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@pilesofpillows solid tip friend!

@gastonriera calm down mate. We have actually tested this at not seen any negative effect on any site we have done it on. It is the "easiest" option, but it won't cause the death and destruction your comment implies. Good day sir.

My understanding is they do look at H3 tags and valuate them as being higher emphasis than normal paragraph copy, however, they do not have a much "weight" in the on-page algorithm as the H1 or H2s. If having H3s makes sense for your page's content and helps the user better read and understand the content, I say H3s are positive and I would not hesitate to use them.

I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.

Just took at look a the site and ran a Link Analysis in the Moz Link Explorer.

Technical Analysis: Https= Good, Site Speed is good (under 2 seconds according to Pingdom), 44 pages on the website (not bad for a local business), and 0 broken links found throughout the website according to BrokenLinkCheck.com

On-Site: Meta Titles & Description could use some help. Try editing the Meta Titles especially on pages you would like to rank on Google, the homepage and service pages especially. If you are trying to rank for "New Jersey" searches, ie "SEO New Jersey", mention New Jersey more in the copy, H2s on occasion, etc. I don't see the homepage or service pages mentioning it once, except for the "NJ" abbreviation in your footer address and it being on the back-end of your Home Page Meta Title.

**Off-Site: **The website has a pretty bare link profile as you mentioned, and unfortunately blogging every week is not going to compensate for not having inbound links, unless you are doing some hardcore outreach to get your posts linked to. I would put a focus on this, even if you start with simple high-quality directory or content sharing websites. Use the Moz Link Explorer to see what sites are linking to your competitors, then strategize on how to acquire some similar links.

Hope this helps and best of success to you!

Shorten and Redirect (With keeping the URL keyword-focused). If there is an opportunity for those website pages to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and spend a few minutes optimizing them as well.

You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one, and then re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

We have seen good results from doing this on our website and it can be an easy win to bumping up rankings for those pages.

If you are on a Wordpress website there is an "All 404 to Homepage" Plugin that you can install for free that makes all 404 pages redirect to your homepage. This is what I have found to be the easiest solution to this, otherwise you can setup individual 301s from each broken URL to a relevant live URL.

Personally, I would still de-optimize the blog, just keep a notes document of before/after changes that you make during de-optimization, that way if the worst case scenario happens and neither page is ranking for your keyword, you can undo the de-optimization and look for another solution.

Also, after you de-optimize the post it may be worth it to utilize Google Search Console's Fetch & Render tool to request Google to re-index and crawl all of the direct links on the product page and blog page. This can sometimes work like a "refresh" to get Google to properly index both pages quicker. I would still wait like a week or so after you de-optimize the post page to see what happens.

Impossible to say for sure Tom, I would give it a go personally, especially if there is another keyword you want to target with the blog post. If Google is currently only allowing one page of your website to rank at one time for your keyword, de-optimizing one of the competing pages for that keyword should lead to more consistent ranking for the other page with all else being equal.

Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.

One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.

Hope this helps and best of success!

My understanding is they do look at H3 tags and valuate them as being higher emphasis than normal paragraph copy, however, they do not have a much "weight" in the on-page algorithm as the H1 or H2s. If having H3s makes sense for your page's content and helps the user better read and understand the content, I say H3s are positive and I would not hesitate to use them.

This makes sense to me as long as the other types of links (directories, forums, etc) are still high-quality. For example, if the directories they are making sure you are listed on are sites like Angieslist, YP, Manta, BBB, Yelp, etc. NOT low quality ones like freeseodirectory.com, directorytopranking.com, etc. it is a good thing and helpful for SEO. If you are a local business, this will help with your NAP as well, and showing up in Google Maps more often. Moz Local has a great list of these high quality directories and I would make sure the company you are working with is providing you reporting of their linkbuilding efforts and sources.

Asking what pieces of content they are sharing from your website would be a good question to ask as well, as one of the best forms of modern SEO and linkbuilding is having helpful, industry-relevant blog posts, infographics, or other pieces of content on your website and then going through the process of promoting it and requesting links to it from other websites, blogs, lists, and resource pages where it would be helpful and relevant. Brian Dean of Backlinko is a big forerunner of this type of linkbuilding, and has seen great success with it for multiple companies.

Very interesting situation Neil, it sounds like you did the right thing with looking at what the competition was doing, and then just making one change at a time, while using the Fetch & Render tool in GSC to see results faster.

While keyword density is a factor, Google is constantly trying to figure out the "searcher intent", and it is possible that adding this keyword in that seemed like a no-brainer changed Google's perspective of the page's "searcher intent". Just spitballing here of course, as there a ton of potential on-site factors at play. It sounds like you are on the right mindset though and I wouldn't totally throw keyword density out, just focus more on "content depth" and helping solve the searcher intent.

Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.

One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.

Hope this helps and best of success!

I personally would do bulk 301 redirects for this, and would not anticipate a negative impact on organic traffic. If anything, you are shortening your URLs which is a good SEO practice, you could probably look at shortening the "thisistheblogpost" part of the URL at the same time you are creating your 301 redirects to make sure the URL is a short as possible, while still including the blog post's target keyword or phrase. Hope this helps and best of success!

A lot of possibilities here, if you have just recently made the page changes you indicated above, I would recommend utilizing the Fetch and Render command in Google Search Console, and then Request To Re-Index the page. This will speed up the time it takes for Google to re-index your page with the changes you mentioned above (I have seen improvements in as fast as a day). You may need to verify your website in Google Search Console if you have not already in order to do this.

In addition to this, it may be beneficial to use more LSI (similar user intent) keywords on the page as it may be "over-optimized", for example if you have a page on lawn care that you want to rank for "lawn care in _____", try using "lawn services" and "lawn maintenance" in the H2s, image alt text, and content more instead of just re-using "lawn care" 99 times on the page. Also considering the length of the page is important as well, see if you can add a paragraph or two in new, unique content that mentions your keyword once or twice.

If neither of those work, it's time to start doing some backlink research to see what backlinks your competitors have that are ranking in the top 3-5 positions on Google for the keyword you are wanting to rank for. Use Moz' Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMrush will be great in helping with this. I would also do a quick page speed audit, check the page's loading time with Pingdom and/or Google pagespeed insights. You may want to decrease the size of photos on the page or leverage cacheing (may need the help of a website developer depending on resources).

On-Site SEO is merely one facet of ranking your webpage higher, and if your keyword term that you are wanting to rank for is competitive you need to pay attention to technical SEO and Off-Site SEO and Quality Backlinks to the page as well, even if you have an "optimization score of 100" with whatever analysis tool you are using. Hope this helps and best of success!

If the blog posts have good user metrics on them (time on site, pages per session, etc.), it should, in theory, help your website rankings over time. The agency I work for has run into this as well, where the website traffic will increase, but leads will remain constant or won't increase near as much.

I say there is a positive benefit as your blog posts could get increase brand awareness, and maybe get referenced and linked to, which helps your overall website authority, but it is definitely a long game, and the short-term benefit will be very little.

If there is an opportunity for those blog posts to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and optimize them. You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old to the new ones, and re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.

For Website Speed: https://tools.pingdom.com/

For Backlink Profile & Authority: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home

For On-Site SEO: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

For Broken Links- http://brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php