SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
-
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do...
MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have.
If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them?
Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the ArticleI want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff.EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.
-
Good advice. When there's a potentially large impact (organic makes up such a large percentage of your traffic) you really do need to tread carefully.
I've seen more than one site that rolled out sweeping changes in, shall we say an overly enthusiastic manner, and accidentally remove themselves from search completely!
I would recommend doing some research and identifying the real low hanging fruit. What queries/topics/categories is there the greatest search opportunity. If you're already doing well for particular terms then there's not much scope for improvement and the impact of getting things wrong is worse.
Can you look at particular pages that are performing badly. Look for landing pages for organic search traffic that have poor engagement metrics. This can identify poorly targeted keywords, or missing/poor content, miss-understood search intent etc.
- Make sure you document everything (with dates!).
- Don't try to do too much too fast. Small steady tests are safest and make sure you give your changes long-enough to see any impact.
- Make sure you have some kind of QA. Run checks before and after you make your changes. It's great if you can have some kind of check list. Watch out for unintended consequences.
- Are you tinkering with the live site or is there a development/deployment process you need to follow are there other people involved? If there is - stick to the process.
-
If the traffic is relatively stable on the site, then testing on newly published pages and monitoring their tragectory when compared to previous articles might work.
Also, I think 2 weeks is a bit short. I'd shoot more for 3 weeks to a month if you want to see where they settle. If you're using new pages, just use the same time frame for those as when you compare them to previous article data.
-
Thank you!!! That's exactly what I was thinking, but was unsure. How long would you take your sample for, though? Two weeks? They have a super high-impact site, but all their SEO is news-y, so the pages wouldn't have much time to live.
That's kind of my worry about testing, is that their pages are all entertainment news, so they have an expiration date. So declining on page-search that I track may be due to its age and not anything I'm doing.
Anyway, thank you SO MUCH William!
Any other suggestions more than welcome. Thanks again, guys!
-
Sounds like the site is big enough that you have the luxury taking a nice little chunk of pages, doing your tests, seeing what happens, and then deciding whether to make the change site-wide. Take a good sample of pages across you site to test on, make sure you know their baseline ranks and traffic to those pages, make the changes, monitor, test some more, etc. This way, no guess work
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
-
Blogspot blog is subdomain, but domain is changing - How will this affect backlinks?
Hi Moz community, I appreciate the title is confusing, so let me explain. We use blogspot to host our blog. It's set up as a subdomain of our website. Let's call it: lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com Our website, in this example, is **lovelytraining.com ** We're migrating our website to a new domain: lovely.training We'll be redirecting everything on the primary website, so our link profile won't be lost. However, as the blog is hosted on blogspot, we'll lose links pointed to the blog. The blog would remain lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com - but our website would now be lovely.training The question is, has anyone migrated/redirected a blogspot blog in this way, to retain links? Secondly, is there another way we can tell Google that this is blog should be treated as a subdomain of our website? I'm sure I'm missing out something stupid, so don't go easy on me! Thanks all.
Web Design | | RobertChapman0 -
Homepage Gateway for Website Divisions (Residential / Commercial) Bad for SEO?
When a website offers multiple divisions for products and services would it be a good SEO practice to implement something as Culligan does by having their homepage be a sort of gateway to the different divisions of site (home, office, commercial, industrial)? 2DaYz
Web Design | | m-johnson0 -
Domain name change
Dear team, If a website with a domain name - example - raisins.com wishes to change to peanuts.com is this a dangerous task or a relatively simple one? I hope that by keeping my Q short, provides ease.
Web Design | | AdrianCGreen0 -
New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
Hi guys, I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work. Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position? Apperciate any advice around this Thanks
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
Mobile and SEO
We are in the process of building a responsive version of our site for mobile users (currently about 20% of total traffic). What are the most important SEO considerations we should be aware of when it comes to this kind of project? Thanks
Web Design | | halloranc0 -
Where should I spend Money on my website?
My website is www.capitolshine.com what do you think? Where should I spend money to enhance SEO search results? I do have a limited budget but the company is growing quickly and I might have more funds to invest in a few months. Where should I spend money now (less than $500 per month) and where should I spend money in the future? I am afraid the person who coded my website wasn't well versed on SEO. There also might be coding errors. I'm trying to work through the errors myself via the repots from SEOmoz.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
Help choosing an E-Commerce platform for SEO, Product Videos and Usability today?
7 months ago I asked the same question.. I am reaching out to all of you What platforms do you hate? and want to meet the guys or girls that coded it in a dark ally way... and What platforms are good? I keep looking at the code of some sites and its shocking. No GA Async code, No canonical tags.. it goes on and on.. If you want to pitch to me and you are in the UK email me robert@thefurnituremarket.co.uk
Web Design | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Drop Down Menus & SEO?
Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO? I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider? Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these? There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.
Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum0