If I sell custom sticker products and have similar titles, is it a problem?

[speedbird1229]

Hi,

We're running a rather new website at www.redrockdecals.com and we sell mainly sticker products. I would just like to clarify on something that is bugging me and I just can't go forward with other products until I know the answers. I'd appreciate the help so much.

1. We sell for example license plate products for different European countries. I have figured out the best title for the page would be for example "Custom Catalonia License Plate" and the primary keyword in this is Catalonia license plate since that's what actually gets some searches from Google and therefore I have used that without the word "custom" in the product description text. I guess it's a good idea to write totally different description texts for all of these license plate pages so that's what I've been doing. Now the question is - does google accept the fact that I have different product titles like Custom Catalonia License Plate, Custom Germany License Plate etc so just the country name differs on all of these pages? Or should I play around with the titles and word orders also?

2. There is one part on the product page where we describe for example the temperature ranges and other specifications about the sticker material as you can see here: http://www.redrockdecals.com/custom-slovakia-license-plate Is it ok to copy-paste that text to all of the pages if the short descriptions on top of the product page are different?

[AlanBleiweiss]

At a certain point, it becomes extremely difficult to justify expending time on creating quality unique descriptions for individual products unless you can get enough unique reviews specific to each product page. Because of this, you need to make a decision as to whether you think you can keep them indexed.  If you do an outstanding job on every other aspect of your site's SEO, you may be able to, however it's not a sure thing even if you do all that other work.

What may be more beneficial is to noindex the individual flame sticker product pages and focus more energy on building trust / ranking signals focused on their category page.  There is no "one answer fits all" scenario unfortunately.

As for your Domain Authority, you'll need to speak with a Moz rep for more clarity, however Domain Authority is based on Moz's proprietary formula for understanding overall quality of the full spectrum of SEO signals.  So the better you do across the board in each aspect of SEO, the stronger that score will be.

You can learn more about DA on their explanation page.

[speedbird1229]

Thank you so much and sorry for the delayed reply. This information means really a lot for me and I am very happy you are taking your time to help me out.

I am already working on the license plate pages and will see how it goes after I have written unique descriptions for all of them. As I understand it's OK if the titles are like Custom Albania License Plate, Custom United Kingdom License Plate etc if I write totally unique descriptions below the H1 title and use the keyword like "albania license plate" throughout the description twice perhaps.

I got two more questions...

1. Any good tips how to optimize or deal with products like this http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-flame-decal-sticker-721 ? The flame decals are actually really similar to each other but they must be presented in a catalog form so I cannot combine them onto a single page with a dropdown or anything like that. And even if I write unique descriptions it's really weird to write totally different titles for them. I wonder if I should just NOINDEX them?

2. Why is our Domain Authority only 20? Is it because of the overall poor optimization? Should it improve if I have half of the pages optimized in a better way?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I have a preliminary very serious concern about how you've set things up on the site.

Of course, without a full understanding of the entire site, this is JUST preliminary. Yet even at this point, I found issues that say "not likely to get true, sustainable 1st page rankings".

http://www.redrockdecals.com/austria-european-license-plate-sticker-different-sizes-and-materials

http://www.redrockdecals.com/belgium-european-license-plate-sticker-different-sizes-and-materials

The URLs for these are EXTREMELY over-optimized.

The page Titles, bold text atop the content area, H1 headline, product descriptions, size options, and "tabbed" description and features on these are identical.  The ONLY difference is the country name.

If this is an issue across a significant portion of the site, you definitely have a problem.

While search engines do their best to understand similar products are going to have similar descriptions, on scale it's more glaring.

Note how Mat Bennett specifically stated "As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles." as his concern?

Yeah. There's a reason for that.

So - can you truly justify having one page for every country for your various products?  Only if you can come up with ways to add at least SOME uniqueness to every page.

If not, you need to consider a redesign where all the "License Plate Sticker" pages are consolidated into ONE PAGE, with a dropdown menu for people to select their country.

(I don't want to come across as mean-spirited, however it is vital for you to understand the potential roadblocks to success your site has, and since I found that even in a very quick review, I only wonder how many other major crisis type issues the site suffers from)...

[speedbird1229]

Thank you! But how about using two keywords for one product category - for example Aircraft Stickers, Aircraft Graphics? Is it a bad idea or can it be implemented?

[matbennett]

1.  This should be fine.  As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles.

2. Again, as long as other parts of the page change this should be fine.  It's quite a common thing and google is pretty good at understanding the difference.