Pdfs for SEO - benefits, downfalls and promotional methods
-
Hi fellow Mozzers,
We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords.
The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted.
I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint.
So:
-
is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content?
-
are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML?
-
as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both)
Hopefully that's all clear!
Nick
-
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your response. Definitely some good food for thought here - especially about ensuring the pdfs are optimised.
It may be that we can put all the content on the site as HTML, but just not have it as part of the navigation (which we are doing with certain pages, like FAQs.
Unfortunately, when they say light on content they mean just that. As we are a design agency, the designers tend to think people are only picture led and the words distract from that. I tend to think that, while people will decide if we are the agency or them based on previous work, they also like to see stats on results, client feedback and so on.
So I'll try to persuade them to go the HTML route, but at least you've pointed out some things to bear in mind if going the PDF avenue.
Thanks!
Nick
-
Hi Nick,
-
My personal suggestion would be to give the illusion that your site is "light" on content through the use of whitespace. Take a look at SquareSpace.com and Desk.com - both of these sites, in my opinion, give the illusion that there isn't a lot of content, because of the whitespace and large images; however, both of these pages have OVER 1000 WORDS on their homepage... which is a decent amount. My guess is this is the idea your designers had in mind when they said "light" on content - but I could be wrong.
-
I am not aware of any studies on the subject off hand; however, I am sure there are some out there. As a side note, I do know that Google Analytics cannot track PDF CTRs out of the box, but supposedly you can add some code to the PDF's link that will allow you to track it. I suppose you could do some A/B testing on the subject.
-
If you want your PDF to rank well, promoting it anywhere would be great.
Personally, I think you should try to convince your designers to let you put the PDF content in an HTML page. It doesn't have to be at a navigational level, but within a page called Case Studies or whatever. My reasoning behind it is that I would assume for most keywords, people would rather view a webpage vs a PDF. Some people may think that if they click on a PDF that is all of the information your website would have on the particular topic, whereas if you click on a website, your assumption might be the entire website would be about a topic.
Also a personal side note - one of our PDFs ranks on page one for a keyword. We have not optimized this PDF or attempted to get it to page one... it just happened because so many people linked to it. The problem is that we didn't do a good job of optimizing the PDF, so that is where our traffic stops... people can open the PDF, but they do not have any links to lead them back to our website (which is our fault for not doing something about this). Point being - you may not get the traffic you want coming back to your site if they just open the PDF from a Google SERP.
Long story short - it depends on the purpose of your PDF. Is it strictly for users to read and be done with it? Is it something you want to rank well for and drive traffic to your website? If it is the latter, make sure you optimize the PDF so that users can get back to your website.
Personally I would rather have people linking to my website than a PDF on my website.
I hope this helps and I hope I was able to answer your question.
Mike
-
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
-
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Do Explainer Videos Help SEO?
My company makes explainer videos. I often come across a lot of (seemingly) inflated & unprovable stats, pertaining to explainer videos, from other companies. This article claims that "Having an explainer video on your web page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results" Is there any real data to back up such a claim? Do explainer videos really help SEO? How?
Algorithm Updates | | WickVideo0 -
Whats the best method to tackle website traffic drop?
ON 14th November following a DNS error (which seems to have been a google error as local servers were not effected and it happened to many people everywhere) my traffic started dropping. Within 5 days it was down 50%. In a panic to resolve the situation I thought it was because i was on a shared host and moved to VPS which was a disaster. Ive had server errors since. After desperately looking everywhere for news on the DNS error and whether there as algorithm change etc I decided i should have a look at my site @ www.mutantspace.com and see if there were any internal issues. In Google Webmaster forum a helpful moderator suggested that I do 2 things: 1. Deal with the fact that I had keyword stuffed my <alt tags="">. Basically i run an arts blog so have 8 - 10 images per post and was putting the same text in each one i.e [artists name][artform][name of artwork]. I stupidly didnt realise what i had been doing and have since been deleting my alt tags for every image except one per post. However i have 17,000 images so its going to take a while. </alt> 2. She also linked me to https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.mutantspace.com%252F and wondered why i had such volatile inbound links. I dont know why. And cant figure it out As far as everything else goes I dont know what I could be doing wrong to deserve penalty - if it is a penalty. I dont back link so all my links are natural (from artists, galleries, art blogs, tumblrs, etc) I dont sell advertising (yet anyway) Having said that ive been told i have too many links on each page (i run a wordpress site and so have categories, etc) so im wondering if i should nofollow my categories? In short im wondering what advice anyone has on doing a systematic shake up of my site. Im currently doing the following: 1. deleting most of the <alt tags="">on my posts. Ive got back as far as 2012 and will keep going til theyre all done.</alt> 2. Redirecting all crawl errors 3. No Following more outbound links and links to social networks 4. Checking all inbound links to see if there is an suspicious domains 5. Sorting out the fact that ive had numerous server errors for the last 2 weeks (would that affect SERPS?) Is there anything else i can do? Should do? much appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | mutant20080 -
Will Parked Domain hurt My SEO as Duplicate Content?
Hello, I have one website (Migration Lawyers) and I have an extra 8 domains Parked so they are basically cloning the content of the site. so if the main site is: migrationlawyers.co.za and I have an addon domain migration-lawyers.com is that good or bad? is there a proper way to redirect the sites, will redirecting (301) subdomains be more effective? Thanks for your Input 🙂 0i8VXqr.png
Algorithm Updates | | thealika0 -
Server Location & SEO
So I just read an interesting Tweet: #SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results? For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server. Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs? Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Algorithm Updates | | jesse-landry0 -
Why SEO
Hi Guys, it's going to be a long one so thank you from advance for your patience. First i wanted you to i am new to SEO world and this world excites me In the last 30 days, i started to check my companies (i am employee not an owner) website in SEO point of view. What we do: Online grocery shopping and home delivery www.artizone.com I will share with you some of the results: 5482 errors for duplicate page content 8850 errors for duplicate page title 37 title missing or empty some pages had 4+ H1 tags many more HTML errors. page authority 42/100 domain authority 40/100 We have no listing 163 back-links domain to our Dallas & Chicago website and much more another thing i checked was where are we for the keywords that we are interested in: "online grocery shopping Dallas" - position 1 in Google search shop for groceries online Dallas - Position 1 in Google search shop for groceries from home Dallas - Position 1 in Google search And some more and the same for Chicago I Did all the searches in new incognito window My Question - how come we build our website so bad, with no Google+, we have very few back-links(compare to our competitors) and the page and domain rank are so low and still we are in the 2 or 3 highest position in Google search One more question - Why to invest time in fixing all the SEO issues i found? You are all welcome to have a SEO view in my website Thank you vest much Ivgi
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
Local SEO-How to handle multiple business at same address
I have a client who shares the same address and suite number with multiple business. What should be done to optimize their website and citations for local SEO? Is this a huge issue? What should we do so our rankings aren't affected. Will changes take a long time to take place? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | caeevans0 -
Benefits of Breadcrumbs Statistics
Hi all, Whilst I know why breadcrumbs are recommended for a site in terms of usability and helping define the structure of a site to search engines, are there any statistics to support the implementation of the benefits of implementing them? Therefore what I'm after is statistics that state that there was an increase in traffic or rankings from the implementation of breadcrumbs on the site and in terms of usability was there an increase in conversions (can be sales, emails, subscriptions, etc) or metrics such as average pages viewed or time spent on site? Any assistance would be much appreciated. Thanks, James
Algorithm Updates | | bigpond0