Where do I start? A little overwhelmed - Really appreciate any help.
-
Hello everyone,
I was hoping to be able to get some advice if at all possible. I'm know there's some really skilled people on these forums. I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting links so if it's crossing the line to post the link of the site I'm working on please let me know.
I was just hired as the Director of Digital Marketing for a decent sized company. I have a lot of experience with PPC, media buys and digital integration but unfortunately I'm a noob with SEO.
I'm trying to learn as quickly as possible, and I'm reading everything I can (including everything I can find from Rand)
The issue is that I have to start somewhere but there's so much that needs to be done that I'm getting a bit lost. We used to have 3 separate sites that ranked really well for our main keywords on Google, but with the growth of our company we consolidated the different market sites into one main one and 301'd the older ones. In doing so we lost nearly all of our search rankings. Our current site is:
Does anyone have any advice on where to dive in here? I'm currently paying a ton each month for traffic through search PPC and contextual display, along with a bunch of geographically targeted brand awareness display campaigns, and I really need to show some progress on our organic search.
Thanks in advance for any help!
-
Thanks Kynduvme,
I have our priority keywords mapped out included a large volume of long tail. We are currently using Analytics and I've been able to get a good insight into how our customers are using the site. We are in the process of adding new features to increase visitor usage metrics (Galleries of notable purchases, click through tutorials, etc).
Our on site meta is pretty bad, and needs to be redone. I've been waiting until our new features and revisions are up to change that however. We have a few hundred locations now and I've been making sure they're verified with Google Places. We've been seeing a lot of traffic through that.
I really appreciate all the advice.
-
Always start with Keyword research. Since you have experience with PPC this should be no problem. Then move on to keyword targeting and selection. Once you have your targets mapped. Make a plan for how you implement them once you are set. Begin changing and updating yout title tags, h1, body copy and meta descriptions.
Then, start looking at website architecture, how the site looks to google etc.
You will also want to make sure you have measurement coding in place. Analytics (with goals) Webmaster tools and an xml sitemap.
If the company has very local targeting you will want to do a google places clam and verification
-
That's perfect! Thanks Steve, I'll check them out today.
-
My recommendation would be to do whatever you can to get as much experience as possible by submersing yourself in with anybody there who deals with the SEO, and get the theory by reading, spending time on here, and doing an SEO course such as MarketMotive, SearchEngineCollege, or Quirk... they're three of the decent ones, and it's kind of like having interactive books with deadlines, coursework and tests to ensure you're doing things right. They're kept nicely up to date too
Try these:
http://www.marketmotive.com/internet-marketing-training-and-certification-signup?top=how&topic=SEO
http://www.searchenginecollege.com/certified-search-engine-optimizer/
And get these:
-
Thanks Andrew. We are working on making sure we have enough keywords in the content. We are probably going to have to do a full revision on the site itself.
I appreciate it!
-
Start with On-Page optimization - IE get your keywords into your content. Then I would just start reading SEO blogs until you have enough understanding of what's going on to branch out from there.
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
-
Please help need some advice?
Can any of you guys please help me I have alerts on links coming in and it looks like recently someone did this, it looks maliciously done as it is only our domain mentioned and most are brand new posts? http://testosteroneclinicindenve53950.shotblogs.com/testosterone-clinic-in-denver-fundamentals-explained-6102386 http://claytondmnnp.ampedpages.com/Details-Fiction-and-testosterone-clinic-in-denver-16897309 http://vinylvehiclecarwrap38041.alltdesign.com/a-review-of-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-9574042 http://devinxccct.educationalimpactblog.com/1784474/little-known-facts-about-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap http://keeganbsftf.ka-blogs.com/7488539/how-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-can-save-you-time-stress-and-money http://andybxoes.thezenweb.com/vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-Fundamentals-Explained-17581028 http://kylerhfdzu.blogkoo.com/not-known-details-about-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap-9029141 http://troyytkyn.timeblog.net/7695911/the-greatest-guide-to-vinyl-vehicle-car-wrap http://waylontyzab.pointblog.net/testosterone-clinic-in-denver-Secrets-16335972 http://testosteroneclinicindenve30516.onesmablog.com/Top-testosterone-clinic-in-denver-Secrets-17252737 http://emiliogkmop.blogofoto.com/7667522/top-guidelines-of-testosterone-clinic-in-denver http://caidenaczxt.blogs-service.com/7514172/testosterone-clinic-in-denver-fundamentals-explained http://daltonpyfms.mybjjblog.com/5-simple-statements-about-testosterone-clinic-in-denver-explained-6517932 Should I try to disavow these and submit to google or will google know our site which has been up for 5 years is not doing this? Should I do any of these https://tehnoblog.org/google-webmaster-tools-my-website-got-bombed-with-backlinks-what-to-do/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
What things, that we might overlook, help retain link juice on the site?
Since subscribing to Moz, I have been focussing alot on some of the more technical aspects of SEO. The current thing I am finding interesting is stopping link juice leaks. Here are a selection of some of the things I have done: I have cloaked my affiliate links - see http://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ Removed some html coded social share links within the theme, and replaced with javascript plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/flare/) Used the Moz toolbar to view as Google, to see what google is seeing. Removed some meta links at the bottom of blog posts (author etc) that were duplicated. Now, I don't intend to go over the top with this, as links to social accounts on each page are there to encourage engagement etc, but are there any things you may have come across \ tips that people may have overlooked but perhaps should look out for? As example as some of the things that might be interesting to discuss: Are too many tags, categories bad? Do you index your tag, date archive pages? Does it matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
Can anyone help me clean up my link profile?
Hi, I've been struggling with my rankings for some 18 months or so. It seems like the plan is to review my back links and remove or disavow the ones that could be causing my site problems. Unfortunately I neither have the time or expertise to perform this task and wonder if there are any freelancers who could work on this project? I look forward to hearing from anyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Website is not indexed in Google, please help with suggestions
Our client website was removed from Google index. Anybody could recommend how to speed up process of re index: Webmaster tools done SM done (Twitter, FB) sitemap.xml done backlinks in process PPC done Robots.txt is fine Guys any recommendations are welcome, client is very unhappy. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkBDW0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
Help me choose a new URL structure
Good morning SEOMoz. I have a huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages. The websites theme is mobile phone downloads. I want to create a better URL structure. Currently an example url is /wallpaper/htc-wildfire-wallpapers.html My issue with this, first and foremost is it's a little spammy, for example the fact it's in a wallpaper folder, means I shouldn't really need to be explicit with the filename, as it's implied. Another issue arises with the download page. For example /wallpaper/1234/file-name-mobile-wallpaper.html Again it's spammy but also the file ID, is at folder level, rather than within the filename. Making the file deeper and loses structure. I am considering creating sub domains, based on model, to ensure a really tight silo. i.e htc.domain.com/wallpaper/wildfire/ and the download page would be htc.domain.com/wallpaper/file-name-id/ But due to restrictions with the CMS, this would involve a lot of work and so I am considering just cleaning up the url structure without sub domains. /wallpaper/htc/wildfire/ and the download page would be /wallpaper/file-name-id/ What are your thoughts? Somebody suggested having the downloads in no folder at all, but surely it makes sense for a wallpaper, to be in a wallpaper folder and an app to be in an app folder? If they were not in a folder, I'd need to be more explicit in the naming of the files. Any advice would be awesome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
30-40% drops in organic Google traffic starting early/mid Feb to Now??
Hello All: I would really appreciate any insight that can be provided into this dilemma. I've ruled out bad links issues - we don't have them and never engaged in grey to black hat SEO linkbuilding. I cannot find the cause for this drop off. Maybe I'm missing something because I am so close to it? The site is markspace Thanks in advance for any and all help or insight!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | holdtheonion0