Should I keep writing about the same using rel canonical?

[Naix]

Hi,

The service we provide has not so many searches per month. A long tail keyword that describes the service well has at the most 400 searches per month. We wrote a post for this keyword and we ranked number 1 for many months. Now we're on page 2 and I the truth is we stopped writing blog posts because we were raking well for our best keywords. I added a few new posts and lost ranking on my top keywords so I gave up, deleted them and recover the rankings for the keywords I wanted the most. The problem is that I have lost these positions and I know we're supposed to be updating the blog regularly. What would you suggest? Should we keep writing about the same thing and use rel canonical? There aren't that many keywords related to what we offer. I appreciate any ideas.

[danwebman]

Hi all,

I truly believe that Google has started looking at the traffic on pages of your site, determines what the overall traffic is and then divides that number by number of pages to work out a relevance.

Therefore if have 10 pages getting 50-100 views each (totaling 800 views / 10 pages = 80)

is better than 100 pages getting 20-50 each (totaling 2000 views / 100 pages = 20)

Therefore if you remove your un-intresting pages (least visited) I believe ranking will increase.

What do you think of this theory? (be kind)

Regards

[Naix]

Thanks so much Mike! You were a great help.

[MikeRoberts]

You don't just want to hit a keyword that you think is/will be most important. Organic search terms are all over the place and you can't account for every way in which an organic searcher could possibly find you. But the algorithm, and Rank Brain in particular, takes into account relevancy... how things are related to each other and why that matters. You don't just want someone to find you for [Ski vacations] you want to be an authority on Ski Vacations which includes ski rental tips, what equipment you should have, what clothes always warmth & freedom of movement, popular products, popular locations, and so on.

[Naix]

I used to be so motivated asking my coworker to write about our specialty vacation (sport). She writes so well..it's really inspiring and we try not to talk about our services but the experience or what to look for, etc. It's not a boring industry although I'm stuck and don't know what direction to take. I have some keywords that are very related to what we sell and have a good conversion rate. At some point I had written about every possible direct keyword and we started writing about terms that had lots of visits but didn't convert and the worst is that I lost ranking for the keywords I really cared about. I though maybe if these posts got shared and ranked well I could at least link to the posts that actually converted, but I didn't wait long enough and deleted all these posts that weren't directly related to my business.

Let's say we don't have more closely related keywords to write about..would it be a good approach to simply write about tips to play the sport or vacations in general? My fear is to start getting more visits, only a few conversions from those news keywords and losing ranking for my top keywords because Google thinks that my business in not as specific as it used to be.

My competitors have very bad blogs...not updated, not optimized, not shared, liked or anything and they simply talk about the sport in general, they're locations, what to bring on a holidays, etc. They post at the most every 3 months (if they have a blog at all).

I though of creating a subdomain to talk about tips for the sport (videos and articles). This could help others people to improve and some may like it and come on vacation to practice with us.

I know there is a lot of content I can talk about like equipment, the destinations, tips to improve, news, etc..I just don't think they are closely related to my keyword..let's say "ski vacation". I prefer to write about ski vacation in Switzerland, ski vacation for families, winter ski holidays, etc., but there is a limit with these keywords.

Thanks so much Patrick (I liked the post about boring industries and will take a closer look at Moz content stuff) and Mike (I have to come up with interesting things to write about without losing ranking for my top keywords).

[MikeRoberts]

I know how tedious it can get writing about the same thing over and over again. But it doesn't need to be "We sell product X, product X does this, Look at pictures of Product X" constantly rehashed. Check out related and relevant terms, go find an LSI keyword tool to find things that are related to your business without being the same core term you always use or do some research on competitors around the country to see how they handle this stuff and pull some ideas from them what you could be writing about. Find things in similar and related industries to tie your product and services to... an ice cream shop could write about local beaches; a towing service can write about regular tire maintenance; a moving company can write about history of bubblewrap; and so on.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

"Now we're on page 2 and I the truth is we stopped writing blog posts because we were raking well for our best keywords."

That's your first mistake. Even with a boring business or low search volume industry has content opportunities. There are various ways to spin or repurpose content where it's fresh and new in both the user and search engines eyes. Not to mention, there are news and industry updates that can also help you when the content well has run dry, so to speak.

There are a ton of great content resources from Moz that can help you get the wheels turning when it comes to new content opportunities. I would also focus on the following:

• What are your competitors writing about?
• What are your target audience talking about?
• What type of content are they digesting / sharing?
• What does the future look like for your industry?
• What current trends are happening in your industry that your audience should know about?

Taking yourself through this process will help you better understand opportunities and gaps that you have in your own content, and give you ideas on how you can not only write new content, but continue to do so in the future.

Whatever you do, do NOT write the same thing over and over and slap a canonical tag on it. You're doing good things, just keep pushing and looking for opportunities to tie your long tail keywords into new content by going through the resources / questions above.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have any questions or comments, good luck!
Patrick