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Hi,

I'm in a bit of a quandary.

I have this page: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/

As you can see we have provided filters to only display Fixed rate, Tracker rate, Variable rate, High LTV and HMO products for users.

At the moment our canonical tags all point to the main Comparison page, but in order for the search feature to work dynamic urls are created. So for example on the fixed rate page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/) when a user puts in their search criteria the url ends up looking like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/?PrevTab=HMO&PVal=250000&Amt=100000&Tme=20&SearchId=5508

Now, my quandary is this - should I make the canonical tag for the filtered products (fixed, tracker etc) like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/ or should I keep it at https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/ ? The comparison page shows all products, ordered by the lowest rate and with a pre-set search, limited to 20 - so not all products will be displayed on the page - and some products (like the high LTV ones) are not displayed on the main comparison landing page anyway...

Thanks,

Amelia

I use a lot of the ones you've mentioned here too, but in addition: SEM Rush - which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet?

It's good for Rankings, competitor analysis, adwords analysis and SEO audits - it finds broken links, missing alt text, dupliacte meta tags etc etc. I find the reports it generates quite helpful and easy to use. I've used it for keyword analysis too in the past, but as my site is up and running I don't really do a lot of this anymore - I know what keywords bring in traffic... I'm pretty sure that I only scratch the surface of it and that there is a lot more to be got from it, but I only have so many hours in a day!!!

I don't just use one tool though - I use a few at once and combine the findings. I don't expect one tool to do it all

Hope this helps,

Amelia

Hi,

We have a 'Why Choose us' section on most pages of one of our websites, and it hasn't affected our SEO in the slightest. It helps inform people as to why they should choose our company as opposed to the competition.

I don't believe it's 'garbage' - SO LONG as it's well executed. It drives conversion for us, so I think it's worth having.

I don't think it's worth having if there is nothing to differentiate yourself (or your client) but that's a different topic.

As far as SEO goes, it does no harm - so long as the rest of the content on the page is unique and useful.

Good luck, whatever you choose to do.

Amelia

Have you (or the company in question) tried contacting the newspaper to ask for the page to be updated/a new page/article written as the original version is so completely different to what the company now does?

Thank you, much appreciated

Hi,

Thank you for responding. I am using Google analytics experiments. You put some code on the original page and 'magically' the two pages get rotated to show approximately half the visitors one version, and the other half the other version. The new version is often called 'page-name-b' (for example) and if it wins then the content moved to the original version. The only exception to this rule was when we used a page called 'todays-mortgage-deals' - because I wanted to try and get it to list for more than just 'mortgage quote'.

Best wishes, and thank you again for responding

Amelia

Thanks guys,

The niche for both sites is UK mortgages - one specialises in commercial and buy to let mortgages, the other residential mortgages. Neither subject is particularly interesting unless you're looking for one at the time - e.g. interesting when you want/need to finance your home purchase but not something most people care about once its all in place! Its a means to an end, and often the least 'fun' part of buying a home! We make it happen, but we're under no illusions that anyone wants a mortgage - they need one which is a different kettle of fish altogether. I don't think its something people come back to regularly - apart from the brief period of time when they are looking for a mortgage. (hope that makes sense?) So I personally would not expect a lot of direct traffic.

The quality / quantity of content hasn't changed - if anything our content writer has got even better as he's immersed himself in the subject more and more to be able to provide really insightful and interesting articles.

I am inclined to believe its the way google analytics is attributing visits as you've suggested. As far as I know nothing has been altered specifically, but I'll check this.

Thank you for answering.

Amelia

Hi,

I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason?

Overall, on both sites traffic has increased.

Thanks,

Amelia

Using images you do not have a license for is stealing.

Someone else made those images. Someone else owns the copyright of those images.

It's no different to stealing a car - you wouldn't do that would you? - Even if the keys had been left in the ignition!

Has it increased your average time on page? That may indicate a good user experience so Google may reward you for it. However, as Chris has indicated, load times may suffer with live chat. We took live chat off our website because of this.

Note Ray-pp suggests you use a private directory... Make sure to keep it out of the serps

I'd include a button to say 'buy all ingredients for this recipe' and have it automatically add the ingredients to the users basket. Easy peasy user experience and you potentially get to increase the average basket value. Win win. You could also include individual buttons next to each product in the ingredients list on the recipe page (assuming it's labelled 'ingredients' and 'method'.)

I also wouldn't hid any text if you can help it - especially content that triggers a sale.

Why not use it to your advantage? E.G make all the products available in the recipes easy to buy from the recipe pages?

'Want to make this dundee cake? Buy all the ingredients here' (or similar).

You may of course already be doing this though.

I wouldn't have thought the presence of useful content to be a detriment to rankings.

Good luck!

Amelia

Hi Mozzers,

We've been A-B testing landing pages, and have had some success.

The changes we've been making have been quite radical in some instances - for example we tested this page: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/todays-mortgage-deals/ against this one: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-quote/ (Today's best deals won, but we've decided to keep the quote page as it does work for some channels). The decision was made to try and optimise Today's best deals for 'best mortgage deals today' rather than 'mortgage quote' because it offers so much more than simply a quote. The quote page is optimised for 'mortgage quote', though it doesn't rank particularly well (I'm not overly concerned by this as even though you'd think that when people are looking for a quote that they would fill in the form, they don't - people are strange!)

As a result of the change above we changed all links that originally went to the quote page to go to Today's best deals instead. As we go through the process of optimising for best conversion will it be damaging if we don't change the url as well. As I can see lots of iterations and lots of work whenever we make changes to the pages (going through the entire site to change the links).

I am worried though that we'll end up with hundreds of landing pages and changing links all over the site - do you think we should keep the URLs the same from now on, unless the content changes as radically as it did in the instance I've highlighted above?

Thanks,

Amelia

Hi,

When quoting sources, we use the blockquote tag.

Information here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_blockquote.asp

It tells Google that 'yes, I know this isn't original, it comes from here'.

Best of luck,

Amelia

I'm glad it's proved useful for you! Like you, if I find a service/product beneficial I will say so! We definitely find Session Cam incredibly helpful.

Google 'tests' landing pages quite a lot actually. I'd have a poke around in your analytics programme and see what the bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit for each landing page. If the homepage is performing better in these areas than your landing pages then that may be why this is happening. Also look in your webmaster tools at organic CTR - if the homepage has a higher CTR then Google is assuming it's more relevant for the query.

My hunch is that this is the issue - once you've got the comparison data you can look at ways of making your landing pages better for user engagement.

Good luck,

Amelia

As others have said, it depends on how you do it!

Like so many things in life, eh?

Try using a service like Session Cam (http://www.sessioncam.com/)

It records users as they use your website and will help give you the answers to your conversion issues, fairly quickly. Otherwise you could spend months testing stuff without any real idea as to how people actually use your website.

I'm not affiliated with them, I am a customer who happens to think it's an incredibly useful tool. I'm sure there are others out there that do a similar thing so have a hunt around.

Good luck,

Amelia

Thinking outside the box... Why not run a short PPC campaign using the keywords you are appearing on page 1 for (assuming you track them). Google is perfectly happy to supply keyword information, so long as you pay for it! So, you could use that information as an indication as to which keywords convert organic traffic too.

LOL - just seen that Donna suggested the same

Using a word twice on a page is indeed, not keyword stuffing - where did I say that it was??? I don't believe I have EVER said that in all the years I've worked in digital marketing!

I said that using the same alt tag would be spammy - the reason I think that is that it either implies that you don't have unique images on the page (so what's the point of them?) or that you have been lazy with your alt tags by repeating the same one over again. Both bad user experiences for folk that need them.

Hi,

I just wanted to dispel a few myths going on here...

1. ALT tags are NOT to 'Tell Google' what the image is about, they are there for people who use screen readers to enrich their use of the internet.
2. Screen readers can be set up to read out alt tags, file names or title attributes - depending on the user's preference and presumably on the site they are looking at
3. Google can and does read image file names: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32567/A-Marketer-s-Guide-to-Optimizing-Images-for-Google-Search.aspx

If you pick relevant images for your pages then you probably will be able to get keywords into both the alt tag and the file name. I don't think this is spammy! It's accurate.

What would be spammy, and this has already been covered by Issac, is if you repeat the same alt text on the same page - vary it! - 'Blue lego bricks' etc. I personally would avoid saying stuff like 'cheap', 'buy' etc UNLESS the image has that text within it (say a picture of lego with a headline within the image saying 'cheap lego') in which case you are doing exactly what the alt tag is there for - enabling screen reader users to experience as similar experience to us sighted folk as possible.

Sorry for the rant, but it annoys me that something that is meant to help people who are (to my mind) at a disadvantage is abused for SEO purposes!

Best wishes,

Amelia

**EDIT: I am well aware that Google and other search engines use alt tags for rankings. What I wanted the OP to be mindful of is that alt tags were not invented 'to tell google what an image is about'. And to point out their value and use for people using screen readers. Most people do not fully understand how blind users navigate the inter-webs, me included. I just think if I can do something to make it easier for them then I will. If you'd prefer to write alt tags purely for the search engines, that is entirely your prerogative! **

I may be being pedantic here but I think the correct status code should be 410 not 404 if the page has gone for good and you don't have a relevant place to redirect traffic to, as per the scenario described.

I believe if Google finds a 410 page, it'll be removed from the index but because 404 is 'file not found' the page may stay in the index, potentially giving bad user experience as outlined by Matt Williamson.

However, I would always redirect if you can - even if you just send traffic to the homepage, it's got to be a better user experience than sending them to a 404 page. I think anyway!

More info here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes

You mention a concern over too many redirects - I think this page may help eliminate your fears: http://www.stateofdigital.com/matt-cutts-there-is-no-limit-to-direct-301-redirects-there-is-on-chains/

Thanks,

Amelia

Was going to suggest the same thing!

If you find a way to do this, please let me know!

I researched this earlier in the year and there wasn't anything available (though I'm not looking for stock market mark-up but mortgage product mark-up - but still financial products). I did email Schema to suggest they made something available for financial products. I guess the more people who ask for it the more likely it'll become available?

BEST of luck!

Yeah, the Google 'help' documents can sometimes leave one scratching one's head saying 'you what?'

Bet of luck

I was trying to politely say that you have some old advice that I don't think is worth investing any time on.

If you want nitty-gritty details read the moz blogs and seo starter guides for newbies. Read from 2014 onwards (SEO info gets out-dated very quickly and you kind of have to keep up-to-date with it regularly - the longer you do it the more adept you'll become at sorting the wheat from the chaff in terms of 'advice' - I have read newly published SEO guides this year offering advice that if followed could potentially get a site blacklisted today but would have worked in 2009! - it's annoying because any Tom, Dick or Harry can say they are and SEO expert - it doesn't mean they are one!)

Ignore any 'advice' that says 'this is an easy fix' because there aren't any.

Good luck.

I believe that local results are included, as are image results and any other SERP-type result. Hope that makes sense - the previous poster has explained it pretty well so I shan't go over what he/she already said.

I would take any SEO 'rules' with a pinch of salt.

Build pages for people first, worry about search engines afterwards. At the end of the day, search engine spiders are never going to buy cat toys off of you, but people will (assuming your example). Make your site easy for people to use, and the conversions will follow. Google is looking more and more at user engagement (check out the latest whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/the-massive-ranking-factor-too-many-seos-are-ignoring-whiteboard-friday) so look at ways of improving these before worrying about where to put your links - it really doesn't matter overly much.

Good luck,

Amelia

PS - this 'first link rule' sounds like 'old' advice to me, and may have worked well several years ago, but I highly doubt it makes much difference in 2014 (2015 soon!).

A similar thing happened to me once. In my case, the DNS settings were incorrect. Check that

I second TheeDesign - do the change of address in Webmaster tools. Double-check your 301's. Then check them again...

Good luck, it's possible to do without a penalty. I did it earlier in the year, I lost a little traffic in the first month, then gained ever since (except for current - no one wants to visit a mortgage broker's website during Christmas because they have much better things to do, like eating mice pies and sipping mulled wine!!!)

I would employ a translator. People can interpret nuances in languages that a machine (however brilliant) just cannot. Google translate is great if you just want to translate a few words here and there but a whole website? It'll read like a badly translated flat-pack furniture installation manual!

Good luck, whatever you choose to do

My guess is that these URLs you list have been hacked. I would inform the site owners if you can find their contact details. They can sort it out from there to remove the offending pages. If I owned one of those websites, I would want to investigate the possibility of being hacked.

well said

Thank you for answering this question, it's much appreciated.

Thank you. Yes, I use SEMRush - I actually really like their tools for both SEO stuff and Adwords.

I'm going to do as you suggest - make the content more different on each page.

Thanks again for your time to answer this, it's much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you Monica. I like your answer best, it's the most positive! I don't want to delete any pages so if I take your experience that the same site can appear for the same keyword more than once on page 1, and that 'all' I need is more links, then that's pretty clear...

You're right, the two pages are NOT identical, I try to be really careful with duplicate content! It's a bugbear of mine.

I will definitely look at the other sites that appear above ours and see if we can do anything to improve ours.

Thank you,

Amelia

LOL that's great!

Hmmmm... maybe this should be in my strategy! (KIDDING)

You're right, we don't have many links. I'm not actively building links as I worry about Penguin these days. I am trying to optimise onsite as well as I can, and have a plan to carry out PR work to get national press coverage to earn links that way instead of building them in the old-fashioned way that I used to do back in 2009...! I think this is a better approach as news coverage for companies that offer financial services like we do is more likely to build trust than pretty much any other method of link bulding would.

The upside of this is it kills two birds with one stone - gets us links from authority sites AND builds trust in our brand with the public - I see this as a 'win win' situation.

Thanks for your input today, it is greatly appreciated!

Best wishes,

Amelia

(Not Provided) means I don't actually know for sure exactly what keywords are driving traffic to these pages. However, I am tracking 8 related keywords:

<colgroup><col width="333"></colgroup>
|

• 80 buy to let mortgages

• 80 ltv buy to let mortgages

• 80 btl mortgage

• buy to let mortgage rates 80 ltv

• 80 buy to let mortgage

• buy to let mortgage deals 80 ltv

• 80 ltv buy to let mortgage

• 80 btl mortgages

|

The product page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/) is on page 2 for all the above keywords. The best position is 11, and the worst is 16. Obviously I want page 1!

The Landlord Advice article (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/btl-mortgage-80-ltv/) is on page 2 for just three of the tracked keywords:

• 80 btl mortgage
• 80 btl mortgages
• buy to let mortgage deals 80 ltv

My concern was that the product page was being held back from page 1 because Google has difficulty distinguishing between them and deciding which to put first. As it stands, the product page is not 'optimised' for all the keywords it appears for as we took the view that trying to get a page to list for multiple keywords was not going to be easy so my colleague wrote the advice page to cover off some of the keywords. This doesn't seemed to have done the trick though!

Your point about customers is really important. You're absolutely right: we need to determine what visitors are expecting when they search for these keywords - I suspect they want to see rates, which is why we created the macros to place at the top of the pages to display the most up-to-date rates (updated twice daily, which is more often than our competitors do!), but that does homogenise the content somewhat. I did wonder if we should display more than three rates on one page but, the market for these products is small so I think there may ONLY be three products available anyway...

I don't think people particularly read the content on any of our pages (nobody has the time) but I can use SessionCam to spy on visits. I think I will do this to see if the content is actually being read. It may be that all we need to do is display a rates table because that's all people want, but Google wants content....

Thank you so much for taking time to answer my question, I really appreciate it.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you - I question the logic behind this though... The two pages are not identical, so I don't believe that a canonical tag is appropriate here. I am open to being persuaded otherwise though!

I am appreciative of the time you have taken to answer this question.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you, yes one page definitely gets more traffic and converts better than the other. I have a third 80% BTL mortgage page, which targets longtail: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/  - this was written to be an informational article rather than a sales page. It links through to the product page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/) and other, similar product pages (other high LTV mortgage pages - e.g. 85% LTV BTL mortgages - this is the highest LTV the market goes on BTL mortgages at the moment).

I appreciate your answer and input and am grateful to you for putting the time in to answer.

Thank you for your input, it's much appreciated.

Hi,

I have two pages appearing in positions 11 and 12 for the keyword: 80 btl mortgage. These are:

• https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/btl-mortgage-80-ltv/
• https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/

Both pages are good, provide useful information and I would not wish to remove one of them. However, I am concerned that the reason neither one of the pages is on page 1 is because the keywords targeted on both pages is essentially the same.

Should I reoptimise one of them for other variations of 80 BTL mortgage keywords? (e.g. 80% LTV Buy to Let Mortgage, 80 Buy to Let Mortgage, etc etc)

Or, is there another solution I haven't yet thought of?

I welcome your insights!

Thanks!

Amelia

_Google knows that Tenerife is a geographic location in the Canary Islands.  This website has the word Tenerife on it many times.  It has pages with Tenerife in the title, in the URL. _

Egol is just explaining why their page shows up for 'Tenerife' searches.

I have no idea if you're targeting tourists, but I expect you are, this means you're effectively targeting two types of customer - those that plan ahead and those than plan 'on the fly'.

So if I wanted an escort for my trip to Tenerife (LOL, no, I don't... happily married lady!) I might search for one before I leave the UK to get it all organised ahead of time. So I would search 'Escorts in Tenerife' (and maybe localise even further to find one close to where I was staying)...

Or, I may be lonely on one night when I get to Tenerife, and do a search to find an escort from Tenerife.

These two scenarios might show different results - the person searching from Tenerife would get localised results, whereas the person searching from the UK is relying on 'Tenerife' being included on the website to appear in the SERPs.

I hope this makes sense!

I think Egol has a lot of great information to share, and I've often found his /her responses to questions in this forum to be very useful and informative. That last comment though was a little harsh, but the point is: _if you feel the current situation is hard to overcome, then imagine how bad it would be if they did know what they are doing!!! _This is how I read it anyway. Perhaps it's just a case of what my colleague calls ‘the impersonal interaction impertinence imperative’ - sounds like something from the hitch hikers guide, doesn't it! But basically means sometimes written, impersonal communications, can be misinterpreted. I often send stuff that sounds harsher than it's meant to be because I forget that sarcasm and suchlike are not easy to interpret in written form!

I'm glad you found my answer helpful

As always, EGOL has some great insights and I agree with them...

Onsite usage metrics are also used in the algo. I'm not entirely sure exactly what Google uses, but I imagine it's something like bounce rate (though not bounce rate as they've said they don't use it... but they lie too so they might do!...), time on site, pages per visit - that kind of thing. The stuff that tells you if people are engaging with your website.

They also use organic CTR (though again, I don't think this is ever explicitly stated by them) - if your CTR is high then they will reward you (though a high CTR with bad usage metrics would not on its own help you - rather hinder I think).

This is why pi$$ poor sites often end up in high positions - people like them. Doesn't always make sense, but if the site you mention provides something people want, they aren't going to CARE whether it's been 'SEO'd' or not - and really Google doesn't either. If visitor behaviour indicates that people are getting value from visiting that site then Google is not going to move it from its high position - until you provide something that people like more and importantly onsite behaviour indicates the same.

Hope this helps

Thanks Leonie. I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones with this problem!

Hi,

I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages.

The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow...

Thanks,

Amelia

Hi,

This is a fairly old article, but should have some good, relevant tips in nonetheless. http://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website.

You can also see speed reports in analytics - It's under the 'behaviour' menu. I think it tells you how to fix specific elements that are taking a long time to load.

Hope this helps!

Amelia

Thank you Mick.