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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.
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.
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.
I would make sure your homepage is in Google's index first by searching "site:yourwebsite.com". If it is indexed, then work on building some internal and external links to it, making sure your Google My Business is linked to it, and then putting your brand name somewhere in the Meta Title and Meta Description of the homepage. This should help your homepage rank more for brand name searches.
In theory, it should result in your product page ranking more consistently. One way to help solidify your product pages rankings for your target keyword would be to add an anchor text link with your target keyword pointing to the product page within the blog post (which has more external links). This would help "transfer some authority" that the blog post has to the product page.
To be safe when making these changes to de-optimize the blog post, keep track of every change you make just in case you need to revert back to the way it was, and also keep track of the rankings for both the product page and blog post separately.
Hope this helps and best of success!
This resource poll is a little dated (2005), but I believe it is still relevant & is from Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable, which is considered a credible source in the search industry- https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002785.html.
Pulled directly from the SE Roundtable article, and in no order the most competitive industries for SEO are-
If I were to add one, I would say Home Remodeling/Construction has become fairly competitive in local SEO. Using Moz's Keyword Explorer can give more insight on this if you type in an industry term and then look at the difficulty score.
One way to do it is to enter whatever you are URL you are plugging into the Link Explorer, then go to "Linking Domains" on the left-hand menu. Once there you can do a "Command + F", or whatever the search command is on your computer, and then search .gov or .edu to see if the URL you typed in has an .edu or .gov links pointing to it.
Although I would start with Moz's Link Explorer, this may be a good link search to cross-reference with Ahrefs, as they will show you if the Domain has any .gov or .edu links in the general overview once you enter a URL to analyze.
Posting on Linkedin won't directly affect your SEO or rankings. However, if you have a relevant blog post it is a good idea to share it with relevent hashtags to generate more referral traffic to your website.
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
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.
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
EGOL is correct above, keep in mind there are a ton of other factors and your competition online (those ranking highly currently) are more than likely not standing still in an SEO sense (so it is a moving target usually).
The lower the competition, the "easier" and supposed "less time" it will take to rank on page 1 of Google is a good rule of thumb. It is also incredibly important to do competitive research on those in the top 3 positions on page 1 to see how long their content is, the quality of it, and the number of quality links it has pointing to it.
I believe "URL" is the page on your website that is 404ing/Broken, the "Referring URL" is the website someone found your URL on and clicked through to. For example, if you had a broken link on a Facebook post you did, it would show the URL as "yourwebsite.com/examply" (broken link) and the Referring URL would be "facebook.com/yourprofile".
In theory, it should result in your product page ranking more consistently. One way to help solidify your product pages rankings for your target keyword would be to add an anchor text link with your target keyword pointing to the product page within the blog post (which has more external links). This would help "transfer some authority" that the blog post has to the product page.
To be safe when making these changes to de-optimize the blog post, keep track of every change you make just in case you need to revert back to the way it was, and also keep track of the rankings for both the product page and blog post separately.
Hope this helps and best of success!
Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-
When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.
Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".
In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!
This resource poll is a little dated (2005), but I believe it is still relevant & is from Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable, which is considered a credible source in the search industry- https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002785.html.
Pulled directly from the SE Roundtable article, and in no order the most competitive industries for SEO are-
If I were to add one, I would say Home Remodeling/Construction has become fairly competitive in local SEO. Using Moz's Keyword Explorer can give more insight on this if you type in an industry term and then look at the difficulty score.
Adding .html to the end of your URLs is not necessary and causes URLs to look less readable in my opinion. In taking over the site, definitely make sure to do proper 301 redirects and run a broken link check on it as well.
One way to do it is to enter whatever you are URL you are plugging into the Link Explorer, then go to "Linking Domains" on the left-hand menu. Once there you can do a "Command + F", or whatever the search command is on your computer, and then search .gov or .edu to see if the URL you typed in has an .edu or .gov links pointing to it.
Although I would start with Moz's Link Explorer, this may be a good link search to cross-reference with Ahrefs, as they will show you if the Domain has any .gov or .edu links in the general overview once you enter a URL to analyze.
Yasss! So the past few years I have been a die-hard Ahrefs fan to be honest. However, the new Moz Link Explorer is my new favorite tool for link analysis by far. Well done on this tool and the stout index as well Moz team!