Trying to fill in the missing gaps
-
The missing gaps are optimisation opportunities I have missed with my site.
I have managed to optimise the site a great deal from what it was, with a new site design and better architecture and focusing on all the on page SEO.
The only problem being it doesn't seem to be an easy market to create links through or find interesting places to guest post or interact on blogs.The site is https://perco.co.uk
I would be grateful if anyone could give me an overview on the site and their thoughts?
Cheers
-
Hey Marcus,
I've implemented a few of the things you suggested, yet to get a blog up and running but hopefully it's in the process.
Seeing as you gave me such a thorough reply I was wondering if you could help me with another site. www.data-contracts.co.uk
I am struggling to rank for concrete repair on google.co.uk. I've tested a few things but cannot get anything to budge in the SERP.
Any suggestions?
Cheers
-
Cheers Marcus!
-
The problem with no branding in SERP listings is that they don't look great and getting listed is only half the battle, you have to get clicked on as well. If you do the following search you can see all indexed pages and get an idea how they are displayed.
site:perco.co.uk
As it goes, some of your links, the very first one I clicked on 404'd so you have other problems to resolve as well.
Re the HTTPS, if you run your site on https://perco.co.uk that's what will be displayed but there is really no reason to run anything other than secure pages (checkout / payment processing) over HTTPS so really, I would lose that on all but the required pages. One for your tech people.
The blog, best is widely agreed to be on the site so a main navigation and /blog so http://www.perco.co.uk/blog is ideal.
Your blog content is likely going to be much more shareable and make for better link targets so always, always have it on site unless you have a cast iron reason not to.
Plenty there to keep you busy eh!
Marcus
-
Marcus,
Excellent response, thank you!I will explain some of my thinking. The bland page names were so that all the focus was on the keyword and not spread out onto branding. I felt the branding was doing well on its own as the majority of customers coming to the site are through the brand name. I will take your advice on this subject now.
Thanks for spending the time creating examples for SERP listings, I obviously haven't spent enough of my own time on them!I could do with more help regarding the HTTPS & WWW. The HTTPS I believe is because there is a SSL certificate on our website for each page for the request a call back. I would gladly see our URLs display as WWW on the SERP but I don't know how to rectify this, do you?
And why not create a blog? I feel enlightened, a quick thought, how would you implement the blog, as a seperate navigation heading and page? Or a seperate site such as blogspot?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Yes I am in Walsall, but I don't the place very well unfortunately.
-
Hey Shaun
Right, I have had a quick look and some initial feedback.
1. You have just gone with very bland page titles for the main keyword so for instance, the homepage title is:
Trenchless Technology
You provide that service, but that is not who the site or business is, where is the branding? How about changing it to something like:
Perco - Leaders in Trenchless Technology Solutions
2. You have a meta keywords tag, I would lose that for starters
3. You have a very short meta description. Again, a missed opportunity to explain who you are and improve upon that serp listing. In fact, a search for Trenchless Technology returns you in 5th place but your SERP listing is pretty weak.
Trenchless Technology https://perco.co.uk/ Pipeline contractor, working predominantly in the water and sewerage sector.
Uses hydraulic (non-percussive) and pneumatic pipe bursting techniques, as well ...It is not using your meta description (as it is so short likely so just getting those absolute basics right is a good starting place and having it look something more like.
Perco - Leaders in Trenchless Technology Solutions
www.perco.co.uk
We are the UK's market leader in trenchless technology (no dig technology) operating in the utilities, construction, rail network and facilities management sectors.4. HTTPS domain
Is there any reason for https? I prefer a standard www. and it certainly looks better in any displayed results. If you notice I changed this in the above example.
5. There are no Blogs or places talking about this? Great, what a killer opportunity, when does your blog launch? Seriously though, there seems to be hundreds of related keywords and a simple google keyword search for trenchless technology returns a bunch of
6. Page Titles & Branding
There is no branding across the rest of the page titles? The few meta descriptions I looked at seemed better but page titles like this are doing you no favours
Expandit Manufacturing
Directional Drilling
Get your brand on those page titles and start letting people know who you are so...
Expandit Manufacturing | Perco.co.uk
Directional Drilling | Perco.co.uk
Exactly what you use as branding is your call but something, anything is better than these single keyword page titles.
Really, there is plenty to do here on the site before you start worrying about building links but I would imagine this is a fairly complicated service so with a bit more scope applied finding blogs to get links from should be easy enough. But, it would be a damn site easier if you started a blog and used that to network and spark things off.
That should give you some food for thought eh!
By the way, are you in Walsall? Just down the road from me in Birmingham, I used to live by the Arboretum. Small world!
Hope it helps!
Marcus
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
-
Is Google Filling in Search Forms?
Hi Mozers, Is it true that Google will fill in search forms and thus generate potentially thousands of pages by itself? We have a spike in number of pages indexed and it corresponds with the time we added an advanced search form to the site... Thanks for the advice! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags
Hi, Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is. The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible. Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Strange internal links and trying to improve PR ? - Please advise
Hi All, I've been looking at the internal links on my eCommerce site to try and improve PR and get it as efficient as possible so link juice isnt getting wasted etc and I've come across some odd ones I would like some advice on My website currently has between 125-146 links on every page (Sitemap approx 3500 pages). From what I read ,the ideal number of links is under 100 but can someone confirm is this is still the case ?..Is it a case of less is more , in terms of improving a page PR etc ? in terms of link juice strength etc so it's not getting diluted to unnecessary pages. One of my links is a bad url ( my domain + phone number for reason) which currently goes to a 404 page ?. - Is this okay or do we need to track down the link and remove it. I don't want link juice getting wasted as it's on every page. Another one of my links is my domain.name/# and another one with some characters after the # which both to the home page. Example www.domain.co.uk/# and www.domain.co.uk#abcde both go to homepage. Is this okay or am I potentially getting duplicate content as If I put these urls in , they go to my home page. I have a link on every page which opens up outlook (email) on the contact us. Should this really be changed to a button with a contact us form opening up instead ? I currently have 9 links on the bottom on every page i.e About it , delivery , hire terms,.contact us , trade accounts , privacy, sitemap. When I check , these pages seem to be my strongest pages in terms of PR. Is that because they are on every page?.. Should I look to reduce these links as they are accessible from the navigation menu apart from privacy and sitemap. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty
So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing. The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty. I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue. I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable. I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either. I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day. He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?). I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none. I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing2 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why google stopped crawling.. any help is appreciated
This is going to be kind of long, simply because there is a background to the domain name that is not typical to anybody in the world really and I'm not sure if its possible that it was penalized or ranked lower because of that or not. Because of that I'm going to include it with the hopes that giving the full picture some nice soul in the world who has more knowledge in this than me see's something or knows something and can point me in the right direction. Our site has been around for a few years, at one point the domain was seized by homeland security ICE, and then they had to give it back in Dec. which sparked a lot of the SOPA PIPA stuff and we became the poster child so to speak. The site had previously been up since 2008, but due to that whole mess the site was down for 13 months on the dreaded seized server with a scary warning graphic and site title which caused quite obviously a bunch of 404 errors and who knows what else damage to anything we'd had before that as far as page rank and incoming links. we had a lot of incoming links from high quality sites. We were advised upon getting the domain back to pretty much scrap all the old content that was on the site prior and just start fresh.. which we did. Googlebot started crawling slowly, but then as we started getting back into the swing of things people started linking to us,some with high page rank, we were getting indexed quite frequently and ranking high on search results in our niche.. Then something happened on March 4th, we had arguably our best day with google traffic, we'd been linked back by places like Huff Post etc for content in our niche.. and the next day literally it was a freefall. Darn near nothing. I've attached a screen shot from webmaster tools so you can see how drastic it was. I went crazy, trying to figure out what was wrong, searching obsessively through webmaster tools looking for any indication of a problem, searched the site on google site:dajaz1.com and what comes up is page 2 page 3 page 45 page 46. It's also taken to indexing our category and tag pages and even our search pages. I've now set those all to noindex follow but when I look at where the googlebots are at on the site, they're on the categories, pages, author pages, and tags. Some of our links are still getting indexed, but doing a search just of our site name and we're ranking below many of the media sites that have written about our legal issues, when a month ago we were at least top result for our own name. I've racked my brain trying to figure out the issue. I've disabled plugins, I'm on fetch as google bot all the time making sure our stuff is at least coming out as 200 (we had 2 days where we were getting 403 errors due to a super-cache issue, but once fixed googlebot returned like it never left) I've literally watched 1000 videos, read 100 forums, added in SEO plugins, tried to optimize the site to the point I'm worried I'm over doing it.. and still they've barely begun to crawl. As you can see there is some activity in the last 2-3 days, but even submitting a new site map once I changed the theme out of desperation it's only indexed 16. I've looked for errors all through webmaster tools and I can't find anything to tell me why that happened, how to fix it, and how to get googlebot to like us again. I'm pulling my hair out here. The links we have incoming are high quality links like huffington post , spin, complex, etc. Those haven't slowed down at all, we do outgoing links to sites we trust and are high quality as well. I've got interns working on how they're writing titles and such, I've gone through and attempted to fix duplicate pages and titles.. I've been going through and re-writing meta description tags What am I missing? I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the issue is. Eternally grateful for any help provided. jnzb6.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malady0 -
Migrating multiple sites and trying to save link juice
I have an interesting problem SEOmozers and wanted to see if I could get some good ideas as to what I should to for the greatest benefit. I have an ecommerce website that sells tire sensors. We just converted the old site to a new platform and payment processor, so the site has changed completely from the original, just offering virtually the same products as before. You can find it at www.tire-sensors.com We're ranked #1 for the keyword "tire sensors" in Google. We sell sensors for ford, honda, toyota, etc -- and tire-sensors.com has all of those listed. Before I came along, the company I'm working for also had individual "mini ecommerce" sites created with only 1 brand of sensors and the URL to match that maker. Example : www.fordtiresensors.com is our site, only sells the Ford parts from our main site, and ranks #1 in Google for "ford tire sensors" I don't have analytics on these old sites but Google Keyword Tool is saying "ford tire sensors" gets 880 local searches a month, and other brand-specific tire sensors are receiving traffic as well. We have many other sites that are doing the same thing. www.suzukitiresensors.com (ranked #2 for "suzuki tire sensors") Only sells our Suzuki collection from the main site's inventory etc We need to get rid of the old sites because we want to shut down the payment gateway and various other things those sites are using, and move to one consolidated system (aka www.tire-sensors.com) Would simply making each maker-specific URL (ie. fordtiresensors.com) 301 redirect to our main site (www.tire-sensors.com) give us to most benefit, rankings, traffic etc? Or would that be detrimental to what we're trying to do -- capturing the tire sensors market for all car manufacturers? Suggestions? Thanks a lot in advance! Jordan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanGodbey0