Changing Text on Pages

[RussNauta]

For one of my sites I'm in a situation where I have 6 main pages that are for lack of a better word "showcased," one of which being the homepage. The problem is that I am seeing pretty good traffic growth, but my conversions/sales are really weak, and I'm about 95% positive that this is because there is too much information on all of those pages --- each one has about 1500 words or so.

The site architecture and link structure on the site is good as out of the couple of hundred pages on the site only 3 of them aren't indexed according to Google webmaster tools.

What I want to do is rewrite the text on those six main pages with more of a sales type of feel and limit them to 500-700 words or so. This will have no impact on the link architecture whatsoever, but I'm a bit worried that it will have a negative impact on my continual traffic growth. Actually, I'm not as much concerned about the continual part as the steady new content stream should take care of it, but I would be very concerned if I lost the rankings that I have right now. Granted, those rankings aren't worth as much as they could be because conversions are down, so so it's kind of a catch-22.

The question is, how dangerous is what I'm planning on doing?

On a side note, my lack of conversions has nothing to do with my description or title tags that show up in the results as they are targeted properly and written for sales. The problem is that the pages, though rich in content, are a bit too rich in content and need to be fixed to work in unison with the descriptions and titles.

[RussNauta]

Thanks. I'm going to document it provided it doesn't take too much time

[Tompt]

Absolutely, traffic is nice, but it is still a business.

You should know fairly quickly how things are going. I'd give it about a month.

If you have the time maybe blog about it on here, it would be interesting to see how it goes.

Best of luck to you.

[RussNauta]

Thanks. I think I'm going to give it a whirl and see what happens. I mean if the pages aren't converting then all the traffic in the world isn't gonna do any good.

[Tompt]

Apologies, I misunderstood "in an image on top of the text." so please ignore me.

[Tompt]

I would imagine it's going to be very unlikely that you'll experience a knock then, make the change then sit back and wait for a little to see what happens. Expect a wobble, and don't panic if there is a slight drop at first.

In the unlikely event that the text does make a big difference, it's the easiest thing in the world to just put the old stuff back and your ranking should return with equal speed.

1500 words is a lot to have on the homepage, so you might even find it does your position some good to thin it out a little.

In the long run there really is only one way to find out unfortunately.

[RussNauta]

The site was registered in '07. I've been working on it fairly actively since '09 and started breaking through this past October or so (meaning that I started popping into pages 1,2 for the words/phrases I'm targeting.

What I did do to test sales copy was build some internal pages with absolutely no pathway. I then took those pages and ran some PPC tests to make sure that those pages would convert as there would be no reason to switch out the copy if they didn't. Granted, PPC conversion rates IMO aren't the same as those facilitated by organic paths, but it's really the best test for what I'm trying to do. It wouldn't make sense to switch the pages out if they didn't convert.

I wouldn't mind losing some of my traffic initially, 20-30%, as I could probably get it back over time (hopefully), but during this last ongoing update, I saw a jump rather than a decline as I don't do anything sketchy. Having said that, when you don';t do anything sketchy or questionable, it takes time to pop-up for terms. I'm seeing some pretty serious momentum and I don't want to jeopardize that. Granted I haven't invested too much $$ in the process, other than paying a few freelance writers, but I've dumped tons of sweat equity into it.

[RussNauta]

No, I'm not engaging in anything like that. What I meant to say is that the images which haven't been changed since the site was launched haven't changed, and are sales heavy. The thing is that the disconnect occurs with the lengthiness of the text within the body. I got too descriptive because I took the approach of writing good content while disregarding the sales aspect, which is obviously the ultimate goal.

[JeremyNelson58]

I was recommending embedding copy in an image so it doesn't get crawled and rankings aren't affected by any changes in content.

[Tompt]

I feel the need to clarify something, are you suggesting hiding the existing text behind an image with the new text on it?

I don't think that would be a fantastic idea, it's the sort of thing that can get a site in trouble.

[Tompt]

How established is your site, how long have you been working on it?

If it's fairly established and older I wouldn't expect a huge amount of change if you were to cut your content somewhat (500-700 is still a lot of words on the page), you might experience a bit of a wobble as google gets used to things, but it shouldn't make a huge difference.

Worst case scenario you can put the old text back and pretend that nothing ever happened.

If you change things and it does make a significant difference it would be interesting to hear about it.

You might want to experiment with your new text first using some sort of A\B testing. That way you'll preserve your current rankings, and test your new text to see if it's going to improve your situation. It's worthwhile testing first before making the switch.

At the most basic end of the spectrum how you have Google website optimizer:

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

but there are some great paid for options out there that do an excellent job.

[RussNauta]

Thanks for your response. Good suggestion on the sales copy in the images, but it's already there. The problem is that the user data on the site that I've gathered via ClickTale and In Page Analytics shows that people are probably reading all of the content on the pages which in theory is a good thing...but the copy is way too thorough which is probably impacting sales.

It's like this:

If you were shopping for say, a new pair of shoes and had the intention to buy, you probably would be more interested in the look, style, size, price, and comfort.

The problem is that while I touched on those points, I went over the top with descriptions pertaining to where they were made, who made them, the properties of the materials, why they are good for arch problems, etc.

It's not a shoe site, but you get the idea. It was a dumb move but it is what it is and it needs to be fixed, otherwise the traffic isn't really worth it.

[JeremyNelson58]

I'm pretty sure that changing content can have an affect on your rankings, especially if you reduce the amount of content* by half.  You could forfeit a lot of long tail searches because of words you aren't even targeting just by having so much content.

If it were me, I'd run a test on just one of the pages and monitor conversions.  Don't run it on one of your key money pages though, but one that gets sufficient traffic to make the test worth while.

Another thing to try is to put the sales copy in an image on top of the text.