Issue: Having to Fight Product Marketing to Use Keywords
-
This is sort of a "DUH!" moment to me. I know everyone has come across this at some point in time and am interested in hearing how others deal with this.
A little background:
I was researching keywords for new menus and pages. Sometimes, people (product marketing in my case) do not give me a heads up on changes they want to make to pages and it is always a fight with them to change it. This is pretty normal for me and I am use to it.
It is one of those things that they don't want to discuss it with you because they know you are going to critique their work. and, yes, change it for the good of the company.
I had a co-worker say to me:
"We may have to start making [pages] meaningful to the human visitor than satify the bot army".My response was:
"What better way to make it [web page] meaningful to users by knowing which terms they search on the most in our industry? Keyword research is not just for Search Engines, it is actual live data as to what most people are searching. That is why I put such a high precedence on it and report on trends. You can bet that if 100,000 people are searching for [keyword], that is what they want to see when they search for it."Anyways, that is how I handled this particular event. I have several responses when these comments pop up from time to time. Usually it is something to the fact that they are not the ones who will get fired if leads drop via organic search, so we better try this. But today, I was feeling kind of spunky and decided to take another route.
What are some of your responses to these types of remarks?
Hopefully this will make for a good discussion.
-
I have tried this as well, but they either forget about it or do not want to use it. Not sure why, but I do know that they are busy, so it may just be that they are trying to complete their tasks as quickly as possible and don't want it to get in the way.
-
I have seen a few situations like yours...
I introduced those folks to the Adwords keyword tool and once they could experiment with it and see search volumes for themselves then they gave up the hard line about using their language.
Some people are empowered by information.
.... that could backfire on you.. lol
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
-
SERP Cannibalization Issue
Hi Moz Community, Glad to be here with you. I need some help from you guys. I have a new client website: [https://deluxemassage.co.uk/](link url) My client runs this type of business offering professional therapeutic health services. It offers massage services on demand ("mobile", therapists visiting clients at home). The client has his business registered, and the therapists listed on the website are carefully vetted, all having training in different types of massage. The client's problem is that until 2 months ago the site was in position 3-4 in Google (somewhat stable) with the main page for the keyword "mobile massage London". Recently I noticed that another page on the site that lists all therapists - i.e. this page [https://deluxemassage.co.uk/therapists/](link url)- is on the first page of Google for the above keyword, although both the title tag, meta description and the page on the site do not target the above keyword.
Algorithm Updates | | Koyel9754
I notice that both pages have serious fluctuations in the SERP for the mentioned keyword, sometimes appearing both in the results.
The Home page is marked as rel=canonical Of course the position in SERP fluctuates from 8, 11, 12, 7. What should I do to solve this problem? Any thoughts here would be appreciated. Thanks0 -
Should I target low competition related keywords to rank my main keyword?
Hi everyone, I created a product review based blog about finding the best outdoor basketball but it's MOZ keyword difficulty is increasing drastically. I'm finding it difficult to rank. Is it a good practice to target low competition related keywords to rank the main keyword?
Algorithm Updates | | rosie16
Please advise, Thank you!1 -
How Google distinguish and ignore keyword attested with or in a brand?
Hi community, Generally there will be a primary keyword which everybody concentrates and expect their homepage or website to rank for....like "seo" for seo consulting or seo tools. There might be some companies with this keyword in their brand name like "ABC SEO". So this primary keyword will be all over the website being part of the brand name; especially in page titles and header tags. How Google distinguish and ignores this keyword in brand name to avoid giving more ranking boost to such websites? Will this keyword will be completely ignored being the part of the company name or their domain name? How Google distinguish between a generic keyword and keyword in company name? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Site:www Issue - Homepage of the website is not showing in Google
Hello everyone, When I have manually search site:www.blinds4uk.co.uk in google.co.uk to know about webpages status, home page of the website is not showing in google search engine result pages. Please let me know, what is the reason behind this? because website crawling and indexing is good. Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Kuldeep-Sharma0 -
Canonical when using others sites
Hi all, I was wondering if this is a good way to safely have content on our website. We have a job search website, and we pull content from other sites. We literally copy the full content text from it's original source, and paste it on our own site on an individual job page. On every individual job page we put a canonical link to the original source (which is not my own website). On each job page, when someone wants to apply, they are redirected to the original job source. As far as I know this should be safe. But since it's not our website we are canonical linking to, will this be a problem? To compare it was indeed.com does, they take 1 or 2 senteces from the original source and put it as an excerpt on their job category page (ie "accountant in new york" category page). When you click the excerpt/title you are redirected to the original source. As you might know, indeed.com has very good rankings, with almost no original content whatsoever. The only thing that is unique is the URL of the indeed.com category where it's on (indeed.com/accountant-new-york), and sometimes the job title. Excerpt is always duplicate from other sites. Why does this work so well? Will this be a better strategy for us to rank well?
Algorithm Updates | | mrdjdevil0 -
Did anyone else notice all their keyword rankings go down after the last Panda refresh on January 17th 2013?
Even before January 17th I noticed my keyword ranking slowly going from the top 3 to around 8, 9 and 10. Then between January 15 and January 30th, (SEO MOZ) is not showing the exact date) they all went down to the second page and worse. The rankings dropped for an e-commerce website petsspark.com. They sell a tear stain removal product which is a pretty competitive market. After January i started to notice that Google was starting to rank blogs, forums, overal product review websites and of course amazon, better than me and my competitors. Was anyone else effected by the panda refresh or have any idea what may have gone wrong? Please help ScreenShot2013-04-10at50852PM.png?t=1365628252
Algorithm Updates | | DTOSI1 -
How can I use Intuit without getting duplicate content issues
All of my Intuit site show duplicate content on the index pages. How can I avoid this
Algorithm Updates | | onestrohm0 -
Sub-domains and keyword rich domains
Hello All I'm hoping for some opinions as i am confused as to the best action for me to take. The problem:
Algorithm Updates | | jonny512379
Although i say the below, we have never been penalised by Google, not taken part in any bad link building and don't do too bad with SERP. but i worry Google may not like what i do these days. We have one main site that is broken down into areas/cities (i,e London, Manchester, etc) so the domain looks like www.domain.co.uk/London But in addition to this we also use Sub-domains to target popular areas (i,e. http://London.domain.co.uk).
These sub-domains take the content from the main site but of course only display results relevant to London and are optimised for "London + Keyword"
Any page that gets duplicated (i.e London.domain.co.uk/profile123 and www.domain.co.uk/profile123 are ALMOST the same content) we add a rel="canonical" link that points to the main domain+page on www.
All these sites have a large amount of links back to www.domain.co.uk/?Page so the user can also search in other areas other then London, etc. This method has worked well for us and is popular with both users and Google search results. All sites/sub-domains are added to GWT under the same account and all sites have unique sitemaps. I do however worry that Google may class this as link manipulation owing to the amount of links pointing back to the main domain and its pages (this is not the reason we use the sub-domains though) In addition to the above sub-domains we have a few domain names (5/6) that are keyword rich that we also place the same content on (i,e www.manchester-keyword.co.uk would show only content relevant to Manchester), and again these sites have links back to the main domain, so users can navigate other areas of the UK. I worry that these additional domains may also not be liked by Google What do people think? I have started to reduce/replace some of the additional keyword rich domains with sub-domains from the main site and then 301 the keyword rich domain (i.e. www.manchester-Keyword.co.uk now goes to http://Manchester.domain.co.uk) as i feel sub-domains may not be penalised as much as unique domains are.
There are domains that i dont really want to 301 as they bring in good amounts of traffic and users have bookmarked them, etc. Any opinions or what you think i should do would be great, as i really worry that if Google stops giving us good results, i'm in real trouble. Although im not sure if what we do is wrong with Google or not.0