Keyword Variants - Low conversion rates - Is a site redesign required?
-
Hi Guys,
I'm Chris & i'm a noob to SEO.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and for offering your support! It is greatly appreciated!
I work for a small family run company called custom designed cables and we manufacture bespoke cable and bespoke retractable cables.
I posted a couple of days ago about how to move forward with our site.
Our website has been targeting specific keywords and their variants across the relevant pages to somewhat reasonable effect.
Since signing up to SEOMOZ, i have been trying to narrow down the keywords that we target per page and also tried to improve the content on the pages with the help of the on page optimisation tool.
I have a few questions that i would like somebody to help me with please if it isn't to much trouble.
Firstly, for our keywords, there are a lot of variants. For example, we braid cables.
Here are some of the variants of this keyword: cable braid, cable braiding, cable screen, cable screening, cable shielding etc etc.
The way i have gone in the past has been to try and target all of those keywords on the relevant page. Now, writing content has been the issue as whilst trying to write good informative information, squeezing in all of the keywords has been a problem and more than likely affected the readability of the page.
From what i have learnt since i signed up, this is not a good practice and therefore i have tried to narrow it down somewhat yet i don't really want to lose potential customers finding us by only targeting one or two of the keywords. This is a similar situation for most of our keywords on the majority of our pages.
What is the best way to approach this? If i was to write a page per keyword, i don't believe that it would look very good as we could end up with over 100 pages with say 5 or 6 of them talking about the same subject which then leads onto the problem of writing good content. It would be difficult to write good content for pretty much the same thing across such a wide number of pages. If this is the solution though then i would more than happily tackle it.
What would be the best way to move forward?
The next issue that I have is that since i have been modifying the pages with the help of SEOMOZ, the number of enquries that we have received have fell off the charts.
We used to average around 50 enquiries a month from the website and since i have modified the site, i'd say we've had probably 20 since the end of February.
The funny thing is though, we have also averaged around 200 hits more per month since the changes. So the hits have increased yet the enquiries have died.
I was wondering if anybody was willing to take a look at our site: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk to give me some general feedback as to why this may be happening and what your overall opinions of the site may be with regards to the layout, look and general feel etc because i am beginning to wonder whether or not the design is what could be causing us to convert so little of our new found visitors.
If anyone could also provide me with actionable feedback with regards to our keyword targeting for our pages that would also really really help!
I am currently considering re-designing the site in it's entirety and i am interested in your opinions on whether or not this would be a good way to go.
Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated guys!
Thanks again!
Chris (Just another website/seo noob desperately attempting to avoid the sack)
-
Chris- Hoping I can help you avoid the sack!!!
I will divide my feedback into four areas:
- Website layout
- CMS
- Analytics
- Creating unique content focused on your keywords
Website layout is average....the fact that you have used so much of your home page real estate for navigation doesnt make sense. you have multiple options for home, about us, custom cable and links.....the red is overhwleming....the choices are overwhelming. Way too busy.....
Take a step back and think about why is someone coming to the page? what are the top three things they might want to accomplish? then get rid of everything else and focus on those three things....you cna remove all of your other headings and subheadings that are not call to action items, down to the footer or condensed into one heading.....
- If your goal is to get them to order cable now then there should be a box "Order cable now" or "check out our prices now"...
- If your goal is to get their email information to follow up market to them, then there should be a call to action box that says"save money with our cable now" or "Sign up for special weekly deals" and then you would have an email box they could fill in and submit.
- If your goal is to get them to see why your cable is unique....then post that information with a call to action.
CMS. Im not sure what CMS you are using, but hopefully you are being indexed correctly and the sitemap is being generated that is solid and provides guidance to the search engines. We recommend wordpress because we have seen that when we convert the same exact content from another site to wordpress, we not only upgrade the user experience but it gets better SEO value instantly because of the architecture and ease of use with plugins. Whatever you are using, make sure you have a solid foundation.
Analytics. You need to install google analytics on your pages so you can track the activity on your site. You need to find out where people are going on the site, how long they are spending on each page and where they are abansdoining. Just install the code on every page in the footer and then set up some basic reporting to get you vital information related to what you are talking about above. You dont know what you dont know....get the data and you then will have some clarity on what is happening.
Creating unique content with keywords. Let me offer you a few suggestions....
- Pick one primary or money keyword on each page. And then pick 2-3 sub keywords that are important and relevant. Just focus on those....don't pick 10 keywords a page....
- When writing content make sure you include the main keyword in the title, in the first sentence and the last sentence.
- Make sure you mention the other sub keywords at least 2-3 times in the main article/content.
- Make sure you use bold, italics and underlines at least once in the content.
Don't stuff the keywords in the content......use the keywords only if it makes sense in the context of what you are writing about.....
Lastly, it sounds like you might not be maximizing your seo value for alt tags and meta tags.....make sure your meta descriptions and picture alt tags are seo optimized with your keywords for that page. Again, with wordpress this is a simple process of filling in the required fields for one of the wordpress plugins.
Good luck. Hope this helps. Please show me the three thumbs up!
Mark
-
I wouldn't 'cut them out' per say, but put them lower on the priority list. Make sure to use the most searched keyword furthest to the left in the title tag.
As far as everything else goes - try setting up some goals in Google Analytics to see which keywords are converting into sales. If you find one converts better than the other - swap it out for the furthest to the left in the title tag. Doesn't matter how much traffic it brings you if it doesn't convert.
As with most people, I can see that you're pretty concerned with your on-site optimization. On-site is a very small percentage of the reason why your website will rank. Links from external websites do most of the work.
-
Hi Todd,
With regards to SEOMOZ's on page optimisation tools.
Would you suggest that i only include the keywords in the body just the one time or would you suggest that i should go with the minimum of 4 mentions?
Thanks Todd!
Chris.
-
Hi Todd,
Thank you for the response!
So following on from what you have suggested, would i be better off selecting the three keywords with highest traffic and optimising to them specific keywords?
Thus cutting out quite a lot of the variants?
Would you suggest that i run with that then for the time being and see how we rank/how many conversions we get whilst leaving the site design the same?
I've just loaded up the link, i will read it now!
Thanks again Todd!!
Chris.
-
Hey Christopher,
You're right in not writing content for all of those keyword variants. Check out this post from Google:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Key takeaway from that post is this:
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Some may disagree, but the only form of on-site SEO optimization I do is in the title tag, H1 tag and 1 time in the copy. I use a different keyword in the title tag, H1 and in copy as well. So for you:
Title: cable braid
H1: cable braiding
in copy: cable braids
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
-
Best tool to find Related keywords with a Keyword provided.
Hi, Best tool to find Related keywords with a Keyword provided. Basically i want to give a keyword and find all related keywords we can use to write articles. Also any way we can find what keyword a page is getting traffic based on? Thanks
Technical SEO | | skandlikp90 -
Is a micro site the way to go?
Hello, a client has asked us today to quote for how much it would cost them to get a micro site built. A Google employee has told them that because their current URL doesn't include .co.uk or.com it is simply: brandname.word that it will be harder for them to get their website to rank. My understanding is that micro sites aren't a good solution for any problem as Google doesn't like them. Would it be better for them to buy a .co.uk (they are a UK company) url and then redirect the url to their current website or is there a better solution? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | mblsolutions0 -
Https Cached Site
Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca
Technical SEO | | TheBatesMillStore0 -
Keyword Targeting with Dynamic Pages
We have a large e-commerce website made with .net. so all of our category and item pages are made dynamic. Most things like title, some of the words and a few other things are done with scripts. I want to be able to target certain words and have more customized words on certain pages. Has anyone dealt with this? I know .net is pretty common so I can't be a unique case.
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Is 301 redirecting all old URLS after a new site redesign to the root domain bad for SEO?
After a new site redesign ...would it hinder our rankings if we 301 redirected all old URLS that are returning 404 error codes to the root domain (home page) ? Would this be a good temporary solution until we are able to redirect the pages to the appropriate corresponding page? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Replacing a site map
We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure. Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google. How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console. Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.
Technical SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
Keyword rich domains
Hi, Our site is beingthere.com.au We are in the business of video conferencing in Australia. I was wondering if there would be any benefit of purchasing keyword rich domains such as www.videoconferencing.net.au www.video streaming.net.au What would be the benefit(s)? And How would I go about using these domains to maximise SEO benefit? Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | dantmurphy0 -
How do I create an RSS feed for my site?
I do NOT have a cms website. just php/html. How do I create a feed so I can register it with feedburner? Not for my blog just the website its self.
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110