How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
-
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs.
Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
-
Hi Karen.
I can appreciate your desire to keep your #1 ranking, and not make any changes to the page. Your fears are valid as any "improvements" you make to the page can impact your ranking. It's a tough spot. Google wants to provide users with the best experience, but by making changes to improve that experience you risk the #1 spot.
I took a look at your page and your SERP and have a concern. Your title in the results page shows as "Per Diem - Nursing news, career resources, RN jobs and nursing..."When I visit the actual page, the title is "Nursingvillage.com - Career Option". If that was a recent change, I would suggest it is a bad one and should be corrected. It would be a reasonable cause to lose your #1 ranking.
A reasonable title for the page would be "Per Diem Nursing | Nursingvillage.com". The rest of your title would be best left for your meta description.
As far as why you are ranking #1, the term "per diem nursing" only receives 3600 global searches per month according to AdSense. It's not that competitive. Compare that with the following keywords which receive more global monthly searches:
nursing jobs - 1,000,000
nurse employment - 673,000
nursing job employment - 550,000
nursing positions - 301,000
jobs for nurses - 246,000
"Per diem nursing" is a long tail keyword phrase which is why you are ranking so well.
-
Your rankings are mainly supported by title tag, keywords in on-page text and inbound links. If you do not change these you should be able to make page modifications with little risk of rankings loss. If you work to improve your site in a way that attracts relevant links that should strengthen your position.
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
-
Does product environment have impact on main website's SEO
We have two environments - product, where login is necessary and where the customers are working. We also have there our help desk, Q&A and knowledge base. Pretty sophisticated page regarding information on a specific topic. We also have our main page where we promote our products, company and events, etc. Main page is www.example.com, where product environment is login.example.com . Does this product environment have an impact on my main page's SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeringaA0 -
Content change and variations in ranking
Hello, I have create a new webpage and asked google in the webmaster tool to crawl it. Within minutes it is ranked at a certain spot. I did make changes to it to increase the ranking and right away I could see variations in ranking either up or down ? I have done the same same thing for a page that has been existing on my website for many years. I changed the content, asked the webmaster tool to re-crawl it. It got the new content within minutes but the ranking doesn't seem to change. Maybe my content isn't good enough but I doubt. Could it be that on old pages it takes a couple weeks to see ranking changes whereas on new page it is instantaneous. Has anyone experienced something similar ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Irrelevant blog contents negatively affect ranking for main keywords?
Hi Moz Community, I am working at a branding company. Currently, we found our ranking for main keywords (branding company) is dropping a little. I am suspicious of the new blog posts that we published lately. We wrote different kind of stuff, such as company culture, how to inspire employees, the importance of leadership and some other stuff that is actually not as related to our main keyword - branding company. My question is, will these irrelevant posts hurt our ranking for main keyword, to some extent? Thank you. Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii0 -
What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
Hello everyone, Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages? For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page? The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau3 -
Keyword research when the site's subject is low volume
Hey guys, what do you do when you planning a new website and doing keyword research for a site when the avg. search volumes are relatively low. We set up run contact centres for UK charities including voice, webchat, sms, email and response fulfillment etc. It seems that people aren't really searching that often for this 'sexy subject'. Average volumes for searches with some intent/qualifier range from between 10-100 monthly searches. What sort of strategies would you adopt in this scenario? Do you optimise for what you can and then make a large focus on other digital marketing tactics such as content marketing, social media, email marketing etc. Thanks for your time guys Leo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leo_Woodhead0 -
Can changing dynamic url of over 2000 pages site after a year will change its ranking
Hi- Have built site in joomla The urls are dynamic in nature with over a year - all pages are well indexed and backlinks been built over with these dynamic urls Need to know if i hire an agency to change over dynamic url to static url of these 2000 pages - will it also change all Search engine ranking positions of existing urls Will all the seo effort and backlinks build over 15 months will still hold valid or this will just back to square one due to change of urls is it advisable to get the url changed from dynamic to static one - especially when site is receiving over 75,000 visitors every month Thanks in advance. Look for expert suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0
