Also the mighty Rand (who is always right about everything) say's 'don't take an advertising first approach' https://moz.com/blog/why-paid-ads-fail see it here and my own experience of this is spookily precisely what he describes.  We did paid at first when we were new and nobody clicked.  It barely broke even and those ads were really great ads with a low agency fee.

Now we are augmenting our number one positions with paid ads and killing it and also squeezing competitors out of the market and making them suffer by starting bidding wars.  Some of them have just given up ad words. SO top organic spots put you in a strong position.  The strongest position.

What happens is you overtake a competitor in the serp and they think OMG I need ad words! Then you plonk an ad above them in ad words and they go into a flat spin.

Hi Roman,

Thanks for this - some great options here for my page. But what about when people want to upload their own photos rather than reviews. So it's hosted on our site and could potentially one day form a sort of Q&A and brochure of our lovely patients.  I also need one for our recruitment page where people can upload CV's and cover letters but think I can fix that with one of my forms plugins.

Cheers,

Ed.

YES! WP custom area.  That's the one I want.  Thanks roman.

Hey there Yael,

Take a look at Rands insights about Searcher Task Accomplishment to discount this as a possible cause.  It's rare to hear people questioning good positions not bemoaning bad ones - but I also have done lots of thinking about implicit user feedback and trying to correlate time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate with rankings.

The upshot of my research is that Rand really has something in his video.  I implemented Adjusted Bounce Rate  in GA and found that people were spending time scrolling and reading my articles that were ranking with a high traditional bounce rate (90%+) but a low adjusted one (17%)

I suggest you take a look at getting more accurate bounce stats by using GTM to set up goals for scroll depth and time on page. It will send an event when a user does something that google measures but GA doesn't in it's bounce rate calculation.

I also noticed with a prices page (from looking at Hotjar recordings of users) that many people scroll to the answer (the price) and then bounce when they've seen the table with the prices on and the price comparisons for my products.  This is really helpful info and is not freely shared by other sites like mine so Google is ranking us number one in the UK for one of the most lucrative search terms in our industry.

The page has no links and the only factor I can identify is that people search for 'Veneers Prices' land on my site, scroll to the answer and then bounce or click back to the main services page. We even had the featured snippet and I de-optimised to lose it because I wanted more commercial and less 'just finding out' traffic.  That worked too. I'm the only person who doesn't want the snippet!

Bounce rate in GA is a misleading metric and Google does not see the same bounce rate that you see.  So your 90% might be 4M time on site or the customer getting the answer they want by scrolling or using on page navigation and then leaving.  Google wants to provide the right answer and this doesn't necessarily mean traditional signals.  Google is getting smarter than that with it's limitless data from chrome.

Hope this gives you something to think about and to go off and test.  Once you have a positive correlation or even a gut feel then start testing to get the solid answer.  Then you can start modelling other pages on your success using the data.

Hope this helps!

Ed.

So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage.  The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'.  This figures.

But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage.  Which is languishing at position 3-5.

Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches.  So people who are searching for us.

Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot?  That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page?

I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page.  But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one.  It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?

Hey,

Thanks for the response.  I've done loads of top ten benchmarking and their sites are older.  I worry that could be the reason too.  We're only a few years old.  The one and two positions are 6 and 10 yrs old.  But we're outranking them for all our services so my question really is can I ignore the homepage and create a 'services page' with 'dentist liverpool' as the focus KW?

DA and PA are Moz metrics not google ones.  That's the first thing to note.  Moz recently made some changes to their way of calculating the metrics that made them a more accurate predictor of the ranking capability of a page.

So basically they are an integer that's arrived at by a calculation involving the number of links pointing to a page and the power and authority of those links. DA is global, so one domain in the pond of the whole internet and PA is a local to your individual site.  So each page you own in the pond of your whole site.

So how do you use these metrics?

1. find out whether google is ranking links and a pages 'power' or the content therein.  Sometimes the first three results all have very high DA of 60-70 and 80+.  This means that to compete you'll probably need to get a ton of links to your page to be in that top three.

Other times the top three can have little or no domain power and just be great articles.  This is more common now.

2. You can look at the PA or your individual pages and rank them according to PA. Then see where each ranks and whether there are any statistical outliers.  Sometimes a page with low PA will be doing well.  That's great.  Other times a page will bomb and if you find that it has a low PA then you might want to insert some internal links to it to bump it up a bit.

By way of additional research look here:

https://moz.com/blog/the-new-link-explorer-is-here - rand on DA updates

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ - matt cutts on pagerank

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagerank-patent/250603/ - roget montti on pagerank patent and lots of _science, yo. _

Go get em!

Hey Tim,

I would have a page for everything you offer.  That's by far the best strategy.  So on your Invisalign page have a picture of Invisalign and don't mark it as dentist schema mark it as product.  I think the dentist schema is rubbish myself.  You're much better off using an image of All on Four on your All on four product page and marking it up that way.

Nobody is interested n your brand and logo if your a small local practice.  They search things like 'Braces New York' and want to see the options for all the braces you offer or your orthodontist.

I use the data highlighter for this because it gets us better results.  On the homepage you can't get review schema to show stars and all you're going to achieve is getting your logo up there when someone types in the name of your dentist so what's the point?

Go for unbranded products and keywords and mark them up with price, availability and an image with an alt tag with your location in it. that works for us.

Sometimes having dentist schema in the site wide footer just overrides our product schema for the services pages so I don't use it.  For your dentists mark them up individually as people with their headshots there and what they do and their postnominals and qualifications.

Also make sure your GMB has orthodontist, endodontist, oral surgeon etc so that you show as an orthodontist in the maps when someone types in braces.  Also having reviews mentioning the products helps.

Google ignores about 70% of our mark-up anyway and I think it's becoming less important as google figures out what things are and what they mean.  But a granular approach works the best. So one page for everything you do with the dentist as author marked up with the products they offer marked up and then it makes the dentist one kind of obsolete.

This is just my experience in our practice but we're ranking number one for pretty much everything now. Interestingly we're not doing so well for just the term 'dentist' but on the other hand we're ranking really well for 'emergency dentist' and I think the two might be competing with one another. Emergencies is much higher volume and makes us more money. being number one for dentist didn't actually get us many good patients.

Being number one for Veneers Cost or Invisalign or Fastbraces or Emergencies does. So perhaps focus more on those.  Dentists make the big mistake of putting everything they do on the homepage and that is a big mistake because you can never compete with my specific page that answers a customers specific dental query.  If I had toothe ache I'd google painful tooth and google returns our emergencies page.  I don't google 'dentist' If I need braces I google braces - not 'dentist'