Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.
-
Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated! -
Thanks all for the answers, we will create new content and start from there, probably create an internal blog for more content creation...
-
I would leave the existing ones alone and create new page(s) targeting baptism and link to them prominently from the homepage and globally on the site, submit the URLs in WMT and add them to your sitemap.xml file for quicker indexing.
-
"So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?"
No, you'll run the risk of cannibalizing your christening rankings and moreover may confuse your customers. Remember, develop for your customers NOT for the search engines.
For example, I work for a law firm and our homepage ranks for all sorts of criminal crimes (DUI, Drugs, etc.) So if I see an area where I want to improve my rank, say for "criminal defense attorney" - I'll write new content for a blog post or page around that set of KWs instead of trying to get the homepage to rank for that KW among all the others.
-
Thanks nsauser for the response. So it sounds like the best strategy is to add to the homepage but not mess with any existing content and add the baptism keywords to any new content and or products.
The problem is we have a fairly static inventory and add new products pretty infrequently, so our best bet immediately would be content creation using the baptism keywords and any new products that are added to start hitting them with the baptism keywords?
So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?
-
Generally I shoot for 1 - 3 keywords per page and definitely only one theme per page. I know that homepages tend to rank for a lot of different KWs but maybe it's possible that you could add a Baptism related kw to your title (and in the content) without removing anything then that might be worth a try.
Otherwise I would create new pages and content to target the baptism related KWs. If you can link your new content from the homepage it will give it a boost to start out with. Internal linking is a great way to get content boosted in the SERPs especially if you have a good Domain Authority. Also, track these changes, the easiest way is to note them in Google Analytics. You want to be able to look back in 2 weeks or a month and see if your changes have helped or hurt.
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
-
Keyword position
I fixed all the crawl issues but still my website is in second page.
On-Page Optimization | | NueveSolution0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Title Tags and Duplicate Content
Hi - I have a question on how to both avoid duplicate title tags and duplicate content AND still create a good user experience. I have a lot of SEO basics to do as the company has not done any SEO to this point. I work for a small cruise line. We have a page for each cruise. Each cruise is associated with a unique itinerary. However the ports of call are not necessarily unique to each itinerary. For each port on the itinerary there are also a set of excursions and if the port is the embark/disembark port, hotels that are associated. The availability of the excursions and hotels depends on the dates associated with the cruise. Today, we have two pages associated with each cruise for the excursions and hotels: mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/excursion/?date=dateinport mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/hotel/?date=dateinport When someone navigates to these pages, they can see a list of relevant content. From a user perspective the list I see is only associated with the relevant date (which is determined by a set of query parameters). Unfortunately, there are situations where the same content is on multiple pages. For instance the exact same set of hotels or excursions might be available for two different cruises or on multiple dates of the same cruise. This is causing a couple of different challenges. For instance, with regard to title tags, we have <title>Hotels in Rome</title> multiple times. I know that isn't good. If I tried to just have a hub page with hotels and a hub page with excursions available from each cruise and then a page for each hotel and excursion, each with a unique title tag, then the challenge is that I don't know how to not make the customer have to work through whether the hotel they are looking for is actually available on the dates in question. So while I can guarantee unique content/title tags, I end up asking the user to think too much. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Marston_Gould1 -
Can we use internal no-follow links without negatively affecting rankings
we are creating a site structure for a travel website. the site homepage has a top navigation bar with 8 top level links and a total link count of 33 links in this (within menus). There are also 10 footer and ad-hoc links As this top navigation bar is a site-wide navigation, when entering s specific "travel destination" page, the "travel destination" page has its own contextual links and reference links, making the total inks on the destination page approx 107. do you think its ok to make all links in the top navigation bar no follow on all pages except the homepage? how would you approach this to create less links to maintain effective link-juice flow to required pages
On-Page Optimization | | Direct_Ram0 -
Will changing my home page cause rankings to drop?
We are looking at doing a major change with our website. Upper management is wanting to have our home page be our store page, instead of just a landing page. So basically we would be eliminating our current home page, and replacing it with our store page. This is a very large site and our current home page gets a lot of traffic. Issues to deal with will be ranking of the current page content; Internal links to both pages; external links (backlinks) pointing to the two pages, and of course, a potential drop in rankings and traffic. Any ideas on how to best do this? Or not do it at all. 301 redirect? Thanks, Brad
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
Short URL's vs Optimised URL's
Howdy Mozzers! What are your thoughts on short URL's vs Optimised URL's. For example if a website currently sells wood furniture and wants to target the keyword "Wood Furniture For Sale", which URL would be preferable: Short URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture Optimised URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture-for-sale The website also uses facet navigation and selected attributes are added in a fixed order sequence after the category. For example if Cane is selected as wood type: Short URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture/Cane Optimised URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture-for-sale/Cane Which one do you prefer (between the short URL and optimised URL) and why? Cheers! MozAddict
On-Page Optimization | | MozAddict0 -
Keyword rich domains - Which are the best domain extensions for ranking in the UK other than .com or .co.uk
Hey there, In the absence of getting a keyword rich .com or .co.uk domain am wondering how influential .info, .org, .net domains (or any others) are in comparison? Does anyone have any comparison info to share please?
On-Page Optimization | | Wallander0 -
Does a page's url have any weight in Google rankings?
I'm sure this question must have been asked before but I can't find it. I'm assuming that the title tag is far more important than the page's url. Is that correct? Does the url have any relevance to Google?
On-Page Optimization | | rdreich490 -
Related keywords in title/H1 tag
Hi, I am trying to improve our rankings for pages with photos/images. For the title is it benificial to include keywords that are almost identical in nature? For example: "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" In Google trends photos and images are both commonly used words so including both seems like it would help. When I search for each one separately in Google (Brad Pitt Photos vs Brad Pitt Images) different sites are returned (except for the ones that include both image and photos keywords). I had read that Google knows that Images and Photos mean the same thing, but the search results do vary. I know stuffing all related combinations isn't good, but selective phrases seem to make a difference. Just want to verify if this makes sense. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | NicB10