Keyword Variants - Low conversion rates - Is a site redesign required?
-
Hi Guys,
I'm Chris & i'm a noob to SEO.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and for offering your support! It is greatly appreciated!
I work for a small family run company called custom designed cables and we manufacture bespoke cable and bespoke retractable cables.
I posted a couple of days ago about how to move forward with our site.
Our website has been targeting specific keywords and their variants across the relevant pages to somewhat reasonable effect.
Since signing up to SEOMOZ, i have been trying to narrow down the keywords that we target per page and also tried to improve the content on the pages with the help of the on page optimisation tool.
I have a few questions that i would like somebody to help me with please if it isn't to much trouble.
Firstly, for our keywords, there are a lot of variants. For example, we braid cables.
Here are some of the variants of this keyword: cable braid, cable braiding, cable screen, cable screening, cable shielding etc etc.
The way i have gone in the past has been to try and target all of those keywords on the relevant page. Now, writing content has been the issue as whilst trying to write good informative information, squeezing in all of the keywords has been a problem and more than likely affected the readability of the page.
From what i have learnt since i signed up, this is not a good practice and therefore i have tried to narrow it down somewhat yet i don't really want to lose potential customers finding us by only targeting one or two of the keywords. This is a similar situation for most of our keywords on the majority of our pages.
What is the best way to approach this? If i was to write a page per keyword, i don't believe that it would look very good as we could end up with over 100 pages with say 5 or 6 of them talking about the same subject which then leads onto the problem of writing good content. It would be difficult to write good content for pretty much the same thing across such a wide number of pages. If this is the solution though then i would more than happily tackle it.
What would be the best way to move forward?
The next issue that I have is that since i have been modifying the pages with the help of SEOMOZ, the number of enquries that we have received have fell off the charts.
We used to average around 50 enquiries a month from the website and since i have modified the site, i'd say we've had probably 20 since the end of February.
The funny thing is though, we have also averaged around 200 hits more per month since the changes. So the hits have increased yet the enquiries have died.
I was wondering if anybody was willing to take a look at our site: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk to give me some general feedback as to why this may be happening and what your overall opinions of the site may be with regards to the layout, look and general feel etc because i am beginning to wonder whether or not the design is what could be causing us to convert so little of our new found visitors.
If anyone could also provide me with actionable feedback with regards to our keyword targeting for our pages that would also really really help!
I am currently considering re-designing the site in it's entirety and i am interested in your opinions on whether or not this would be a good way to go.
Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated guys!
Thanks again!
Chris (Just another website/seo noob desperately attempting to avoid the sack)
-
Chris- Hoping I can help you avoid the sack!!!
I will divide my feedback into four areas:
- Website layout
- CMS
- Analytics
- Creating unique content focused on your keywords
Website layout is average....the fact that you have used so much of your home page real estate for navigation doesnt make sense. you have multiple options for home, about us, custom cable and links.....the red is overhwleming....the choices are overwhelming. Way too busy.....
Take a step back and think about why is someone coming to the page? what are the top three things they might want to accomplish? then get rid of everything else and focus on those three things....you cna remove all of your other headings and subheadings that are not call to action items, down to the footer or condensed into one heading.....
- If your goal is to get them to order cable now then there should be a box "Order cable now" or "check out our prices now"...
- If your goal is to get their email information to follow up market to them, then there should be a call to action box that says"save money with our cable now" or "Sign up for special weekly deals" and then you would have an email box they could fill in and submit.
- If your goal is to get them to see why your cable is unique....then post that information with a call to action.
CMS. Im not sure what CMS you are using, but hopefully you are being indexed correctly and the sitemap is being generated that is solid and provides guidance to the search engines. We recommend wordpress because we have seen that when we convert the same exact content from another site to wordpress, we not only upgrade the user experience but it gets better SEO value instantly because of the architecture and ease of use with plugins. Whatever you are using, make sure you have a solid foundation.
Analytics. You need to install google analytics on your pages so you can track the activity on your site. You need to find out where people are going on the site, how long they are spending on each page and where they are abansdoining. Just install the code on every page in the footer and then set up some basic reporting to get you vital information related to what you are talking about above. You dont know what you dont know....get the data and you then will have some clarity on what is happening.
Creating unique content with keywords. Let me offer you a few suggestions....
- Pick one primary or money keyword on each page. And then pick 2-3 sub keywords that are important and relevant. Just focus on those....don't pick 10 keywords a page....
- When writing content make sure you include the main keyword in the title, in the first sentence and the last sentence.
- Make sure you mention the other sub keywords at least 2-3 times in the main article/content.
- Make sure you use bold, italics and underlines at least once in the content.
Don't stuff the keywords in the content......use the keywords only if it makes sense in the context of what you are writing about.....
Lastly, it sounds like you might not be maximizing your seo value for alt tags and meta tags.....make sure your meta descriptions and picture alt tags are seo optimized with your keywords for that page. Again, with wordpress this is a simple process of filling in the required fields for one of the wordpress plugins.
Good luck. Hope this helps. Please show me the three thumbs up!
Mark
-
I wouldn't 'cut them out' per say, but put them lower on the priority list. Make sure to use the most searched keyword furthest to the left in the title tag.
As far as everything else goes - try setting up some goals in Google Analytics to see which keywords are converting into sales. If you find one converts better than the other - swap it out for the furthest to the left in the title tag. Doesn't matter how much traffic it brings you if it doesn't convert.
As with most people, I can see that you're pretty concerned with your on-site optimization. On-site is a very small percentage of the reason why your website will rank. Links from external websites do most of the work.
-
Hi Todd,
With regards to SEOMOZ's on page optimisation tools.
Would you suggest that i only include the keywords in the body just the one time or would you suggest that i should go with the minimum of 4 mentions?
Thanks Todd!
Chris.
-
Hi Todd,
Thank you for the response!
So following on from what you have suggested, would i be better off selecting the three keywords with highest traffic and optimising to them specific keywords?
Thus cutting out quite a lot of the variants?
Would you suggest that i run with that then for the time being and see how we rank/how many conversions we get whilst leaving the site design the same?
I've just loaded up the link, i will read it now!
Thanks again Todd!!
Chris.
-
Hey Christopher,
You're right in not writing content for all of those keyword variants. Check out this post from Google:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Key takeaway from that post is this:
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Some may disagree, but the only form of on-site SEO optimization I do is in the title tag, H1 tag and 1 time in the copy. I use a different keyword in the title tag, H1 and in copy as well. So for you:
Title: cable braid
H1: cable braiding
in copy: cable braids
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Https Cached Site
Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca
Technical SEO | | TheBatesMillStore0 -
Big BUPA Bounce rate
Good morning from ten degrees c mostly cloudy wetherby UK 🙂 Ive got a 70% bounce rate on this home page - http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/Home.aspx Whilst their is a telephone number on the home page it feels too high. Ive drilled down and identified the following: 1. Medium (NONE) is causing 80% bounce
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
2. No ppc ad are running I get a futher explanation from the Google Gods: •Auto-tagging is on but cost data is not applied (learn more)
•There is a redirect in the URL
•The gclid parameter is altered or dropped from the ad
•Auto and manual tagging are being used at the same time
•Manually tagged URLs are missing a value My feeling is eMails with links to the home page are causing such I high medium (none count) Would be grateful if any SEO mozzer could offer there insights, Thanks, David0 -
How to move a site slowly
I've got a site that I started back in 2001 (www.jaaroncaststone.com) to sell what I was making, concrete countertops and sinks. Well we're going to be discontinuing the concrete products in a month or so and want to start pointing all the links from the old site to a new one dedicated to a single product (www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com). I don't want to do a full 301 on the old site just yet but can I put a canonical tag on the index and about us pages pointing to the new site now so the search engines start looking that way or should I wait and do a full 301 when the day comes to pull the old site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Site maps, Is there any benefit?
I have a relatively simple and small site (60 pages). All of it is crawlable and there is nothing I want non follow. So, is there any real benefit to a sitemap since Google can get to all the site anyway? Do they give the site more credence or something because it's there? I guess as an aside, are there any favorite sites that will generate a site map? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Watermarking Keywords
I've been viewing an seo companies website that claims to get small business websites to Google Page 1 for free or starting at $150/mo. I'v noticed that on all the website this company has done work on they include in the footer (usually as a watermark) all the keyword phrases. There don't apprear to be any sites that have been penalized. Isn't this poor SEO practice? I've included a screen shot of what I'm talking about. I just want to be clear. Thank you for your input. XnQUc.png
Technical SEO | | JulB0 -
Site Disappeared off of Search
A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking. I did some checking and can't see a problem. She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either. When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated. This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland
Technical SEO | | kdaly1000 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0