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 -
Subdomains + SEO
Hi everyone, So a little background - my company launched a new website (http://www.everyaction.com). The homepage is currently hosted on an amazon s3 bucket while the blog and landing pages are hosted within Hubspot. My question is - is that going to end up hurting our SEO in the long run? I've seen a much slower uptick in search engine traffic than I'm used to seeing when launching new sites and I'm wondering if that's because people are sharing the blog.everyaction.com url on social (which then wouldn't benefit just everyaction.com?) Anyways, a little help on what I should be considering when it comes to subdomains would be very helpful. Thanks, Devon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EveryActionHQ0 -
Can Press Releases Be Beneficial for SEO?
Can it hurt your website if there are thousands of links to your website from multiple websites with identical content? Is there a right way to use PR for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content
Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic1 -
Social Media and SEO
What is best? Increasing DA and PA on a specific social media profile such as twitter or spreading out the DA and PA on a variety of different profiles?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
SEO Strategy for Microsite
I am working on a project to build a microsite of sorts that will represent a joint program between two large organizations with established web presences and strong domains. Each of the organizations has dedicated sections on their sites speaking to the program, but the leadership has decided the joint program deserves it's own site with dedicated content. The two larger sites perform very well for SEO, and I don't necessarily want to jeopordize thir rankings by delivering content that competes directly with them. So I am doing some keyword research to find some opportunities that will alllow me to use the new site to target keywords not yet being captialized by the larger sites. My grand scheme is to have the three sites targeting the broadest array of keywords possible, thus maximizing exposure and avoiding competition. Here is the rub: the content between the three sites will be different but very similar, and there will be plenty of cross linking, especially from the existing sites to the new site, as we grow the brand of the joint program. I'm curious to here some expert opinions on what the puitfalls of the strategy are and what are some of the things I can do to avoid falling in the black hat category - I recognize that proliferating sites around a single topic and cross linking them is black hat. The organizations simply want to build a brand around a joint program and we are striggling to do that without a dedicated website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
The format for image SEO
Hi there. After looking at a few SEO videos relating to image SEO it seems important to ensure images are SEO'd just as well as pages. I however have a question. If the page is Meta titles the following: Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech And this particular page contains five images which are each variants of this product, how is it best to SEO them? Would you go with the: Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Front Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Back Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Side and so on... Or would this result in keyword stuffing with Google's new over-optimisation rules. Would it be better to rename them so they are all individual? I am considering deleting the images, renaming them on the server as the SEO proof name and then re-uploading them so the Image caption = filename. Am I on the right track? If you need the page: http://www.onlineforequine.co.uk/jodhpurs-breeches/22-just-togs-ladies-latina-denim-breech.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlineforequine0 -
Your Biggest SEO Jobs Explained
What have been your most proudest moments in SEO ? What would you consider as being you best achieved job and in what industry was it achieved it. What are the reasons you have this down as your biggest achievement ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0