What other SEO strategies and tactics can be accomplished at this point?
-
The client specializes in home, commercial and restoration cleaning services and offers carpet, upholstery, area rug, wood floor, drapery, tile and gout, stone and restoration services such as (water damage, fire damage, mold remediation). This company has over 40 franchises. Carpet cleaning service is their core service that gets them to the customer’s door, then technicians get to up sell on the secondary services (tile, upholstery, stone, wood…)
One of the main strategies we have implemented successfully is to be more visible at the local level was a local SEO strategy with every locations having their own unique landing pages for each of the services they would offer ( for instance the san diego location would a customized page for carpet, upholstery and all services they would offer). We have done a great job optimizing each of these locations. Optimization includes on page optimization, unique NAP information, local citations (manual insertions + Yext). We also added local markups and for some of the franchises we added review snippet. Link building around carpet cleaning has been conducted as well through guest posting and in links content. Most of our locations have a google business updated and optimized as well. We are working to get as many reviews as possible but it is still very challenging. In summary basic SEO tactics have been implemented following google’s guideline.
Traffic & rankings got us a positive progressive boost in mid 2013(April to August) but in april 2014 the site got hit by manual penalty affecting all carpet cleaning queries only. I was able to cleanup the mess within 2 months luckily but unfortunately we still saw a drop of %40 in traffic (vs 2013) on average in all carpet cleaning pages YoY (april to august).
2015 Q1 traffic has improved by 6% compared to Q1 2014 which is good but still not at the level we were. With the pigeon update and all the high authoritative directories (yelp, angieslist) taking over more and more of the organic real estate in the SERP and increase in competition we have had a hard time getting back to where we were (2013) and we may never get back unless another algorithmic change happens.
Another frustrating thing is local competition which has the worst sites as far as UX and content and still outranks us ( such as http://www.carpetcleaninglosangeles.com/). My main goal is to figure out a plan to increase traffic within the carpet cleaning pages and therefore increase conversions. Like it or not rankings for carpet cleaning queries is affecting our CC traffic, so working towards improving them is one way to go even though I shouldn’t focus all my efforts on just rankings.
2015 SEO main activities has been:
-local link building= somewhat successful (Seeing some rankings improvements but not consistent across all franchises)
-content marketing projects= quiet successful as far as traffic, branding and link acquisition but not seeing enough ROI
-new web design (launched late 2014)
-google business reviews
-local citations duplicate removal
-weekly blogging ( successful as far as traffic and branding)Things I would like to work on:
-improve Bounce rate within site
-improve CTR by adding review snippets across all franchises
-add industry certification logos to build trust with users and improve conversion
-add before and after pictures of services performed
-site speed (has slowed down compared to the old site)I would love get feedback on what other crucial components(that I am missing) can be done to improve most of these franchises rankings. I am a bit out of ideas as far as what else can be done.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for your suggestions!
Our blog content is more informational than anything. I think we are pretty solid as far as kw selections for each of our services.
Digging deeper into the analytics is a good suggestions so we can understand where people are falling from the funnel. The truth is that we have some GA implementation issues lately so hopefully asap we will have access to this kind of data.
Our site is entirely mobile friendly
My coworker is a CRO specialist and is working on user testing but essentially focusing on testing the service scheduler. Are you suggesting that we need to also use A/B testing for service pages and blog as well?
Also do you know any tools or any methods to find "buzz" topics around carpet cleaning industry besides kw research, link analysis...?
-
Thanks for your suggestions John.
We are pretty active on social as well by posting every blog posts we create on fb, twitter, and google plus. We are also promoting services via sponsored posts. We are not really conducting any promotions such as giveaways.
Our blog posts generates close to 10000 visits but still has a very high bounce rate close 90% . I think the topics are good but not amazing per se. Despite adding internal links on those posts, the bounce rate hasn't really decreased so maybe the way the blog is structured is affecting us as well (look, design, feel) .
-
Hello there!
Definitely agree with John - social seems to be a huge area of opportunity for you guys. This could help with not only content distribution but also as another touch point and communication tool along the conversion journey.
And, is your content (blogs, specifically) more informational or does it have a certain "buzz" appeal? John had a great idea with the "10 Nastiest Things We Find On Your Carpet" idea. This type of content performs particularly well on social media (just look at buzzfeed!) by being easy to absorb and easily shareable.
This might be a tough question to answer honestly but considering past rankings from a purely user perspective - did you guys deserve those rankings? For example, if someone was to search "carpet cleaning companies in (location)" the user is clearly seeking a list of cleaning services in the area. Though that term might have a huge amount of search volume, an individual page for an individual location might not have been a good match for that search query in the first place, despite sales that might have resulted from that query. It might be worth evaluating your keyword list again and tweaking a few to ensure that you are a good match for exactly what is being searched. *I know nothing about your keywords or website, it was merely a suggestion
Digging deeper into the analytics and mapping out consumer paths to figure out where people are dropping off might be another good avenue to explore.
Also, have you considered user testing? Sites like usertesting.com are often relatively affordable considering the value of what you get in return and you might even get feedback on things you never even considered before.
Finally, you'll want to check and be sure all of your pages are as mobile friendly as possible and that you information is easy to find and navigate and that your forms are easy to fill out via different device types.
Best of luck!
-
I am just writing down thoughts as in many ways it is a open question.
The one component that seems to be absent is social media. Are the blogs being published on twitter, google + facebook etc.? Are the blogs posts topical, educational "the 10 nastiest things we find in your carpet?" etc. Do the customers connect with the blogs.
Given the high bounce rate that means a lack of a strong connection with a customer... a survey - just a simply one of what your customer is missing may uncover some gems - and a path to deepen that connection.
When all else fails ask the customer? Do a site survey.
Site speed is an absolute killer - a study I saw a year ago (cant recall where) states every second over 2 second for page loading you drop 7% of customers. That adds up. Also it is a significant ranking factor.
If I have one priority when I fix a site it is loading speed & usually a tidy up of title, H1's - H4's. Perhaps conduct a site audit - pretend looking at for the first time - be super critical.
So in summary - fix the loading page speed and do some customer research or ask your client to do a customer survey... also everything sounds a little bland.. you need to aim to twice as good as the best... are you doing that?
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
-
Mobile site scrolls past content straight to the products. Can this affect our seo?
As our content can be quite long at the top, we introduced js anchor scroll going straight to the products, by passing the banner and the content at the top. Can this have an issue on seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits1 -
Can I define that one area of my website is a regualr news (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read?
Hi I have a client that have a news website, he asked me if he can define one area of his website to be a regular news that google can show on google news search results (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Yoast Seo + Home Page
Hi All, I'm using Studiopress Genesis Enterprise child theme in Wordpress + InstantWP + Yoast SEO. I have created a standard home page (see image) along with bespoke pages My question is this: When I select Pages | All Pages ... I cannot see the home page and therefore cannot optimise the home page with Yoast SEO. What am I doing wrong? Thanks Mark XQvbFl2taJEgFXJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Can SEO increase a page's Authority? Or can Authority only be earned via #RCS?
Hi all. I am asking this question to purposefully provoke a discussion. The CEO of the company where I am the in-house SEO sent me a directive this morning. The directive is to take our Website from a PR3 site to a PR5....in 6 months. Now, I know Page Rank is a bit of a deprecated concept, but I'm sure you would agree that "Authority" is still crucial to ranking well. When he first sent me the directive it was worded like this "I want a plan in place with the goal being to "beat" a specific competitor in 6 months." When I prodded him to define "beat," i.e. did he mean "outrank" for every keyword, he answered that he wanted our site to have the same "Authority" that this particular competitor has. So I am left pondering this question: Is it possible for SEO to increase the authority of a page? Or does "Authority" come from #RCS? The second part of this question is what would you do if you were in my shoes? I have been devoting huge amounts of time on technical SEO because the Website is a mess. Because I've dedicated so much time to technical issues, link-earning has taken a back seat. In my mind, why would anyone want to link to a crappy site that has serious technical issues (slow load times, no persistent cart, lots of 404s, etc)? Shouldn't we make the site awesome before trying to get people to link to us? Given this directive to improve our site's "Authority" - would you scrap the technical SEO and go whole hog into a link-earning binge, or would you hunker down and pound away at the technical issues? Which one would you do first if you couldn't do both at the same time? Comments, thoughts and insights would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
The format for image SEO
Hi there. After looking at a few SEO videos relating to image SEO it seems important to ensure images are SEO'd just as well as pages. I however have a question. If the page is Meta titles the following: Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech And this particular page contains five images which are each variants of this product, how is it best to SEO them? Would you go with the: Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Front Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Back Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Side and so on... Or would this result in keyword stuffing with Google's new over-optimisation rules. Would it be better to rename them so they are all individual? I am considering deleting the images, renaming them on the server as the SEO proof name and then re-uploading them so the Image caption = filename. Am I on the right track? If you need the page: http://www.onlineforequine.co.uk/jodhpurs-breeches/22-just-togs-ladies-latina-denim-breech.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlineforequine0 -
Effects on SEO with CDN
Should we be concerned about any adverse consequences to our site's SEO value when moving the site's assets (javascript files and css files) to a CDN (Akamai)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Volusion.com0