SEO: what part art and what part science?
-
Hi All:
Just writing in the hopes of a reality check. When I compare the first page or two of companies in any field it's usually clear why the top two are on top and why the bottom two are on the bottom, but for everything in between, it often looks pretty gray to me. It's very difficult to find a smoking gun as to why companies rank where they do. While looking at one you could say it ranks because of Yelp reviews and another because of links, but then there are other completely contradictory examples. So I guess I'm asking, is this just the nature of the business? Is a lot of this simply unknowable and you look at what you can do that is most expeditious and will have the most impact, as well as more expensive longer term steps, decide what is practical, move forward and see what happens?
Grateful for anyone's thoughts so I can better understand just how lost i should feel.
Cheers, Wes.
-
Good advice, thank you. Luckily I know some of those other things better than SEO, so that works out well.
Cheers,
Wes
-
We have a very basic mobile site as we have not put our full attention to that yet. It's not responsive, it's just basic. I think it will work for now, but I want something better as the brand definitely suffers. I'll check out dudamobile. I need simple. Thanks very much for the tip.
-Wes
-
Wes,
Do you have a mobile site? Or a responsive design site? Or neither? We are in the works of creating a responsive design site, because that's what google says to do. However, for now, we just have the desktop and mobile ones. if you don't have either, I would recommend dudamobile. It is super easy to build and very cheap. (I mean cut and paste easy. No tech skills required).
- Ruben
-
There are multiple ways to do everything in SEO. Multiple ways to rank highly, multiple ways to lose all rankings. I'd say it's pretty much 0% science, because if any part of it was then it wouldn't be nearly as hard. Even the things that one might say we have down to a science (proper title tag structure, well written meta description, etc.) aren't really because Google can display them how they want to display them - not how you wrote them.
The most important thing I can stress is don't rely solely on SEO. Don't rely solely on any one strategy. That's a guaranteed way to fail. Use SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc. Diversify your strategy and you won't freak when Google changes the algorithm and everything goes upside down.
-
Hi Ruben:
Thanks very much for writing. That's pretty much what I'm doing as well. Hats off to Moz for keeping things simple and making it accessible to folks who aren't as computer literate as a they might like to be. Step by step works. I am doing local and the Moz Local is definitely where are start. Thanks again for the note.
Cheers,
Wes
-
Hi Wes,
It's okay to be lost. I've been on this forum for about 6 months, and I still feel insanely lost...but our rankings have improved. I'm not particularly good at understanding why one page ranks higher than another in the cases you've described, but I can tell you how our rankings improved. Most of it is very "knowable" and while, it may not be the best strategy, it has worked for us.
Not knowing much of anything when I started, I started with on-page optimization. I just filled out the Moz's Page Grader with the keyword and the URL. Then, I followed the steps till everyone was an A. Ironically, when I started, we did have some pages with "C's and F's" that still ranked well, and pages with "A's" that didn't, but that wasn't the norm. All of our rankings have improved from the on-page optimization.
Another easy-fix for us was improving our pagespeed and loading times. I just used pagespeed insights, and followed their instructions on what Google wanted me to do to improve my score. Though, some of that got pretty technical, so I did have to outsource some of it. However, there's a lot of competition for that type of service, so it's not very expensive.
Blogging: I try to write at least one article a week that is useful and/or topical. Like "Why your primary care doctor won't treat you after a car accident" or "Jameis Winston's Current Legal Situation" and I make sure there are not any grammatical errors. Also, I make sure I'm allowed to use whatever pictures I use. I do not know how to make something go viral, but I do know if you consistently write unique, quality articles, google will like it.
Duplicate Content: We had a ton of duplicate content, because most of our pages were almost exactly the same. Just the area of practice or location was changed. That was very time consuming to fix, but it was not difficult to understand or change.
I'm just now trying to get us ranking well in the Local category. Not sure if that applies to you or not, but it will help our company out a lot. What am I doing since I don't know much about Local? I put my citation in the Moz's listing checker and I do what it tells me to do to improve my score...(noticing a theme here?)
More generally, assuming you use this forum to ask a lot of questions, read through the responses, research terms that you don't understand and keep up with the blogs, you'll be surprised how quickly you'll learn.
Best of luck! Happy Friday!
Ruben
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
SEO Value of Google+?
Hi Mozers, Does having a Google+ page really impact SEO? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Unique content for international SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US. We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders. We are going to implement hreflang tags. I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique. This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content. Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geekyseotools0 -
Which automatic redirects to use in International SEO
Hi, I need help with international SEO redirects. I'm going to have intelligencebank.com/au for Australian visitors and intelligencebank.com for the rest of the world. I would like to automatically redirect aus users that land on .com to .com/au and vice versa for non-australian users. 1. Which automatic redirects should I use: a) java script because it will allow US based google bots to crawl my /au website (bots won't read javascript so they won't be redirected) b) http redirects c) 301 redirects d) 302 redirects e) anything else? a) Should I still use rel alternate even though I only use english? b) if I should add rel alternate, can I still keep my existing rel canonical tags that are use to avoid duplicate content (I use a lot of utm codes when advertising)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intelligencebank0 -
What tags/coding are not good for SEO?
what tags/coding are not good for SEO? and also what tags not to include while creating website. For example - I read some where to avoid Span tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
Ajax website and SEO
Hi all, A client of mine has a website similar to Pintrest. All in Ajax/. So imagine an ajax-grid based animal lover site called domain.com. The domain has three different Categories Cats, Dogs, Mice. When you click on a category, the site doesn't handle the URL and doesn't change the domain So instead of the domain going from domain.com to domain.com/cats, it uses the Ajax script and just shows all the cat pins. and when you click on each pin/post it opens a page such as domain.com/Pin/123/PostTitle It doesn't reference the category. However a page domain.com/cats does exist and you can go there directly. Is this an SEO issue for not grouping all pins under a category? How does Google handle Ajax these days, it use to be real bad but if Pintrest is going so well i'm assuming times have changed? Any other things to be wary of for a grid based/ajax site? I am happy to pay for an hour or two for a more in depth audit/tips if you can feed back on the above. Fairly urgent. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero1 -
What would your Seo tactic's be for this
Hiya guys... Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something. What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation. Let it rip 🙂 Cheers guys Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukescotty0