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
-
I am really surprised to see this page is ranking like crazy even the content is very thin
https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/ We are ranking for 121KW for this page. And 22KW are ranking in the 1-3 position. I am not able to understand why will it rank like anything. Considering that it has just 4 inbound links. Will some help me to understand this mystery. When we try to write a good in-depth content then we are not ranking but for such content, we are doing fairly good.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajnish_HE1 -
Can adding "noindex" help with quality penalizations?
Hello Moz fellows, I have another question about content quality and Panda related penalization. I was wondering this: If I have an entire section of my site that has been penalized due to thin content, can adding "noindex,follow" to all pages belonging to that section help de-penalizing the rest of the site in the short term, while we work to improve those penalized pages, which is going to take a long time? Can that be considered a "short term solution" to improve the overall site scoring on Google index while we work to improve those penalized pages, and, once ready, we remove the "noindex" tag? I am eager to know your thoughts on this possible strategy. Thank you in advance to everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links. Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag. However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up? I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up... Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sfgmedia0 -
Help Me find a Great Seo for my Budget!
I am looking for a Good SEO for my tech news site and would like your help in recommending a good SEO that will fit in my budget of 300-500 per month.I have contacted many firms in the Moz directory of recommended firms but found they are out of my monthly price range.Google search for a decent SEO can be scary with so many so called SEO companies.I would like to work with a experienced SEO individual who can come up with a great plan for our site and also implement them.We just had a SEO forensic audit done with Alan Blieweiss and implemented his suggestions and are now looking for someone to work with long term for the rest of our SEO needs.I understand that I cannot afford the top SEO firms or industry leaders but with your help and suggestions I am sure we can afford and find a great SEO. Please reply here or message me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisyak0 -
Help with htaccess
I just setup a WP install in a subfolder: domain.com/development/ However, there is an existing htaccess file in the root which contains the following: RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)/([a-z]+)$ /index.php?page=$1&comp=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)/([a-z]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&comp=$2 [QSA] I need to leave the rules as-is due to the nature of CMS (not WP) under the root domain. Is it possible to include an exception or condition which allows URL requests containing /development/ to resolve to that folder? I tried to add: RewriteRule ^development/([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)$ /development/index.php?page=$1 [QSA] but this seems to send it in a loop back to the root. Thanks!!!0 -
Where do I start with cleaning up our link profile?
We have just taken the steps to start building links to www.towelsrus.co.uk, I am concerned about the state of external links to the site created by previous companies, i.e are they OK, or doing us harm, could I get more out f whats already in place or should we focus purely on getting new links? We also have about 25 pages that have 302 errors and contain external links to the site. What should i do with these. try and get them re-directed to our site with appropriate anchor text or simply put a 301 re-direct in place? In essence where I start, We want to build and increase traffic in particular for towels, bathrobes, dressing gowns and bolster our position as our positions are fluctuating a little but steadier than they have been. Any help appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0