Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.
-
Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated! -
Thanks all for the answers, we will create new content and start from there, probably create an internal blog for more content creation...
-
I would leave the existing ones alone and create new page(s) targeting baptism and link to them prominently from the homepage and globally on the site, submit the URLs in WMT and add them to your sitemap.xml file for quicker indexing.
-
"So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?"
No, you'll run the risk of cannibalizing your christening rankings and moreover may confuse your customers. Remember, develop for your customers NOT for the search engines.
For example, I work for a law firm and our homepage ranks for all sorts of criminal crimes (DUI, Drugs, etc.) So if I see an area where I want to improve my rank, say for "criminal defense attorney" - I'll write new content for a blog post or page around that set of KWs instead of trying to get the homepage to rank for that KW among all the others.
-
Thanks nsauser for the response. So it sounds like the best strategy is to add to the homepage but not mess with any existing content and add the baptism keywords to any new content and or products.
The problem is we have a fairly static inventory and add new products pretty infrequently, so our best bet immediately would be content creation using the baptism keywords and any new products that are added to start hitting them with the baptism keywords?
So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?
-
Generally I shoot for 1 - 3 keywords per page and definitely only one theme per page. I know that homepages tend to rank for a lot of different KWs but maybe it's possible that you could add a Baptism related kw to your title (and in the content) without removing anything then that might be worth a try.
Otherwise I would create new pages and content to target the baptism related KWs. If you can link your new content from the homepage it will give it a boost to start out with. Internal linking is a great way to get content boosted in the SERPs especially if you have a good Domain Authority. Also, track these changes, the easiest way is to note them in Google Analytics. You want to be able to look back in 2 weeks or a month and see if your changes have helped or hurt.
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
-
Keyword position
I fixed all the crawl issues but still my website is in second page.
On-Page Optimization | | NueveSolution0 -
To change or not to change site URL structure?
I am learning my way around SEO, having always used professionals for it in the past on previous businesses i have decided to do it myself and learn more about it. Now the dilemma i am up against is i recently changed some of my permalinks on quite a few main pages throughout the site. The site launched in April this year so we're quite new. The problem is since my last change i have not seen any increase...a decrease which in fact hasn't recovered at all. Having now analysed them in more depth and read up more on the whole subject of SEO, (which is endless) i have put together a complete new strategy; with this increased understanding of what i am doing (but by no means conclusive) i want to complete a full overhaul on all SEO (via Wordpress which i use along with YOAST SEO tools), ensuring i have all my keywords, permalinks and descriptions spot on throughout every page, post and picture. I spent a lot of time mapping these out, ensuring there is no Focus keyword duplication, and that the site is relatively flat in terms of its layout. What i am unsure about now is whether changing my permalinks again is a bad thing to do?
On-Page Optimization | | MrCostello
Could it permanently damage my rep going forward?
Should i just focus on my content and keywords/descriptions? I am at a loss as i don't want to do irreparable damage to our reputation. The site is still reasonable easy to manage so changing now is the best time to do it, but if changing the URLs is a waste of time then i may just forget that and just work on the keywords, descriptions and content. Advice is 'oh so welcome' 🙂0 -
Post url not matching with post title ( wordpress)
I have this site called searchoflife.com on which I have noticed the post urls are not matching with the post title. For Example:Post Title - A Dialogue With NaturePost URL - http://searchoflife.com/dialogue-nature-2013-09-12 Words like 'A' and 'with' are not present in the post URL. This has been the trend since a few days. After investigating I found out that it was due to my plugin SEO ultimate which is actually creating post slugs automatically for the post urls. So my question is whether it is advisable to use post slugs instead of the full post url. Does it affect the SERPS for my site?
On-Page Optimization | | toxicpls0 -
Hiding Legitimate Content From Google Without Penalty?
Hi Around the time of the April/May 2012 penguin update we lost around 40% of traffic and ever since traffic has slowly been reduced to around 50% of what is was from last year from approx 1000 hits a day to under 500. I'm not convinced totally that penguin is to blame as link building has not been overdone especially when other companies who rank first page for "personalised gifts" have 100's of anchor links pointing back to there sites with this term as the link. I think our site may be hit due to accidental keyword stuffing! Basically when an order is placed the product page is updated with the last message to be engraved on the item, so for example if someone buys 10 wine glasses all personalised with "happy birthday mum, happy birthday dad, happy birthday son etc or if customers choose similar engraving then we have lots of combinations of the same words repeated. This information has increased the number of conversions as it gives customers ideas as what to engrave and I don't really want to remove it from the page. Could anyone advise me on what i need to do, is there a way of telling google to ignore this text, a way of hiding without being penalised? Any ideas greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | SmithyWhiffy0 -
Does a phone number in the title tag hurt your rankings in SERP?
Hi Mozzers, One of my client is a carpet cleaner and I was wondering if adding a phone number into the title tags would hurt our rankings . I am asking because the client has mentioned it and that we do have some space to add a phone number into the tag. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Changing Title Tags once Indexed and positioned?
Hello, Would it be wise to change title tags on a page that is optimized and ranked already in google? These are sports pages, and the teams we are targeting are now in the playoffs so we wanted to insert that into our Title? Thanks!!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Proper way to change keywords without losing ranking
Hello Everyone, The website I am working with offers service in two locations, lets say Service in City A and Service in City B. Those two cities, which are close by, are the main source of clients, so the owner asked me to concentrate on these terms. I did a decent job for a newbie and now we are on the first page of google closer to the top for these 2 terms. The problem that I am facing right now is that a) it hard to get that extra bit from onsite optimization when you optimizing for 2 different cities b) Customers may get confused which cities we focus on A or B? We have locations in both. c) Owner wants to expand services to additional cities. So I looked at how our competitor handling these time of problem and most of them have a page with titles like "Cities we serve" with links to the individual locations that are optimized for the specific city. That page usually includes paragraph or two about local history and then re-span description of their services. Is it a good practice to structure one's website like that if you are trying to target multiple locations? Should I re-target my home page to something less geographically specific and create separate pages for Cities A , B and the new locations? Would I lose ranking for terms service in city A & service in city B because of that Or should I leave my home page optimized for Cities A & B and just add new locations as separate pages? Thanks in advance for you insights.
On-Page Optimization | | SirMax0 -
Question about URLs
Hello! I have a client that wants to upload an URL like this: www.example.com/keyword/page-name.html The main problem is that www.example.com/keyword/ doesn't exist and gives a 404 error so I'd prefer not doing that...... What do you think about this? And if the client wants to go ahead, is there any solution? A 301 to the final page would help? Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | Juandbbam0