How to have H1 keywords on EVERY Page but not destroy user experience for holiday rental site
-
Hi all, as a Newbie getting my holiday home rental site up & running, I just cannot find a clear answer to this after many hours research.
Moz & everyone else advises I need to optimise by ensuring my keywords are in my H1s, that H1s need to be on every page, more than 20 characters, but still unique, relevant, a statement of the content, appealing to users & not keyword stuffed. How can I include my keywords ("holiday home tasmania" & "tasmania holiday rentals") in the heading on EVERY page & still make every heading unique, relevant & not keyword stuffed?
I only have 10 pages Home / The Space / Amenities / Location / About / Guide / House Rules / Reviews / Contact & they by nature need to be information based, not designed like a more creative Blog (which I will add later). Eg - my Amenities page which is a quick reference list so people can easily see inclusions & find if we have features they need/want. It seems really awkward & not in keeping with the chic, designer image I am trying to project to have "Amenities At Your Holiday Home Tasmania", "Three Beaches Tasmania Holiday Rental Location", "About This Beach Holiday Home Tasmania", "Your Guide To The Best Of Your Holiday Accommodation's Local Area", House Rules Of Your Chic Holiday Home Tasmania", "It's Easy To Contact Your Next Tasmania Holiday Rental"
Much of the information out there including Moz's seems to be oriented towards blogs where there is a lot more creative freedom for an expressive H1, rather than a service business in a competitive space where people need to access facts & features quickly in order to make a buying decision & are very quickly going to notice & be irritated by the use of similar sounding phrases in every headline AND sprinkled throughout the page content.
Many thanks,
Cherie - Australia
-
Hey there - yep we have certainly got it going on down here. As Lonely Planet said, our gourmet's paradise is "wild & dramatic, cultured & quirky, isolated yet accessible". We have an intoxicating mix of splendid isolation with breathtaking, unspoiled scenery combined with all the mod cons provided by excellent tourist facilities, world class art galleries, festivals, music & culture along with plenty of unique wildlife & hipster cafes/restaurants serving up superb paddock to plate produce. But I am sure I don't need to sell Australia to the Brits! You know where to stay now anyway :). We will look after you if you ever get to Tassie.
(It seems this part of my reply was deleted on sending, apologies)
I have changed the sitemap to https://3beaches.id.au/sitemap.xml.
The 404 is courtesy of hosting provider Hostinger & it has been a struggle to get the 404 page I actually wanted up, but here it is - https://3beaches.id.au/whoops.
Thank you so much for the spreadsheet! I am sitting down to give it the attention it deserves as we speak. Unfortunately I can't use 'airbnb hobart tasmania' as we are about an hour out of Hobart in an entirely different region & it will probably annoy people who are looking for Hobart accom as they want the capital city & our strength is being in the country but still only an hour away from a cosmopolitan city. "best airbnb near Hobart" is accurate & I like it! Should we be using this if it doesn't rank however?
'5 star accommodation tasmania' is not quite right as we are rated 5 stars by guest feedback which is not to be confused with the official hotel star ratings system. 'airbnb east coast tasmania' at 110 search volume & 'airbnb south australia' at 210 can't be used as they refer to a vwery different area in Tassie in the case of 'east coast' & South Australia is on the mainland of Australia & very different. Your promptings have been very helpful however as I never even thought about searching for 'eggs and bacon bay' as I thought it would be way too obscure & imagine my surprise when I found that this yields a 720 result! I am also going to target 'huon valley tasmania' our region as Moz says in Australia this yields 501-850 volume. I can't see how via the Moz keyword tool to search worldwide, but will check this via the Google keyword planner which I always find ridiculously difficult to find.
So I am now targeting - airbnb tasmania, huon valley tasmania, eggs and bacon bay, best airbnb near hobart + huon valley accommodation (which according to Moz gets 51-100 monthly volume.
Thanks so much again, will be back in touch once I have finetoothed your spreadsheet! Do send your name & details if you wish via my contact page.
Cherie
Your Airbnb Tasmania must see & do guides to the best of Huon Valley Tasmania
-
It's a very noble ambition, got to admit just looking at the pictures, Tasmania looks really cool! I'm really glad the bookings are going well as ultimately the commercial viability of a site demonstrates its true worth
So I just thought I'd do a quick crawl to see, how many pages you really do have!
Basically you're right, it's ten pages and one sitemap which doesn't seem to be working:
- https://d.pr/i/ToY8Kh.png (screenshot)
The pages are fine, it's just the sitemap XML which is 404-ing
You have a robots.txt file here:
It references a sitemap XML file here:
It seems to have some issues:
Love the little 404-dinosaur, but maybe a Tasmanian devil would be more suitable? :')
In any-case, looking at the 10 pages, I'd do something like this:
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cXUvQg_pxWuqaVx3dyuYUkokAr76DUimxanx_W2SF48/edit?usp=sharing (gdoc link share)
I started a sheet here (not finished yet) showing how I lay out this kind of keyword research. I have completed the top two rows (green) for you. Maybe you can use this as a template to carry on! Only the Titles and H1s were significantly altered. The Meta Descriptions were actually cut down a bit so they won't 'cut off' on Google's SERPs
-
Hi Luminatrix,
Yes, I recommend including your keywords, but not being quite so strict about order. You might enjoy this Whiteboard Friday from earlier this year: https://moz.com/blog/write-for-seo-2018
-
Hi Miriam - thanks for taking the time to respond! So I don't need to be too strict with my keyword word order in my H1 to still get good results? My instincts without any SEO shackling for my reviews page is to honour the common feedback themes I am getting from my guests. So my H1 for that page is currently "Beautiful. Welcoming. Delightful Details". I will try balancing elegant text with the need to reassure people they are looking in the right place by using another keyword & making it "Beautiful. Welcoming. Delightful Airbnb Tasmania Details".
Many thanks!
-
Hi Cherie!
Excellent discussion going on here. You're in the fortunate position of having only 10 pages to write and optimize, and I want to encourage you to simply give yourself a little more creative license in how you craft your H1 tags. Yes, it's a general best practice to include core keywords in your H1 title, but I'd encourage you not to be so very strict about exact word order. Let't take a couple of minutes to look at this together.
You have a Reviews page. Strictly speaking, you could write an H1 tag that reads:
Tasmania Holiday Rental Reviews
But that's pretty bland and doesn't convey much excitement to the human reader, who is your ultimate judge. So, what if instead of that, you wrote:
Tasmania Travelers Write Fun & Awesome Reviews of our Holiday Rental
Does this seem a bit more engaging and human to you?
You have an Amenities page. Instead of being strict in your wording, you could give it an H1 tag reading:
Which Amenities Will Matter to You Most Staying at Our Holiday Home in Tasmania?
And then go on to create the page in that vein, explaining why certain amenities are loved by particular types of guests (those who want to breakfast late, those who hate hot weather, those who love a hot tub after a hike in nature, etc.). Put yourself in the reader's shoes and try to engage their needs and desires.
Google is pretty good these days at understanding topics, so my overall advice is to honor your sense of creativity and write for the reader rather than focusing solely on keyword order, which, as you've so eloquently explained, ends up sounding robotic.
-
Hey thanks! I only have 10 pages. I have listed on all the major holiday rental sites & wanted my site to supplement with information I can't present on the listing sites. I would also like to use it to perhaps broaden awareness of our region of Tasmania which is a popular tourist destination, but does not seem to have a very good online presence. Perhaps it is ambitious of me to attempt to single-handedly put the Huon Valley on the map, but someone's gotta do it!
The bulk of my bookings come via Airbnb, so I am now targeting Airbnb Tasmania as my primary keyword. The bookings are going very well so far & the reviews & feedback are universally 5 star. We are in the high season ATM, so I am looking to get some groundwork done now to scaffold bookings during our winter low season - June-August. The site is 3beaches.id.au.
Cheers,
-
Hey Luminatrix, not a problem! What you are grappling with is potentially a divergence in what people search for online, and what your real, current customer-base wants. Remember that your opportunity audiences may be significantly different from your existing audience, which though profitable may be limited in reach / scope. I'd actually be really interested to see a link to the site so I could get a feel for it and what it's trying to be and who it's trying to serve
Following that, I could do some super top-line keyword research and maybe even allocate some keywords to web pages for you (might be handy). We run a lot of PPC at Effect so we get the 'more' accurate search volumes from Google which are rounded in tens (until they get above a certain level). If you don't spend enough on PPC, the tool gives you 'ranged' search volumes (e.g: "10 - 100 monthly searches") which are completely unusable
Really, your distinct pages should be targeting different keywords. You should not be using the same keywords across loads of pages as it can cause your SERP URL for a given keyword to 'hop' over time within Google's results (giving randomised user journeys to different people). Although the dangers of 'keyword cannibalisation' are often over-egged, issues can arise in that area and it shouldn't be 100% ignored
Partially you may be confusing the psychology of your audience with what people actually 'type' (that's what you should optimise for). Just because people are looking for chic properties, that doesn't mean that's the phrase they type into a search engine to find what they want (if they even search in that level of depth at all). Your SEO strategy does have to fit your opportunity web audience(s), SEO isn't something you force (it's something that leads the way!)
We need to get you keywords for each page, that's what we need to do. If the site is massive then focus on the core first and build out. Maybe I can use this thread to outline some of that methodology for you
-
Thanks effectdigital for the detailed response. Interesting that it is a common issue, but nobody out there seems to have successfully addressed it via a relevant story/article/post/etc. The closest I have found is "write for your customers not computers" but then a moment later, they will say "use your keywords in all your H1s on every page". Probably OK for a series of blogs, not great for a service or product.
Research is showing that the people who are choosing my property want something with a appealing contemporary design (chic), clean & well presented, with bespoke, thoughtful details which delight & add a touch of luxury & fun to their stay. People are picking the property because it looks beautiful online, it is in a great location & the description & amenities sound appealing. So vanity is not the motivator, highlighting the point of difference & appealing to what people want in a competitive market is working well so far with bookings. I would just like to translate this to website traffic without detracting from the so-far, thoughtfully designed & curated product.
So - my question was about keywords in H1s on EVERY page. I can see your suggestion relates to the Homepage & I get that - indeed I am reasonably happy with what I have ATM "Chic Holiday Home Tasmania". There is a lot of similar advice on the web regarding the home page. The problem occurs when optimising the other pages. Are you suggesting my H1 on every page has a version of "Holiday Homes & Holiday Rentals in Tasmania - Amenities", "Holiday Homes & Holiday Rentals in Tasmania - Guide", etc? Will this comply with Google's requirement to be relevant? Would this be construed as keyword stuffing? It seems a simple "Amenities at Three Beaches" or "Amenities with Luxury Touches" is a much more accurate reflection of the content of the page, but as you say, what is the point if no-one is going there to see it? Is there no other way to do it? Perhaps the answer is to add a blog where I can contribute interesting & useful content about the area which people do want & need which will then eventually establish backlinks to drive traffic, who when they arrive at the site, see a consistent message with what the product is all about?
Cheers & thanks for taking the time to write!
-
Common issue which people run into and complain about on a routine basis. The thing is, you always have priorities to decide upon as a business owner. Are you like Coca Cola with a huge brand, where people visit your site directly - your product is only associated with you and keywords / SEO is not a big concern? Then your H1s should be more weighted towards CRO (conversion-rate optimisation) and user-enticement
If on the other hand, you are not well known and you are entering into a competitive market - leave your vanity at the door. There's no point having a site that offers wonderful UX with all copy 100% on-brand, if your traffic suffers and you have no audience. First you get the traffic, then when your users become more brand-loyal you decide what other measures to take (further down the line). But the ascertainment of traffic is, at this juncture - your primary concern. Without any visitors there will be no ROI and no profitability to speak of
That being said - people can easily overdo optimisation to the point that a site looks very spammy, even to Google. At that point you won't get any traffic and if you do, people won't stick around for long
No individual web-page should serve more than 5-7 keywords, unless it's a one-page design implemented with a modern HTML5 structure (multiple H1s are actually okay in such a scenario - but still, one-page design's just aren't very good for SEO)
You take the top 2-3 keywords and insert those into your H1, the rest should be in the copy of your site. You forget that you're competing with enterprise-level businesses who will go the extra mile to customise their site layouts to work in content in clever, non-intrusive ways that aren't enabled by default on most basic sites or site-builders like Shopify or Wix (or even mid-tier custom designed websites). Every time the easy to mid-tier site production routes become more complex, those at the very top innovate further to stay ahead (that or they just coast on their colossal SEO authority / link metrics, until such a time as innovation becomes a requirement). You're in a race, you're not the only one running
You can be clever in terms of creating compact keyword optimisations. If you wanted to include "holiday home tasmania" & "tasmania holiday rentals" in the H1 of your homepage, you'd write this:
- "Holiday Homes & Holiday Rentals in Tasmania"
Without over-repeating itself, that string of text basically combines every element of both the keywords which you cited. You could probably get away with "Holiday Homes & Rentals in Tasmania", but since "holiday homes" and "holiday rentals" are both distinct search entities, I'd rather recap that info in the title
Your site and business exists because people need it and search for it. It's nice if you want to consider what you do 'chic', but unless there's data backing up that - people are specifically looking for that, your vanity is getting in the way of your success. Where you say "It seems really awkward & not in keeping with the chic, designer image I am trying to project" - what's the point of projecting an image to no one?
First get your audience. Then analyse the data, find out what they want (not what you want), then serve it to them. In a way, SEO is no different than starting a business. Think of your website as a physical outlet and Google as a road that's passing by. Look at the surrounding shops and stores, what do they say about what the community wants? How can you give that to them, whilst also standing out?
SEO is a medium for online success but it in no way offsets your business choices and / or decisions. Another thing you need to remember, competitors may not seem to have sites much better than your own. But in their time, when they were new, they were in some way revolutionary - that's what scored them all their backlinks and audiences (which cement their ranking positions). To overtake them, you have to be BETTER, not the same. Yes it's hard, costly and the stakes are high
-
Hello,
You can make the H1 the simple useful page names, & use keywords in the H2 tags & page copy & image alt tags. Focus on writing for the user & then insert the keywords so that the copy reads well.
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
-
Keywords used to land on specific page?
Hi all, Does anyone know if there's anywhere where I can see what keywords are used in search engines to land on a specific page? I have access to the Google Analytics account and linked it to Moz as a campaign, but I can't find this data. I'm curious about this because a very uncommon word is used in a page title for a page I try to optimize. It's the Dutch translation of 'malicious'. And now I wonder if it's better to switch to a word that's used more often. Or if it's better to 'win the battle' on this (probably) rarely used word. I've used Google trends to see how many people use it, but it says there's not enough data to show the interest over time.
On-Page Optimization | | RaoulWB0 -
Multiple H1 tags on Squarespace blog page?
Hi All, I use Squarespace and while running my site (https://www.growmassagebusiness.com) through programs am seeing that my blog posts are being seen as one page with multiple H1 tags. I read through the SS help desk and found back in 2015 someone wrote that it's not a bit deal b/c of HTML5 and that the search engines will read each blog post as a sub-page. I'm not so sure about that and wondering what the experts think? If that is screwy then I'm considering possibly making each blog post it's own page rather than using their blog posting format.
On-Page Optimization | | rajam0 -
Homepage and keywords
hello, another problem i am facing is that if i see in my rankings over 90% of keywords are connected with my home page. When i go to moz pro in Page Optimization Score wanting to optimize the page to rank better there are some propositions the issue is that it is impossible to have over 100 keywords in home page title to optimize it better for each one of these. I have more specific build more specific sites for many of these keywords in the site but google continues to rank all those keywords for the home page and not for the more specific page that could also be optimized for every keyword it deals with. In adition the question i posted in moz with url: https://moz.com/community/q/greek-language-distinctiveness is also mainly connected with above issue. Please help thanks
On-Page Optimization | | anavasis0 -
On Page Optimization, F on all keywords?
On our website we have all F's even though we have the targeted keyword in the title, url, meta desc, h1, body and some of the img alt's. They still show zero uses of the keyword. Are we missing something here or is this some kind of bug or glitch? Any help or advice is appreciated, Thanks. Keyword: 2015 Toyota Tundra Hilton Head Website: http://www.stokesbrowntoyotahiltonhead.com/2015-Toyota-Tundra-Hilton-Head-Serving-Savannah/
On-Page Optimization | | stokesautogroup0 -
Search Pages outranking Product Pages
A lot of the results seen in the search engines for our site are pages from our search results on our site, i.e. Widgets | Search Results This has happened over time and wasn't intentional, but in many cases we see our search results pages appearing over our actual product pages in search, which isn't ideal. Simply blocking indexing of these pages via robots wouldn't be ideal, at least all at once as we would have that period of time where those Search Results pages would be offline and our product pages would still be at the back of ranking. Any ideas on a strategy to replace these Search Results with the actual products in a way that won't hurt us too bad during the transition? Or a way to make the actual product pages rank above the search results? Currently, it is often the opposite. Thanks! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Does keyword usage in the footer have an effect on how high a page ranks?
My client has a lot of text about their company in their footer. Is the text in the footer associated with the on page keyword usage and density for all pages or none of the pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Santaur0 -
Keyword placement on home page or throughout the website
OK, I find the courage to ask this because there is not supposed to be a dumb question. Like all of us, I want my website to rank great with a particular keyword. Do I have to use this keyword only on my home page (the start page which I want to appear on top Google results), or does it make a difference if I use the keyword on several articles that I post on my website. These articles all have seperate links. Eg i want the www.website.com to be found by Google, but this website contains www.website.com/link1.html, www.website.com/link2.html.. etc. Will keyword usage on link1.html, link2.html etc be relevant so that www.website.com is found by Google? Or is every single page for itself? Hope I have explained that well and I would really appreciate your feedback.
On-Page Optimization | | polyniki0 -
SSL Necessary on Every Page?
Our ecommerce site is currently set up with an SSL on each page. My understanding is that these would need to be removed on the pages that I'd like a 301 redirect to be placed on. As of now, we have 302s due to the SSL. Do I need an SSL on every page or just the checkout pages? Any real benefit to having the SSL on every page?
On-Page Optimization | | NiallTom0