Where do I start? A little overwhelmed - Really appreciate any help.
-
Hello everyone,
I was hoping to be able to get some advice if at all possible. I'm know there's some really skilled people on these forums. I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting links so if it's crossing the line to post the link of the site I'm working on please let me know.
I was just hired as the Director of Digital Marketing for a decent sized company. I have a lot of experience with PPC, media buys and digital integration but unfortunately I'm a noob with SEO.
I'm trying to learn as quickly as possible, and I'm reading everything I can (including everything I can find from Rand)
The issue is that I have to start somewhere but there's so much that needs to be done that I'm getting a bit lost. We used to have 3 separate sites that ranked really well for our main keywords on Google, but with the growth of our company we consolidated the different market sites into one main one and 301'd the older ones. In doing so we lost nearly all of our search rankings. Our current site is:
Does anyone have any advice on where to dive in here? I'm currently paying a ton each month for traffic through search PPC and contextual display, along with a bunch of geographically targeted brand awareness display campaigns, and I really need to show some progress on our organic search.
Thanks in advance for any help!
-
Thanks Kynduvme,
I have our priority keywords mapped out included a large volume of long tail. We are currently using Analytics and I've been able to get a good insight into how our customers are using the site. We are in the process of adding new features to increase visitor usage metrics (Galleries of notable purchases, click through tutorials, etc).
Our on site meta is pretty bad, and needs to be redone. I've been waiting until our new features and revisions are up to change that however. We have a few hundred locations now and I've been making sure they're verified with Google Places. We've been seeing a lot of traffic through that.
I really appreciate all the advice.
-
Always start with Keyword research. Since you have experience with PPC this should be no problem. Then move on to keyword targeting and selection. Once you have your targets mapped. Make a plan for how you implement them once you are set. Begin changing and updating yout title tags, h1, body copy and meta descriptions.
Then, start looking at website architecture, how the site looks to google etc.
You will also want to make sure you have measurement coding in place. Analytics (with goals) Webmaster tools and an xml sitemap.
If the company has very local targeting you will want to do a google places clam and verification
-
That's perfect! Thanks Steve, I'll check them out today.
-
My recommendation would be to do whatever you can to get as much experience as possible by submersing yourself in with anybody there who deals with the SEO, and get the theory by reading, spending time on here, and doing an SEO course such as MarketMotive, SearchEngineCollege, or Quirk... they're three of the decent ones, and it's kind of like having interactive books with deadlines, coursework and tests to ensure you're doing things right. They're kept nicely up to date too
Try these:
http://www.marketmotive.com/internet-marketing-training-and-certification-signup?top=how&topic=SEO
http://www.searchenginecollege.com/certified-search-engine-optimizer/
And get these:
-
Thanks Andrew. We are working on making sure we have enough keywords in the content. We are probably going to have to do a full revision on the site itself.
I appreciate it!
-
Start with On-Page optimization - IE get your keywords into your content. Then I would just start reading SEO blogs until you have enough understanding of what's going on to branch out from there.
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
-
Does traffic for branded searches help a site rank for general terms?
A year or two ago we put up some websites which were specific to brands we own. Sure enough those sites (eg 'myBrand.com') started to rank pretty well for those brand terms eg 'mybrand curling tongs' (it's not curling tongs, btw, but you get the idea). We were getting a decent amount of traffic presumably from people who have bought or seen these products on our amazon/ebay stores. Before long, we see us starting to rank well for non branded searches eg 'curling tongs' even among decent competition. Next thing you know I'm getting told by the boss that we need to put up websites for all specific ranges, not just brands, because specificity is a bonus for ranking well. While there's probably a point that a site for MybrandCurlingTongs lends itself well to ranking for curling tongs, is there also an element that the branded searches we got (via making our brand known on amazon/ebay) helped the site gain recognition and authority? As such a new website about 'ionising hair dryers' would not rank well based on being specific, because it wouldn't be helped by a lot of branded traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSDOnline2 -
Please help us undertsand the things we need to improve so that google crawler visit us more often to reindex pages from our domain
we are currently in the process of a massive project which involves us migrating our domain, we realised that Google crawlwer has not been crawling our pages Quiet often. i have observed some cases where google crawled these pages about 6 months back and then never visited the pages again
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bhaskaran
and we had to manually submit these pages for reindexing in some geographies. can you please help us undertsand the things we need to improve so that google crawler visit us more often to reindex pages from our domain0 -
How to rank an ecommerce site for search terms starting with how where why
Hi guys, I just got a new SEO job for an e commerce store, the client is asking to rank the site for keywords like where to buy used phone, where to sell my used phone for for best rates and so, the question is how can i achieve that, can anyone help me with some concrete suggestion? Thanks in Advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkhurramali0 -
How do I not mess up a national seo strategy? All advice appreciated in advance!
Hello Moz Friends So I have always worked on local seo, websites, and digital brand management. But one of my clients wants to go national. They sell building materials and the competition is pretty fierce. So here is my question and I thank you in advance for any advice: How do I not mess up a national seo strategy, based on local seo efforts? So for an example, say I put the NAP in the footer, but my client sells to 49 states, will this hurt a national campaign? And on the opposite, would getting local links from say construction websites in California, if my NAP is from Florida, hurt or help? I understand that most of this is seo 101, but I am so used to local seo, that I don't want to cause national issues by doing something local. Thank you again Moz Friends "Have a Positive Day" Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | asbchris1 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
SEO Features of Different Shopping Cart, Need Help on Selecting BEST Cart
I want to move my existing online store to a new Multilanguage Shopping Cart. After reading Andrew Bleakley's review, I have to make a dissisions between the following shopping cart. New to SEO, I will like to have your impressions on there SEO Features and HELP me select the BEST SEO frendly shopping cart. corecommerce: Search Engine Friendly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze205
• Entire store is search engine optimized
• Dynamically generates static html pages with clean URL's (no numbers and special characters inside the URL's) for products, categories and custom content pages (ie about us, etc.)
• Auto Generated Meta Tags for your store to create web site page rankings that matter!
• Built in Canonical URL's
• Header tags usage for your product names
• Auto-build of the Google XML Sitemap
• Meta tags for all products, categories and content pages
• Add your own custom meta tags from your store
• You determine the page titles
• You can add custom content for the category pages
• Use of alt and title tags for images
• Use of bread crumb trails
• Customer SEO page slugs (naming) for products and categories americommerce: Have a look at there page, the list is to long. http://www.americommerce.com/ecommerce-seo.html ------------------------------ asho Web Optimisation - SEO
Fully Search Engine Optimised (SEO) structure
Optimised and updated by industry leading SEO experts
Source code optimised for search engines
Page based META management. Titles, descriptions and keywords
Link popularity program between Ashop Commerce customers
Always up to date with new search engine algorithms
Spider friendly URLs
301 Redirect and 302 Redirect support for any page
Free SEO tips & tools
Auto HTML and CSS page generation
Google, Yahoo and Bing verification meta inclusion
Inbuilt automatic XML site map generation (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
Correct use of robots.txt file
Correct use of NOFOLLOW attribute
Auto set up with correct hierarchy for H tags
Auto creation of alt text on menu text links and images
Tableless design structure Pinnaclecart Cutting-edge search engine optimization
Flat URL generation (www.yoursite.com/product/product-name.htm)
Ability to create your own URL structure (www.yoursite.com/create-your-own-url.html)
Manage all URL's at the category, product and page level.
If you're moving from a different application, you can change the URL's to match the old URL's.
Meta keyword, title and description for each product page
Meta keyword, title and description for each category page
Meta keyword and description for home page and all pages created via the control panel
Upload / create robot.txt file
Ability to generate meta tags based on product descriptions
Ability to modify HTML or CSS via browser
Automatically generated site map
Generates XML site map for Google Base
Valid WC3 template design
Image ALT tags
Design generates very lightweight, 100% HTML page without CSS or PHP coding
Creates "breadcrumb" navigation
Search-engine-friendly architecture
Ability to upload customized HTML pages to assist in How would you rate those carts structure in a SEO point of view? My existing store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ (OsCommerce) need SEO improvement and moving it to a SEO Frendly Shopping Cart is the best thing I can do to increase sales and conversions. Thank you for your support, help and precious time. BigBlaze0 -
Help with canonical tag
hello- i got this recommendation <dl> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page</dd> <dd>from my "report card" and i see also that i have a lot of issues with duplicate content but i really dont have any duplicate content on my site.</dd> <dd>the crawl has apparently marked every post in my blog as duplicate page content.</dd> <dd>and the "use canonical tag" suggestion keeps appearing as a fix to my problems.</dd> <dd>could you please help me with ------How do i create a canonical tag?</dd> <dd>is it just rel=canonical?</dd> <dd>and where do i put it?</dd> <dd>i should put it on every page right?</dd> <dd>or with CSS my webmaster could probably do it very quickly right?</dd> <dd>i get the basic concept behind rel=canonical but i cant say i fully understand it -</dd> <dd>i need some help with regard to how and where this tag should be placed.</dd> <dd>thanks,</dd> <dd>erik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro9
</dd> <dd>.</dd> </dl>0