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
-
Do we still have this Page Rank / Link juice / Link equity? So this dilution concept?
Hi all, As per the traditional or standard SEO rules, we have this link juice and dilution concept. Many websites have changed their linking structure with this with the beleif "the more number of pages, the PR will get diluted". Then many websites avoided more number of pages from homepage to avoid link juice dilution. Even we followed same. But I just wonder it's still the same way Google handles websites and rankings as per the links. And many websites even avoid more number of 2nd tier/hierarchy pages to avoid link dilution. I have gone through our competitors where they been employing lot of top level pages like 2nd tier/hierarchy pages but still doing good at rankings. Please share your views and suggestions on this. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
A/B Testing.. Are you doing? how is it been? What do you think would be the best path for who is starting now?
Hey Mozers, One of my 2014 resolutions is to start doing A/B Testing, so far I have been following "best practices" and "common sense" when comes to website design, but I would like to go above and beyond. I was hoping a could get a few tips some of you that are already doing A/B testing. How is it been? Do you see a great ROI? What do you think would be best path for who is starting now? Any book or links you would recommend? Thanks
Web Design | | Felip30 -
Link juice passing from a .org.uk link to a .org/uk websites
Hi all, A client I am working on had a CMS built in recently which has resulted in all their canonicals tags being taken off the website, and as such the same page with both a .org/uk and .org.uk/uk domain have appeared in the search results and I am wondering what your guys take is on the best cause of action. For further background: Historically they have always used .org.uk/uk (not sure why) for their UK website and used .org/xxx for other countries (they also have a .org splashpage FYI). Having seen the .org/uk pages, and knowing they have to choose one to avoid duplication, they would like to move their uk website to the .org/uk domain to fit in with the rest of the divisions. However due to the historical use of .org.uk/uk their backlink profile contains links to both the .org.uk and .org domains. My question then: would a canonical tag on all the .org.uk/uk pages pointing to the .org/uk pages be strong enough to pass on link juice to the .org/uk pages (from all links pointing to .org.uk) or would a 301 redirect be required in this instance, or indeed would it be best to stay with the .org.uk/uk domain? Thanks, Diana
Web Design | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
Http://www.domain.com/services/city or http://www.domain.com/city
Hi, I have a website created on a WordPress Platform. My site is in the "Service" industry and we perform the same service for many different "cities." My question pertains to the Navigation Bar and SEO. Is it better to have a "Service" tab on the navigation bar - that has sub navigation that lists all the cities on a drop down menu. When this happens the URL string looks like http://www.domain.com/service/city The other choice would be to create individual TABS on the NAV bar, by doing this the URL string would look - http://www.domain.com/city . I could be wrong, but I am assuming the http://www.domain.com/city is better than http://www.domain.com/services/city for SEO purposes, ....if I am correct is there a way to make SUB Menu URLS appear as http://www.domain.com/city ? Any input as always would be appreciated best regards, Jimmy
Web Design | | jimmy02251 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Comparing the site structure/design of my live site to my new design
Hi SEOmoz team, for the last few months I've been working on a new design for my website, the old, live design can be viewed at http://www.concerthotels.com - it is primarily focused on helping users find hotels close to concert venues throughout North America. The old structure was built in such a way that each concert venue had a number of different pages associated with it (all connected via tabs) - a page with information about the venue, a page with nearby hotels to the venue, a page of upcoming events, a page of venue reviews. An example of these pages can be seen at: http://www.concerthotels.com/venue/madison-square-garden/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-events/madison-square-garden-events/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-reviews/madison-square-garden-reviews/304484 The /venue-hotels/ pages are the most important pages on my website - and there is one of these pages for each concert venue - they are the landing pages for about 90% of the traffic on the website. I decided that having four pages for each venue was probably a poor design, since many of the pages ended up having little or no useful, unique content. So my new design attempts to bring a lot of the venue information together into fewer pages. My new website redesign is temporarily situated at: (not currently launched to the public) http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend The equivalent pages for Madison Square Garden are now: http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue/madison-square-garden/304484 (the page above contains venue information, events and reviews) and http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 I would really appreciate any feedback from you guys, based on what you think of the new site design compared to the old design from an SEO point of view. Of course, any feedback on site speed, easy of use etc compared to the old design would also be greatly appreciated. 🙂 My main fear is that when I launch the new design (the new URLs will be identical to the old ones), Google will take a dislike to it - I currently receive a large percentage of my traffic through Google organic search, so I don't want to launch a design that might damage that traffic. My gut instinct tells me that Google should prefer the new design - vastly reduced number of pages, each page now contains more unique content, and it's very much designed for users, so I'm hoping bounce rate, conversion etc will improve too. But my gut has been wrong in the past! 🙂 But I'd love to hear your thoughts, and thanks in advance for any feedback, Cheers Mike
Web Design | | mjk260 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
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