this?
Who should win this argue? GR.0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Review of our site
Hi Moz-Fans 🙂 I'm doing SEO for about a year now and have a new site to which I do not know where to improve any further. The main keyword is "Webdesign Freiburg" and the site is werkzeug - kasten . com Anyone want to have a look into and tell me what might bring us from page 2 to page 1 on google? Thanks a lot Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Why is my m-dot site outranking my main site in SERPs?
My client has a WP site and a Duda mobile site that we inherited. For some reason their m-dot site is ranking on P1 of Google for their top KWs instead of the main site which is much more robust. The main site might rank beyond page 5 when the generic home page for their m-dot site appears on P1. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
How do I best deal with pages returning 404 errors as they contain links from other sites?
I have over 750 URL's returning 404 errors. The majority of these pages have back links from sites, however the credibility of these pages from what I can see is somewhat dubious, mainly forums and sites with low DA & PA. It has been suggested placing 301 redirects from these pages, a nice easy solution, however I am concerned that we could do more harm than good to our sites credibility and link building strategy going into 2013. I don't want to redirect these pages if its going to cause a panda/penguin problem. Could I request manual removal or something of this nature? Thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Dupicated Site Issues?
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com. Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same. The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped ) Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0