Branded vs Non Branded Homepage?
-
So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage. The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'. This figures.
But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage. Which is languishing at position 3-5.
Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches. So people who are searching for us.
Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot? That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page?
I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page. But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one. It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?
-
Sounds like a good plan, Ed!
-
She certainly fits the genius bill for sure. That's funny because my PPC guy was saying there's loads of CRO opportunities. You're right - I'm becoming obsessed. All this gamification of apps is making me crazy. Seeing just a 5% drop in traffic will ruin my day and we could have converted £25,000 of new patients lol. I'm not even kidding either. I'm getting bummed out by stupid stuff.
Who was it who said you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. I think it's time to bin the dashboards for a week and come up with some new thinking.
Thanks for your advice. I'm also gonna hit Joy up at Sterling. Even her lowliest agency tea-boy could probably move the needle for our site.
-
Hey Ed,
I know just how you're feeling about this, and sometimes, you can be so deep in the weeds of a project, you can begin to feel a bit lost. I think this happens to everybody now and again.
Yes, remove that review schema from the homepage. It could possibly be a spam signal. Not 100% positive about that, but I think it may be so.
Another suggestion: I know that rankings are important. I get that. But I've had clients in the past who overemphasized this beyond what was reasonable, narrowing their focus so that they lost sight of the bottom line: conversions. Yes, you have to have visibility to earn conversions, but it could be that you need to turn down the dial on the rankings focus for a bit and see how well the current rankings you have are converting to appointment bookings, or some other valued metric. Could there be usability improvements made that could take the same amount of traffic you're getting right now and increase the phone calls it is yielding, or the time spent on the site, or the links your content is earning? Maybe focus on that for a bit, and then come back to the rankings picture.
Hiring an expert for some consulting might also be a bright idea, if you hire someone truly qualified. I'm thinking along the lines of a Joy Hawkins, here ... not just a run-of-the-mill Local SEO. A true expert will often notice things a brand is overlooking, and from what they notice, a picture emerges of what is and isn't possible for the business. That can be very valuable.
Wishing you best of luck!
-
Yeah you nailed it as usual.
Schema stars just don't show up on homepages. You're probably right. A homepage is a homepage and it's going to kill my local rankings to try to mess around with a 'dentist Liverpool page' Should I take all the schema review attempts (that failed) off the homepage? Is it damaging things?
I went through a big phase of consolidating content and it worked really well and now I'm number one for lots of stuff (or sometimes one and two!) I'm experimenting with more specific 'topics' now trying to write more content - also trying not to fall foul of maccabbees or beinng so specific that I just don't get enough traffic/keywords on each page to get them ranking.
It's all testing and I really feel now like I'm in a maze just randomly testing routes and trying to stick to best practice but doing it blindly. I audit my competition every time I do a search. Sometimes I just don't know. The auditing tools all come up with different ideas and they are less and less reliable as google is taking these giant leaps. But that's the point. If we were able to work it out then the whole thing would fall apart.
One thing that has had a HUGE effect is all the DCMA's i've been putting in and disavowing dodgy domains. I really don't think google is as good at ignoring them as they say they are.
I've experimented with Ad Words (appearing first on all the mobile searches as a sort of branding exercise) but i'm not sure that's helped with CTR like the research suggests.
Sometimes I want to pay some pure genius to look at it for me and run a really comprehensive report but I know I'm just going to pay for a crappy SEM Rush branded PDF report or a something straight from an SEO SAAS product. I need someone with a brain to look at it for me. I feel like i'm at the limit of what I'm actually mentally capable of and it's frustrating me.
I also think that it's sometimes not me moving the needle but the whims of google. Search console is showing some really strange results with demand like some days there'll be 3x the impressions but I don't see any featured snippets or reasons.
Im sorry - i'm ranting at you.
-
Hey Ed,
I'm not sure if you realize this, but you're never supposed to use aggregate Schema review markup on your homepage. More on this: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/
So, skip that goal of stars showing up from this in relation to the homepage.
I want to be sure I'm understanding your goal here. I believe you're saying that you homepage isn't ranking for your core term. It's only ranking for branded searches. And this is making you think you need to make a landing page for your core term. If you only have one location, that really wouldn't be a best practice. Rather, you have to figure out what WILL move the needle for you and this core term (if anything). Some things (like proximity or filters) will be a brick wall you can't easily pass through. Others (like building authority) are what you're going to typically run into as recommended strategy. There is something about your competitors that is holding you lower than that coveted #1 spot, Ed, and a competitive audit is going to be the best solution to find out what that something is.
I did a post here on the Moz blog about doing a competitive audit to analyze local rankings, but you're talking about organic rank, right? That would be a bit different, though related. Either way, you've got to find that secret something. It could be proximity, it could be links, it could be content, it could be spam!
Am I understanding your topic correctly?
-
So to be clear I've ruled out:
-
Domain and page authority
-
Content and KW density and stuffing
-
comprehensiveness and content topics etc
So all that's left is domain age but I read that doesn't matter anymore so much and how are we outranking them for the non-branded keywords? some of them really super-comeptitve?
It's a mystery.
-
-
Hey,
Thanks for the response. I've done loads of top ten benchmarking and their sites are older. I worry that could be the reason too. We're only a few years old. The one and two positions are 6 and 10 yrs old. But we're outranking them for all our services so my question really is can I ignore the homepage and create a 'services page' with 'dentist liverpool' as the focus KW?
-
Hi Ed.
Have you analyzed the competition? It may be that the competition has very well optimized the web page. It can also be that the web is older, etc. What is your website to analyze it with respect to the competition?
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
-
Keyword and Branded Title Tags Site Wide
I have a client who is using a structure like this for site wide title tags: Page specific keyword | Brand Name | Industry specific keyword + locations So in an example it'd look like: Drupal Development | BrandName | Web Services for Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New York I've researched this structure pretty thoroughly to be able to make a case for or against doing this site wide.
Local SEO | | culturefoundry
However, I've received many mixed signals on many things. My questions are as follows: Should brand name be last in this structure? Does it matter? The length of this is obviously causing truncated Title in search results, so which is more useful? Is using a keyword intended for site ranking like "Web Services", "Digital Agency", "SEO Specialist" useful for every page to have or damaging? Is this cannibalizing that keyword? Is having multiple locations on every page title helping, hurting, or neutral It seems like all these things could go either way to me, but I don't want to tell them one way or another without having some more detailed explanations to give them. Thanks for your help!0 -
How to go about SEO when the content on all the pages is in a regional language (with its own script which is non-roman) but majority of searches are in the same language but roman script?
For example, the entire content is in an Indian language called Gujarati and the script is also Gujarati. However, when I did a keyword research, I found that majority of the searches are in Gujarati langugage by roman script e.g. "gujarati sahitya" meaning Gujarati literature. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Local SEO | | Tumul0 -
From traction to non existent! What happened to my Photography site and what can I do to fix it?
Aloha guys, To start as I always do with the (awesome) Moz community I wanted to say thanks for the insight! This has to be one of the best online communities and help resource with great positive and concise help that really makes a difference, so many thanks everyone! PS I also do my best to relay what I learn here to fellow business owners and point them to SEO boosting avenues to help support the community as much as possible. Anyways... **My Photo website ** **Current top wedding website (I do enjoy her work!!!) ** Attached below is a link to some stats/graphs! The Problem! After the recent Google update last month I've had a drop in my site visibility from 5.8% and some change to now .7% of search volume.. Painful for my photo & video business here on Kauai to say the least. A few images are attached, is there also any correlations you guys can see or think may help to get my site up to the first page? I know we deliver some of the very best work here on the island and deliver great service too, its a bummer that we cant do more for folks visiting here that dont even know we exist! The question! Do you guys have any ideas on what can be done to get my page to gaining organic traction and doing great again? My goal is to have our business rank for Kauai Wedding Videographer, Kauai Wedding Photographer, and Kauai Family Photographer! My moz dashboard is still saying we're on the way for that but that my search visibility is way way down. Any clarity or ideas are greatly appreciated you guys! I would love to relay this to the wedding community as well! Warmest aloha from Kauai everybody and have a great day! NjELT NjELT
Local SEO | | Trey30 -
Blocking non-U.S. traffic to fight referral spam?
I've been thinking about ways to deal with referral spam in Google Analytics. From what I can tell, most if not all of this is coming from outside the U.S. I'd love any insight into the following questions related to this issue: For U.S. based local businesses, I'm wondering if we should just block all traffic from outside of the U.S. -would there be negative SEO factors if we use this approach? Would it be better to just create GA segments to filter out this traffic, rather than actually blocking it? Has anyone found success in using filters or segments in this way? Is anyone seeing referral spam from within the U.S.? Edit: I just came across this suggestion, that setting 2 filters (for invalid hostname and screen resolution) can solve most of the issue. Any insight on this alternative vs. my ideas above?? https://www.distilled.net/resources/quick-fix-for-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
Local SEO | | irapasternack1 -
Sub domain page or brand new domain
I run a business that provides entertainment services for parties, inc weddings and business functions, but I wanted to take advantage of the visitors that I have and work with other businesses to offer other services for parties, I started with a caterer, and created a catering page on my website. Thinking that my domain authority of 28, which is better than some of the local catering businesses, would be an advantage. I'm just getting going on that so I am only on page 2 in the new niche, 2 days since I launched, but I am creating quality off page content, and watching the results, but I just thought that I would ask the question: Which is better a page on the website of the same wider niche, eg party suppliers, with some DA already built up Or a brand new domain for each partner that I work with, having to build up DA and PA as I go. And having to create on page content for the new niche Or even one new website for party services with new content for each services, starting at no DA or PA One issue seems to be that when I add my sitemap, google does not seem to be indexing the page (and about 20 others, even though I now have a clean robots.txt file) according to webmaster tools, and yet it shows up on page 2 of Google for the keyword. Answers appreciated Mike Collins
Local SEO | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
How to globalize your brand if the name contains a geo-location modifier?
Hi Moz community,_**[Posting for one of our staff members 🙂 ] **_One of our clients has difficulty attracting a national and international market potentially due to their brand name including a geo-location modifier. We believe that it may be a combination of search engine algorithms incorrectly assuming that the brand is location specific as well as human users perceiving this. I can't reveal the brand but a similar example may be "Houston Cheese-makers". This company wants to attract national and international customers and not be restricted to just Houston. It appears that both search engines and human users are understanding the brand to be limited just to Houston. The client does not want to re-brand. The brand also has a Google Plus Local entity verified against their headquarters location in Houston. We have considered the following tasks to help alleviate this restriction: Changing site messaging to include modifiers such as "national", "USA" and "international" (title-tags, meta-descriptions, on-page text etc). Including a testimonial page that has testimonials from multiple international locations (eg "Joe Blogs from Sydney, Australia says..."). Changing the title tag format site-wide from "page-name | Houston Cheese-makers" to an abbreviated version such as "page-name | HCM" or "page-name | H Cheese-makers". Schema tags - is there any specific tags that can send a signal about the global presence of the brand? What other techniques can help alleviate this problem? Is the Google Plus Local page potentially hampering this as well? Has anyone had a similar experience and can shed some light?Thanks so much!
Local SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
Landing Page vs Call Tracking
It is important for this particular client to maintain a single phone number for brand recognition.That being said; the client also utilizes radio advertising on occasion to announce new products or special promotions. I would like to track response to radio campaigns without call-tracking numbers. I am considering setting-up a separate easy-to-remember domain (the primary domain is quite lengthy) to use as a landing page for a new service the client has launched. I have created a topically relevant page for the new service on the client's primary domain and have achieved excellent organic placement. What might be the best approach to capture response to radio advertising and track PPC conversion metrics? 301 the landing page/domain to the relevant page on the primary domain OR use the separate landing page/domain as a lead capture page with a simple form and option to click-through to the primary domain? As always, I am looking-forward to your helpful suggestions 🙂
Local SEO | | SCW0 -
Citations for a non-local campaign?
Is it worth building citations if one is targeting a national campaign with NO local keywords? Even if they have some effect, are they really worth the time, effort and costs?
Local SEO | | Gavo0