Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Scratch_MM,

Yes optimising for pdf´s still matters and follow some specific optimization rules, You can find a great post about this on SEJ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pdf-seo-best-practices/59975/.

In relation to competing with the parent page, the pdf is just another page and as such eligble for ranking dependent on the content.  If the pdf contains the same content as the parent page than it would be better to use a canonical to the parent page.  Otherwise its will compete as much as normal pages would do, based on there content.

Hope this helps

Hi Camilo,

thanks for the clarification.  As this content wil not be available anymore on the "old" pages it will only exist on the newly created blog pages there will be no duplicate content issues.  These newly created blog pages with the content removed from "old" pages will start from scratch for ranking. and the "old" pages could loose some ranking because you reduced the onpage ranking.

This is not per se bad as it is part of your strategy to improve on conversions (which should be the most important kpi anyway).

You could help these new blog pages a bit by linking to them from the "old" page.

Hi Jenna,

In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this.

For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much.

You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.

Hi VTmoz,

Although it sounds there is no big risk involved to do the redirect when there are no backlinks and no traffic, it might be better to err on the safe side and simply setup an information page on the domain with a link to your main domain. So that way when people accidentally enter the taken over domain they can easily navigate to your correct site, and you don´t risk any legacy issues with the taken over domain.

If you do decide to redirect you could additionally check in the GSC for manual penalties, check spam score on Moz and citation flow / trus flow on Majestic and view archive.org to check for any spam content in the past (though all these are unlikely when you have not found backlinks or traffic).

Anyway good you got the domain that was infringing on your trademark!

hi  Luke Rowlands,

You can use another name (although i can´t come up with a reason why a client wouldn´t want that format in the url).  You should however than

Link to it in your robots.txt or submit the sitemap directly to the search engines

Hi Chuck,

Yes i have seen this before.  I understand this manufacturer is also your supplier so they would also be cutting out a middle man (more clients would purchase from them directly) and leaving them with higher margins whilst at the same time reducing there cpc´s.

If you remove all competition but one from a keyword auction it would lower cpc (how much depends on the minimum cpc for that keyword) but it has nothing to do with "low search volume" which is a result of a keyword having very small amount of searches (this is influenced directly only by the buyers and not by the sellers).

Google will handle this by reducing the cpc that was increased because of competitor bidding auctions.

Its not a pleasant situation and in my case there was nothing to do about it (or it must be a generic product for which you could find another manufacturer, which i think is not an option in your case)

Hi  AdvimateLtd,

Yes you need to do 301´s to pass link equity to the new url´s .  You can use a tool like this one here to facilitate the work https://donatstudios.com/RewriteRule_Generator

Hope this helps.

I Agree with James,  for the 404 pages you could also configure Google Search Console to find them (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001104?hl=en.)

Hi  Cesare Marchetti,

Thanks for you question.  I think there are several things to consider here:

1. are you the only one appearing on adwords for these keywords or are there other competitors as well.  If latter is the case you would simply be loosing potential business to your competitors as 20 - 30% of the users click on adwords (these are the ones left over after the 70% - 80% that never click on ads) for commercial terms.
2. Different people with different intent, devices, place etc.. will click on different results so i would like to dominate the serp as much as possible so i can cater to those, and adwords would just be one of those results.  This way i think i can maximize the results and return.
3. But these are mostly empirical assumptions to really test this objectively is almost impossible as there are many factores influencing results.  like you said seasonality, competitores, positions you have in the serp based on device, location, time etc... You could stop adverting adwords for one month for one of the keywords, compare how results were for this keyword compared the other keywords (and compare that to how they would compare in previous months), ajust for seasonality based on historic monthly results. But there can still be other factors incluencing the results.

Hope this helps and give you some perspectives on the issue, althouhg i don´t think this is completely what you were looking for (and if somebody does know a way to test this i would be very interested)

Hi Alex Cox,

I understand why you would want to do this and i have seen instances where this was done (not with the shoping aggregator markup but using the product markup with aggregateratings) and they got the rich snippets in the serps, like you mention. But for how long?

The point though is that your not following the intentions of the schema markups.  These reviews that you would be using on the category would be from people reviewing your products and not the category itself.  Hence you are gaming the system.

I´ve had the urge in the past (had to use some restrain) but refrained from doing it because at the end of the day you are eluding your users and thats not good business in the long run.

Hope my thoughts helped

Hi Najia-ali,

When i look at your onpage optimisation it all looks good.  but when i analised the the keyword difficulty for sign boards in Indie ,one of the main keywords i think the site is targeting, you have very strong competition, several sites with domain authority over 80 whilst the site of your client has DA of 6.

The fact that only one backlink to the site is showing in moz isn´t so strange as they don´t have the same size index as Google.  The high authority competition you are up against though would suggest you need to work on your link profile and inserting the site in directories will not be enough.

To get link from high authority sites will not be a easy and quick fix and usually takes time to build, i am talking about things like content creation, guest blogging, testemonials, promotion, outreach etc...).  A lot has written about this like  https://moz.com/blog/the-10-golden-rules-to-attracting-authority-links,  https://nichehacks.com/build-niche-backlinks/ or https://neilpatel.com/blog/11-ways-to-get-authority-links-for-your-new-blog/ among many other articles.

Sorry dont think there´s an easy fix for this

Hi Neil,

I think complementing your local seo business for your clients with adwords makes a lot of sense.  Since both have there strengths and weaknesses you can maximize the results for you clients while gaining a lot of insights.

Google Adwords express is mainly for small business owners that don´t have the time neither the knowledge to use Google Adwords.  You have a lot less control in the former, especially the lack of control over the keywords, and most is automated.  This doesn´t give you enough control to effectively manage these campaigns for your clients and add value for them.  More info on how to start with adwords for smb you could find here https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/blog/complete-guide-to-google-adwords-for-local-business/

If you should have them all in one account or each one have there own depends on various factors, like:

1. Payment - Will each client pay directly to google, in this case you need to create a different account for each
2. Recourses - If you want to spend as little time as possible maintaining the accounts this would be much easier in one account with all your clients
3. Portability - Do your clients value the fact there account is portable?
4. Quality - If you have all clients in one account they all contribute to the overal accounts quality score (positively or negatively) this might not get you the best performance for each client

Hope this helps and good luck

Hi Seoanalytics,

Is there a correlation or causation between the search popularity of a keyword an the difficulty to rank?  I would think the primal reason for dificulty in ranking is a high comercial value of the Keyword that could be because a lot of people search it or because it has high values + margins.  So not just the popularity of the search term is key and a keyword could be highly popular but have no comercial value.

e.g. for "tying shoes" (i know not very exciting example) i find 6.600 monthly searches in US and moz ranking diifficulty 50.  and for "ty slippers" 390 monthly searches moz ranking difficulty 65, whereas you would excpect the other way around if there was causation.

so i would say there is correlation but no causability.  Just my 50 cents

Hi Jesh Krisna Murthy ,

To answer your questions:

• As your site has lots of content in the different categories it makes a lot of sense to add these to the url structure.  They will help users and crawlers understand how your site is laid out. They will also add relevant keywords to the urls which could benefit your rankings.

• For doing this kind of a change you should analyse the following:

• the work involved in doing this change (how easy is it to change this in your cms? in some cms´s like wordpress this change is pretty easy)

• the work in the additional setup of the 301 redirects you need to send people landing on your old page to the new page and to pass on any link equity of those old pages.

• Work involved in updating your internal links to these pages.

• update and resubmit your sitemaps.

• I would do this change all at once, though it effects many categories,it is only one change. And it could be more of an effort to try and split it up.  If you want to be extra cautious though you could do this by category

• When you have done this change correctly and submitted new sitemap to search engines this shouldn´t take to long for Google to pick up.  I have seen 1-2 weeks and sometimes a bit more. And as you have setup correct 301´s you shouldn´t have to worry about this.

Hope this helps you.

regards

Hi imjonny123,

Yes thanks, hope your doing well too.  if you have the same content you have already on the main domain, no issues in using noindex and you will avoid duplicate content issues at the same time.

Hi Enertiv,

There are many things you can try like using the form on the page itself (instead of the user having to click on "schedule demo" to get to the page of the form) also there is a small disconnect on the words used,  so better would be to have the text on the action button under the form also using "schedule demo" rather than "submit".

You can use testimonials from authority clients in your niche to aid the credibility of the company / product. And therefore get users to more easily convert.

you also had a chat appearing asking me if i would like to receive a case study (good idea) but it disapeared when i visited another page and i couldn´t get it back to appear. you could keep it sticky and let users close it.

like i said there are many things you can do, but i didnt see any maior critical thing on your page, it´s many times also an issue of trying out several different approaches and AB test them. several companies have great advice on this https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/high-converting-landing-pages or https://unbounce.com/101-landing-page-optimization-tips/ amongst others.

you also say you got a plenty of traffic of the keywords you are targeting, how are you actually monitoring this? Because for some of the main keywords you are targeting on those pages(like building solutions, submetering, building diagnostics, utility submetering)  i couldn´t find Enertiv in the SERP.

Another way to go would be to invest some money in Adwords so you can control better the traffic you get for each keyword and the amount so you can easier test different versions of your page to optimize the conversions.

No eureka moment, but i hope it helps

Hi Alick300,

isn´t .ie a ccTLD though for Ireland or does google treat this one as a gccTLD as seen here https://www.screencast.com/t/5YgjXIriy ?

Hi Brian Nash,

Don´t think this funcionality exist.  Can you explain why you would like to nofollow instead of disavow?

You could use GSC to find some actionable insights to optimize your on-page content.

1. go to the search analytics area and click on the "pages" option.  Then click on the page and change the option to "queries" to find relevant keywords you can add to the that page on your site.
2. Find pages in the same report with low ctr´s on good positions and optimize the meta descriptions and page titles.
3. Identify your top queries and see if the right pages are ranking for them.  If not diagnose why and correct the issue(s). You can check out his moz resource https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

Hi Alex,

I would say if you maintain the exact same url structure e.g.:

before:

http://www.xxxx.xxx/xxxxxxxxx

after:

http://www.xxxx.xxx/xxxxxxxxx

You will be good with the search engines, independent in which server folder the new site is (current or new).

Hope this helps

Hi Becky,

In general this will depend a lot on the kind of impact your looking for / companies objectives.

First thing is find your high converting keywords and work on improving ranking for those.

Second find ways for automating work with templates for your onpage optimisation. Though not always best for SEO, unavoidable for Big ecommerce sites.

Build links e.g. by producing quality content relevant for your audience.

Hi,

I have been working with several writers in the past from peopleperhour with excellent resuts.  They however did not do the keyword research and were only used to write the copy according to our instructions.  There are several people offering this service though so you could give them a try.

Hi Aua,

Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO.   I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much.  It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.

Hope this helps

Hi,

Did you maintain the meta tags for the img (alt text, filename) for the newly compressed images? I imagene that the time  between the replacement and the drop is fairly close for you to deduce this is connected, has the drop occured long ago (could be a temporary issue)?

Hi Laura-EMC,

I cant make up from your example what kind of duplicate content this is.  You say it is from product pages but the first url looks like the homepage for your blog.

Anyway as a basis you should redirect duplicate content to the right page when the page doens´t need to be available for your users. e.g. you had a page for a product but now you have a better one and you redirect the users to this one.

A canonical should be used when the page needs to be available for your users but you don´t want them in the index.  e.g. you have a shoe page for shoe size 41 but you also have a page for shoe size m.  As the only difference on the page will be the size the content on them will be almost completely igual.  you still want the users to be able to visite the page but not have it in the index.

Hope this helps

hi vtmoz,

I can see all this keywords of being there own topic, sure they use the same main keyword / topic "seo" but they are not the same. A page about "seo history" and "seo strategies" can have substancial different content and cater to a different search intent.  If you have good content for all these keywords its a sound strategy to create multiple landing pages for them.

Hi VTMOZ,

If there is no issues with the domain, as you indicate,  than do a auto redirect 301.

greet

Hi vtmoz,

On your first question i wouldnt do a redirect i would show a message with a link to your website for users ending up on that domain.

The difference is that with a 301 redirect you are telling Google to pass all the link equity of that page to the page you are redirecting to (the good and the bad)  when you implement a link on the page pointing the users to your correct website you can use a nofollow which will result in google not passing any link equity at all.