Trying to fill in the missing gaps
-
The missing gaps are optimisation opportunities I have missed with my site.
I have managed to optimise the site a great deal from what it was, with a new site design and better architecture and focusing on all the on page SEO.
The only problem being it doesn't seem to be an easy market to create links through or find interesting places to guest post or interact on blogs.The site is https://perco.co.uk
I would be grateful if anyone could give me an overview on the site and their thoughts?
Cheers
-
Hey Marcus,
I've implemented a few of the things you suggested, yet to get a blog up and running but hopefully it's in the process.
Seeing as you gave me such a thorough reply I was wondering if you could help me with another site. www.data-contracts.co.uk
I am struggling to rank for concrete repair on google.co.uk. I've tested a few things but cannot get anything to budge in the SERP.
Any suggestions?
Cheers
-
Cheers Marcus!
-
The problem with no branding in SERP listings is that they don't look great and getting listed is only half the battle, you have to get clicked on as well. If you do the following search you can see all indexed pages and get an idea how they are displayed.
site:perco.co.uk
As it goes, some of your links, the very first one I clicked on 404'd so you have other problems to resolve as well.
Re the HTTPS, if you run your site on https://perco.co.uk that's what will be displayed but there is really no reason to run anything other than secure pages (checkout / payment processing) over HTTPS so really, I would lose that on all but the required pages. One for your tech people.
The blog, best is widely agreed to be on the site so a main navigation and /blog so http://www.perco.co.uk/blog is ideal.
Your blog content is likely going to be much more shareable and make for better link targets so always, always have it on site unless you have a cast iron reason not to.
Plenty there to keep you busy eh!
Marcus
-
Marcus,
Excellent response, thank you!I will explain some of my thinking. The bland page names were so that all the focus was on the keyword and not spread out onto branding. I felt the branding was doing well on its own as the majority of customers coming to the site are through the brand name. I will take your advice on this subject now.
Thanks for spending the time creating examples for SERP listings, I obviously haven't spent enough of my own time on them!I could do with more help regarding the HTTPS & WWW. The HTTPS I believe is because there is a SSL certificate on our website for each page for the request a call back. I would gladly see our URLs display as WWW on the SERP but I don't know how to rectify this, do you?
And why not create a blog? I feel enlightened, a quick thought, how would you implement the blog, as a seperate navigation heading and page? Or a seperate site such as blogspot?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Yes I am in Walsall, but I don't the place very well unfortunately.
-
Hey Shaun
Right, I have had a quick look and some initial feedback.
1. You have just gone with very bland page titles for the main keyword so for instance, the homepage title is:
Trenchless Technology
You provide that service, but that is not who the site or business is, where is the branding? How about changing it to something like:
Perco - Leaders in Trenchless Technology Solutions
2. You have a meta keywords tag, I would lose that for starters
3. You have a very short meta description. Again, a missed opportunity to explain who you are and improve upon that serp listing. In fact, a search for Trenchless Technology returns you in 5th place but your SERP listing is pretty weak.
Trenchless Technology https://perco.co.uk/ Pipeline contractor, working predominantly in the water and sewerage sector.
Uses hydraulic (non-percussive) and pneumatic pipe bursting techniques, as well ...It is not using your meta description (as it is so short likely so just getting those absolute basics right is a good starting place and having it look something more like.
Perco - Leaders in Trenchless Technology Solutions
www.perco.co.uk
We are the UK's market leader in trenchless technology (no dig technology) operating in the utilities, construction, rail network and facilities management sectors.4. HTTPS domain
Is there any reason for https? I prefer a standard www. and it certainly looks better in any displayed results. If you notice I changed this in the above example.
5. There are no Blogs or places talking about this? Great, what a killer opportunity, when does your blog launch? Seriously though, there seems to be hundreds of related keywords and a simple google keyword search for trenchless technology returns a bunch of
6. Page Titles & Branding
There is no branding across the rest of the page titles? The few meta descriptions I looked at seemed better but page titles like this are doing you no favours
Expandit Manufacturing
Directional Drilling
Get your brand on those page titles and start letting people know who you are so...
Expandit Manufacturing | Perco.co.uk
Directional Drilling | Perco.co.uk
Exactly what you use as branding is your call but something, anything is better than these single keyword page titles.
Really, there is plenty to do here on the site before you start worrying about building links but I would imagine this is a fairly complicated service so with a bit more scope applied finding blogs to get links from should be easy enough. But, it would be a damn site easier if you started a blog and used that to network and spark things off.
That should give you some food for thought eh!
By the way, are you in Walsall? Just down the road from me in Birmingham, I used to live by the Arboretum. Small world!
Hope it helps!
Marcus
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 have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
Trying to pinpoint why 1 keyword moved down 100 positions in 2 weeks. Help me speculate?
Hi there, One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100. Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide: I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?) The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved. As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015. With regard to the particular page/keyword in question: The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.) Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results. I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed. With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Am I missing an issue on my website?
Are there any glaring issues that I am missing with my site? I am building links, and growing the profile but had seen a drop in rankings a couple of months ago. Is this do to a site issue or am I just missing something? www.wallybuysell.com Any help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty
So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing. The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty. I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue. I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable. I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either. I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day. He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?). I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none. I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing2 -
5th Reconsideration Request, Have i missed anything...
Hi Guys, I wonder if any of you can help me out.I'll be shortly submitting another reconsideration request to Google.I've been working on removing bad / spammy links to our site http://goo.gl/j7OpL over the past 6 months and so far every reconsideration request I have submitted has been knocked back with the following message:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear site owner or webmaster of http://goo.gl/j7OpL , We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://goo.gl/j7OpL for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines . Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes . We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've removed over 70% of all our links - we had some large sitewide links on big sites with exact match anchor text to our main money keyword, I've also removed a large link network that our previous SEO company setup. Today I have completed an overhaul of all our internal links, near enough every blog post that we added to the site had a link back to the home page with an exact match money keyword. 1 thing that I did notice was when we got hit by the penalty it didn't affect every keyword we target just our main / most competitive keyword, yes some of our other keywords took a dip in rankings but not as much as our main keyword. When I submit our next reconsideration request I'll also attach a spreadsheet of links that I can't remove either because I can't find any contact details / blocked by whois or I'm just not getting a response when I email them. If anyone can point out anything else that I have missed or might have missed that would be great. Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
When I try creating a sitemap, it doesnt crawl my entire site.
We just launched a new Ruby app at (used to be a wordpress blog) - http://www.thesquarefoot.com We have not had time to create an auto-generated sitemap, so I went to a few different websites with free sitemap generation tools. Most of them index up to 100 or 500 URLS. Our site has over 1,000 individual listings and 3 landing pages, so when I put our URL into a sitemap creator, it should be finding all of these pages. However, that is not happening, only 4 pages seem to be seen by the crawlers. TheSquareFoothttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/http://www.thesquarefoot.com/users/sign_inhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/searchhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/renters/sign_upThis worries me that when Google comes to crawl our site, these are the only pages it will see as well. Our robots.txt is blank, so there should be nothing stopping the crawlers from going through the entire site. Here is an example of one of the 1,000s of pages not being crawled****http://www.thesquarefoot.com/listings/Houston/TX/77098/Central_Houston/3910_Kirby_Dr/Suite_204Any help would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Can Anyone See What I am Missing, If anything at all?
Hi Mozzers I have launched www.carbodypanels4u.co.uk 3 weeks ago, It's a website that sells aftermarket car body panels. I want this website to rank on the first page for "Body Panels" Postion 91 on google UK "Car Body Panels" Position 33 Google UK The above are the two main keywords for the home page and I'm pleased with the progress we have made in 3 weeks, however I want to ensure I havent missed anything? Apart from Link Building, can anyone suggest anything else I can do on the website to improve my rankings. I was thinking of making all the makes on the home page to Header 2 tags? shivun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohive-2227200 -
The missing link?
Hello and Welcome Moz friends! Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem. On my website I've optimized our content to match the keywords I have selected for the site. I constantly am Re-writing articles, reading SEOMoz on tips and tricks how to make link juice flow. Yet only one of my keywords ranks decently, the rest never show up. I have the hardest time getting traffic to my site, and sales after that. Maybe I am implementing something incorrectly or there is something I am not doing. www.FrontlineMobility.com If you have any tips or anything to give me I would gladly accept it, any criticism is also appreciated. Thank you Friends, hopefully you can help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0