Help with onpage keyword optimization, site architecture, and how those aspects affect the SERPs.
-
Hey guys,
I've made a post or two before, but my story is that I've been learning SEO for a while now and have only recently (in the last four months) had the opportunity to actually apply what I've been reading about. What I've learned while trying to put these things into practice is that it can be pretty tough sledding, even when it comes to basic elements like keywords and search results.
Anyway, to the good stuff. I've been helping my brother's startup company in my spare time because I want them to do well. They're on the last legs of their series A funding and have no money to put towards SEO, content marketing or social, so I'm helping when and where I can for free.
The company is Maluuba, a siri-like personal assistant app for Android with a ton of different domains. They launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and actually have a lot of traction and a fair amount of publicity, so I'm not exactly working with scraps, but I don't work with them in their offices and only really communicate with my brother, who is having a really hard time getting buy-in for some of the stuff I want them to do.
Their initial website was pretty terrible, so my brother got the okay to redesign the site and together, we worked with a designer to implement the site I linked to. Because they have so many domains (search, social, organization) I thought creating specific pages along with a one homepage would be a good way to optimize for different things and funnel a wider audience to convert to the one macro goal of the site: getting people to download the app.
The results haven't been exactly what I expected and I fear I didn't really implement what I still think is a good plan correctly. I've only tried to optimize the pages for a few keywords to start. The main keyword for the homepage and indeed the brand is 'personal assistant app' which is a fairly competitive keyword that I know have them ranking second for on Google CA. I used 'siri-alternative' as a secondary keyword, since that's how they label themselves in the Play Store. For the three other main (pages search, social, organization) I used 'personal assistant app' as a secondary keyword and tried to optimize each page for 'search app', 'social app' and 'organizer app', respectively.
While I'm really quite proud that I managed to get a page ranking in the top three for our main keyword, I'm just as disappointed that it's the search page and not the homepage, mainly because I have no idea why it's happening.
So, all of that to ask a few questions:
Did I make a mistake by trying to add funnels to the site? Or did I just go about optimizing the pages incorrectly?
Why does the search page rank really, really well for 'personal assistant app' while the other pages - including the one I intended to rank the highest for that term - lag behind? I'd guess that Google is indexing this page alone as the main representative of 'personal assistant app', but that wasn't my intention. I'm also not using any rel=canonical tags, if that matters.
Also, this page has been flipping around in the 1-3 range in the SERPs for about a month, but I still haven't noticed any traffic from 'personal assistant app'.
Alright, this is getting way to long. I'd very much appreciate any and all insights as to what I'm doing wrong or what I'm missing. It could be really obvious and thus make this post silly, but I really have read and tried to learn a lot. I just can't see what's going on here because I don't have any experience to compare it to.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Cheers,
JD
-
Hi JD,
First things first, the site is dancing around in the SERPs so you may be ranking well and it is trying to gain traction, or you may not be ranking well at all and you are getting inflated spikes.
Secondly use the Google Adwords keyword tool to search the exact search traffic for the terms you are optimising and let me know what they are. Be sure not to tick "broad" or "phrase" as these will give far larger figures, just make sure only "exact" is ticked. You could optimise as well as you like, but if there is no traffic for the search terms, then that is why you aren't getting any traffic.
When you are searching for your rankings, use a different browser, maybe IE and ensure you aren't signed in to any Google account and your browsing history is cleared so you aren't getting any bias towards your own website.
Get back to me on the above and we can go from there.
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
-
Homepage optimized for main keyword - adding the same keyword to category
Hello, We have a listing / classified advertisement website. The homepage is optimized for the main keyword lets say Prague clubs. The homepage shows around 50 latest listings. Now the homepage is not ranking well for the keyword. (By not well i mean in 3 months we have no ranking in the target SERP) Im thinking the issue might be that the keyword "Prague clubs" is not in any of the URL or category names. What do you think if i name one of the categories also to lets say "best prague clubs". This way i will have around 50-80 urls having the target keyword in them. (advertisements + the category itself) Will this help or actually dilute the keyword? What you think?
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!
Hi Mozers. Since Google switched to the https version, our company website (http://we.register.it) indexing switched to the https version (https://www.register.it). After that the ranking on Google dropped for almost every keyword. The site is very old and got a great authority and PR 7. It ranked for same keywords for very long time On each page from years there is the correct meta rel canonical. No spam, and WMT is ok. Could you please help? The internal links are all in http, and in https. If you are https are in https (they are all relatives) No changes have been made and the subdomain is in that way from 8 years: the main url has always been http://we.register.it Google started this indexing switch around the 15 October
Technical SEO | | luca_cash0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Site Categorization?
I know getting site categories to appear under the site are dependent on a lot of factors including site mapping. We have a site that does the categorization thing when you type in the sites url name however more people search for the name of the talent to find the site and the short url on the site is just his name, but shorter. However I was just wondering is their a way to optimize the site so that way we could get categorization to show up under the sites URL when they search for the talents full name I ask because the amount of people looking for the talents full name rather than the short name is a lot larger and I would like to see if we can take advantage of the real estate, but I honestly don't think there is a way, however I figured I would open it up to discussion to see if anyone has any ideas. Example: Site name is ABCD you type this into Google and you get ABCD.com about blog how to contact However the actual person whose site it is is ABCDEF and when you type that in you just get: ABCD.com without any of the categories appearing below the url. And that is what I'm asking about. Thanks as I can't seem to find a lot of information on this. However if there is another spot on the site talking about this please let me know I may just not be searching with the right terms.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TargetClick0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710 -
Help with SEO
Hello, I am brand new to SEO and I'm learning on the go everyday. I am having issues with Google and getting any sort of ranking or analysis or even just traffic reports. I understand the site has never really been optimized so it might really not have any reports. So basically my real question is what helpful tricks or hints do you guys have that I can implement? Anything and everything helps. So far I have run the crawl diagnostics and I'm working on fixing the errors. Thanks fr your help.
Technical SEO | | Future130