Under-performing blog as part of main site
-
Hi
I was hoping to get some thoughts and opinions on our blog. It is part of our main site (not on a subdomain) but performs very badly, pulling in very little organic traffic (only accounting for 0.6% of our organic traffic).
Every page of the blog is listed in our sitemap, and using Screaming Frog I've done spot checks of several pages to see if they are indexed, which they have been. Looking at Google's text cache, all the content is visible.
Pages are often well shared on social media (for example): http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog/2014/10/antarctica-photography-safari-2014-updates.aspx
I'm aware that we do need more links coming into the blog but I still feel that it should be performing better than it is.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
-
I think that the blog has nice content.
Many of the posts are competing for queries where there is very little search volume.
Go to this page... http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog.aspx?destination=india read the titles of the posts. Are people are searching for those topics?
I think that the blog posts will get more traffic if their titles align with search volume or if their topics align with search volume.
-
Kata,
I would suggest the following. I am assuming you are using Moz Pro. What i would do is work with your client on a key word list. I would have them list the searches that they want to show up on and then enter these search strings into the key word tracker.
I would then work with the client on a content plan that is closely tied to ranking on these searches. This works well because the content that you or your client writes that ranks is then shown as the ranking URL in the key word ranking report. This visual feedback seems to really help clients see results form their work. I had one client go from 4 ranking URLs to 67 in under six months once they had this feedback look. This tool also had them go through the web site with the page grader and make sure they had pages on their main site ranking for their most important key word strings.
Hope this helps,
Ron
-
I am not sure the blog is the problem, if I search with a query containing the title of that article: https://www.google.it/webhp?q=antarctica+photography+safari
I can find it as third result. Which keywords are you after? Because if I narrow the search to just antartica+photography things change.
If I look at the keyword density in that article (like just using this tootl http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/), I get the impression without going black hat or irritate google copy could be a little bit more keyword focused.
The body is 900 words which is not so bad. But if I query for antarctica+photography competitors have a much larger copy and a probably better structure (headings are not just dates but do feed keywords to crawler).
Have you run a report on semrush for the domain? http://imgur.com/1pJ3G1i 229 positions is not much. Expecially given the 243 backlinks, which is not bad either: http://imgur.com/cuIwiLa
I would try to improve the copy of the articles, check the html in more depth, and review the backlinks profile for all the usual things (link quality, anchor diversity, deep linking, etc..).
-
Hi Kate,
From a quick browse, one slight improvement that you could implement is a template for your title tags and meta descriptions.
Google uses your title tags as ranking signals, and at the moment, yours don't seem to follow any kind of pattern. Best practice would indicate that you include the brand name at the start or the end, and that you could pull in the title of each blog post to use in the title. You should also try to include some sort of keyword for the page in the title if you can.
Although the meta description is not used as a ranking signal by Google, it is one of the first impressions a users gets, so the meta description should be enticing and make the user want to click through to the page.
Hope it helps! Good luck!
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
-
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Breadcrumbs for E Commerce Site
Hi, Does anyone have experience with Breadcrumb nodes for e-commerce? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overstock.com%2FOffice-Supplies%2FOffice-Star-Professional-Air-Grid-Deluxe-Task-Chair%2F2605023%2Fproduct.html What happens if your product appears in more than one category? Should you let google spider the various breadcrumb routes to the category?? Which one would take preference in results? Right now, for ease of management, we have not enabled category URL paths to the product - so the product appears right after the domain, for example, www.mydomain.com/en/myproduct.html - If we do enable category URL paths, Any comments or opinions? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
SEO firm site audit
needs recommendation for a site audit. Post panda/ post penguin experience preferred. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | skyao0 -
What is wrong with my once highly ranked site?
Hello, I'm really desperate for some help. I believe I've been hit by Panda as traffic started diminishing late March for my 6 year old website. I've never had a sharp drop, only gradual. I've lost a load traffic since then. I did change shopping carts in June since I had a a canonical issue from my old cart that couldn't be corrected. The old cart also did not allow me to have unique product titles and the urls were garbled with letters, numbers, etc... I know Panda did not like that. I've made several changes (cleaned up broken links, added more content to my site, added Disallow: /search/ and Disallow: /search to my robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content from my search box.) My most prized keywords (tutu and tutus) are on page 15 or so of Google now, when they used to be on page 1 or 2 at the worst. Other good ones are slipping too. I do need to hire an SEO to optimize my titles eventually as I believe my they are still a bit stuffed but before I do that, I am just trying to get the other stuff done first. My main questions are this... Do any of you see something else that looks bad to you in the eyes of Google? I'd love the cold, hard truth as I'm pretty desperate for my site to recover, if at all possible. Thank you in advance! Here is my site: http://alturl.com/mvmux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tutugirl0 -
The Site: search and Flow of PageRank
It is my understanding that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com the results are like every other SERP in that the most authoritative pages are ranked higher. So obviously I would expect my homepage to be first (in most cases), then followed by main category pages, etc. My question is has anybody ever seen disturbing results when doing this (i.e. pages that should have no authority outranking main category pages)? Is this always an issue with site structure or can you think of other factors that may cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purch0 -
Big Site Wide Link
Hi Guys, I've noticed that Google is starting to de-value site-wide links... Our previous SEO agency sourced us a site wide link on a big website and at the moment within Google Webmaster Tools its showing 749,726 links from this 1 source. Do you think this is too many? Could this be being flagged by Google? Here is the site: http://tinyurl.com/7bttw3b Cheers, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0