Blog vs. News/Editorial Layout?
-
We're in the coupon blogging space & saw that one of the larger coupon sites move away from the more traditional blog layout: http://thekrazycouponlady.com they now have more of an editorial type layout. Here is another site which is more similar to our layout: http://hip2save.com.
So here are my questions:
-
Which layout type do you feel better serves their visitors & why?
-
How does the affect the SEO of the site?
-
How does it affect the advertising revenues?
-
Which layout do you prefer?
Is there strategy in this move for the coupon blog, or is this just a preference on how they now display their content?
We're making some updates to our design soon & I wanted to get some feedback on the overall direction we take.
-
-
What analytic tools do you use? We currently have Google Analytics, but I'm familiar with KissMetrics & Crazyegg, do either of those make this process easier to measure?
-
We put up version A and get data on a large number of visitors.
Then we make a logical change to the position of the elements to produce version B and run that to get data on a large number of visitors.
These changes are not yet tweaking colors or fonts. They are testing ad positions or navigation formats.
We watch the data for changes in things like ad yields, number of pageviews, time on site, number of sales - whatever metrics are important to you.
If you have a lot of traffic you can determine if a design is tanking in a short amount of time but if you have small amounts of traffic you might need to run split tests or separate tests for days, weeks or months.
After we have tested a few very different designs we then start tweaking ad colors. This is done by creating a program to change ad colors hourly with a separate channel for each hour. On one of my sites my first choice of ad background color was ffffee... then after testing many different colors I learned that ffffee had the lowest yield.
We found up to 10x differences in revenue from different formats and up to 2x differences in revenue from different ad colors.
It is much easier to double your income from your current traffic than it is to double your traffic.
-
I'm always afraid of drastic tests, how would you do that on a large scale? With the 15 different versions you tested on your pages, what were the key items you were measuring?
Any chance you can share more info on the enormous differences in your changes & how measured this? Ultimately this is what I'm looking to do. I just want to make a calculated decision before jumping into it.
That's good to know about the SEO...thanks!
-
Don't ask us and don't guess yourself.
Instead, toss up a version and test it on your visitors.... then try something different...
The response of your visitors is the only response that matters.
If you have a content management system it isn't a whole lot of work to try something different.
Some of the page formats on my site have been through 15 different versions and the income / engagement differences between them have been enormous.
About the SEO.... if you don't change the title, navigation links and other on-page elements of the design there should be little impact on the SEO.
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
-
Having a Subfolder/Subdirectory With a Different Design Than the Root Domain
Hi Everyone, I was wondering what Google thinks about having a subfolder/subdirectory with a different design than the root domain. So let's say we have MacroCorp Inc. which has been around for decades. MacroCorp has tens of thousands of backlinks and a couple thousand referring domains from quality sites in its industry and news sites. MacroCorp Inc. spins off one of its products into a new company called MicroCorp Inc., which makes CoolProduct. The new website for this company is CoolProduct.MacroCorp.com (a subdomain) which has very few backlinks and referring domains. To help MicroCorp rank better, both companies agree to place the MicroCorp content at MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/. The root domain (MacroCorp.com) links to the subfolder from its navigation and MicroCorp does the same, but the MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ subfolder has an entirely different design than the root domain. Will MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ be crawled, indexed, and rank better as both companies think it would? Or would Google still treat the subfolder like a subdomain or even a separate root domain in this case? Are there any studies, documentation, or links to good or bad examples of this practice? When LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com, for instance, what if they kept the https://www.lynda.com/ design as is and placed it at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/. Would the pre-purchase (yellow/black design) https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ rank any worse than it does now with the root domain (LinkedIn) aligned design? Thanks! Andy
Web Design | | AndyRCWRCM1 -
Disallow: /sr/ and Disallow: /si/ - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - I have come across the two directives above in a robots.txt file of a website - the web dev isn't sure what they meant although he implemented robots.txt - I think just legacy stuff that nobody has analysed for years - I vaguely recall sr means search request but can't remember. If any of you know what these directives do, then please let me know.
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Content Issue: Mobile vs. Desktop View
Setting aside my personal issue with Google's favoritism for Responsive websites, which I believe doesn't always provide the best user experience, I have a question regarding duplicate content... I created a section of a Wordpress web page (using Visual Composer) that shows differently on mobile than it does on desktop view. This section has the same content for both views, but is formatted differently to give a better user experience on mobile devices. I did this by creating two different text elements, formatted differently, but containing the same content. The problem is that both sections appear in the source code of the page. According to Google, does that mean I have duplicate content on this page?
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Does anyone know how to find functions/codes/etc in WordPress?
Right now, I'm working on solving a relatively easy WP issue (easy, because someone told me what to do. Thanks iNetSeo). I have to replace: <span class="post_date"></span class="post_date"> and replace it with <span class="post_date date="" updated"=""></span class="post_date> But, I can't find the "_<span class="post_date">"</span class="post_date">_For a number of my WP problems, the hardest part is just located the code/function/markup I need to replace. Does anyone know where this might usually be stored on a website? Also, does anyone know if there's any tool that would allowed to just put "various function" in a search box, and wordpress take you to where it was on the backend of your site, so you could edit it? I included a screenshot of our editors, but I already opened them all, pasted the code in Ctrl-F to no avail, but maybe I missed something. Thanks for helping with my frustrating scavenger hunt! Ruben ASTPPfA
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Is it cloaking/hiding text if textual content is no longer accessible for mobile visitors on responsive webpages?
My company is implementing a responsive design for our website to better serve our mobile customers. However, when I reviewed the wireframes of the work our development company is doing, it became clear to me that, for many of our pages, large parts of the textual content on the page, and most of our sidebar links, would no longer be accessible to a visitor using a mobile device. The content will still be indexable, but hidden from users using media queries. There would be no access point for a user to view much of the content on the page that's making it rank. This is not my understanding of best practices around responsive design. My interpretation of Google's guidelines on responsive design is that all of the content is served to both users and search engines, but displayed in a more accessible way to a user depending on their mobile device. For example, Wikipedia pages have introductory content, but hide most of the detailed info in tabs. All of the information is still there and accessible to a user...but you don't have to scroll through as much to get to what you want. To me, what our development company is proposing fits the definition of cloaking and/or hiding text and links - we'd be making available different content to search engines than users, and it seems to me that there's considerable risk to their interpretation of responsive design. I'm wondering what other people in the Moz community think about this - and whether anyone out there has any experience to share about inaccessable content on responsive webpages, and the SEO impact of this. Thank you!
Web Design | | mmewdell0 -
Duplicate Page Content mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html MOZ Dashboard
According to MOZ Dashboard my site shows Duplicate Page Content mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html .What i can do for that .redirect mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com .then how can i do that using .htaccess file .
Web Design | | innofidelity0 -
Link Pages/Directory
Hello, What is best practise for dealing with alot of links. I was thinking of breaking them download to alphabet pages i.e. all A on one page etc... BUT should I then make the links clickable on this list OR that they load to a sub company page which has a clickable link to there website.
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
SEOMoz crawl report shows a duplicate content and duplicate title for these two url's http://freightmonster.com/ and http://freightmonster.com/index.html. How do I fix this?
What page is attached to http://freightmonster.com/ if it is not the index.html ? Should I do a redirect from the index page to something more descriptive?
Web Design | | FreightBoy1