What to do with PDFs that rank well?
-
Looking at some reports, I found that a client's site has PDFs that are ranking well for niche terms and getting some traffic.
What can I do to get more out of them from a marketing standpoint?
The obvious issue is that a PDF doesn't have the interactivity of a site visit, where we have analytics and CTAs. Someone has to follow a link back from the PDF to the site for us to even register a visit, let alone try to get their email or have them otherwise convert.
My first guess is to make landing page summaries of the PDF content that link to the PDF, and canonical the PDF to the respective landing page.
Has anyone tried this, or done something else that they would recommend again in this situation?
-
Sounds like a smart plan to me!
-
Thank you, Robin!
I agree that there's a danger of splitting authority with the solution I've proposed and either of the alternatives would be stronger. The issue here is that I've got PDFs with 80+ pages of content, so making that into a HTML page would be it's own can of worms.
I'm thinking of doing one or a couple as an experiment and seeing the results before putting effort/taking on the risk of doing a whole bunch.
-
Hi there, good question! I've run into a similar situation and had all the same concerns as you. I think my recommendations would be (in order from most preferred to least preferred)
- Convert pdf to full HTML page with internal links and ability to convert, redirect PDF
- Replace PDF with HTML page which has the PDF as the content but also contains things like the internal nav (sometimes this is the only possibility with limited resource)
- Create summary page and link to pdf with canonical on pdf page (just as you say)
Making the content of the PDF more easily readable by search engines (by turning it into a HTML page as in solution 1) would hopefully boost ranking potential as well as helping give users a better experience.
The only reason I put your solution as lowest on the list is because if we're creating a page then we may as well create the full page, rather than creating a page which kind of gives the same information as the PDF but still relies on the PDF existing. You could find that the two pages compete and neither ends up ranking.
Hopefully that helps!
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Evolution of rankings over the course of time
Hello, Has anyone got experience on how rankings behave to climb all the way to the top once your do a redirect and change the design and content of your page entirely ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
SPA (angularJS) Ranking Problem
Hello dear experts; I working on SPA website with More than 20,000 indexed pages by Google there is a problem that I involved with: 1- Some pages had a good ranking on google.com but from a week ago, ranks one by one, dropped and homepage Replaced. for example, URL: https://cafegardesh.com/tours-dubai removes and https://cafegardesh.com replaced. Google still see the page when I use Fetch as Google tool. I can't understand what happens Is there anyone can find my site problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Keyword Ranking Fluctuations
Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine. It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Ranking Suggestions
Hi There, I am currently working on this site: completesteamclean.ca to rank as high as possible for "carpet cleaning windsor" on Google.ca and I can't seem to make any head way against the other websites ranking. I've optimized the page, created social media accounts for activity, even invested in Google Adwords and Facebook ads to try to boost my presence. Does anyone have any suggestions on any tactics/revisions I can make that may help boost my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
How to get an online store ranked
Hello, The question is how to get SEO traffic to www.misslovegirls.com [staff warning: this is a lingerie site and may be not safe for some viewing situations] The only editable info we have on the pages is in the Meta Keywords and Meta Description on each page. Goal to get search engine traffic to the site. Any suggestions? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemktg10 -
PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?
What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images. Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images? thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0