What are your best moves if you want to get your traffic and rankings back for a specific keyword?
-
Hi all
We are server and website monitoring company for over 13 years and I dare to say our product evolved and mastered over the years. Our marketing not so much. Most of our most convertible traffic came from the keyword "ping test" with our ping test tool page, and for the first 10 years we have been positioned 1-3 in Google.com so it was all good. The last two years we have been steady on positioned 8-9, and since 7-30-13 we are on the second page.
We have launched a blog in 2009 at http://www.websitepulse.com/blog, and post 2-3 times a week, and are working on new website now, and my question is what is your advice in our situation?
Aside from providing fresh content and launching a new website is there anything specific we could do at this stage to improve our position for "ping test"?
Thanks
Lily
-
Doug,
That was splendid add up! Thank you very much for the time and effort you've put to help us out. I will do all the things you suggested.
Thanks
Lily
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your tips. We did that yesterday, now we are waiting for Google to update its index. We are also paying closer attention to our competitors now, checking what kind of content they develop and publish, and I am now researching their link profile.
You guys are great help!
Thanks so much
Lily
-
You've not dropped massively, just enough to knock you onto the second page.As such, I'm not sure you need to be overly worried about a potential penguin/panda penalisation.
I don't think you need to start panicking and disavowing links. This could do your more harm than good.
It's looks like a pretty competitive keyword with lots of high Domain Authority sites ranking on the first page.
The first thing I notice is that you don't have many links to your Ping Test page. Only 11 external links (from 7 domains). For a tool such as this, it doesn't suggest that this is one of the more popular/useful versions. (The #1 result in the SERPS has more than 1400 linking route domains.)
I also notice that all (almost all) of the internal links on your site have the anchor text "PING". You might want to make this a little more relevant (both to visitors and search engines by changing it to "Ping Test" for example. I've also got to say that finding it in your multi-level drop downs was an interesting challenge!
First, I'd take a look at your analytics to find out what the value of organic search visitors to this page are to your business. What's the conversion rate? How many of them end up taking a look at your services and then signing up? This, combined with the average lifetime customer value will give you feel for how much time/effort you're willing to spend on this page/keyword.
While looking at your analytics I'd also take a look at some of the page engagement metrics. What's the bounce rate / time on site look like. Are people actually using the tool or just leaving straight away.
If people are bouncing back to the search results and picking another tool from the SERPS then that's a pretty good signal to google that perhaps the searcher didn't find what they were looking for on your site.
It might be worth looking at the design (I'm sorry, it looks a little dated) and the user experience. My first impression looking at the ping test page is that there's a lot of small text which just adds friction. A nice big friendly input field and an appealing button would be nice!
How many of your visitors come from mobile? Worth looking at your analytics again. If people are trying to use their phone to figure out if their server is up, then I'm sure they'd appreciate a mobile optimised/responsive form to make their life easier.
Can you remove any of the clutter? What about removing the marketing message so that it's only displayed on the results page?
It's important to remember that your site isn't the only horse in the race!
I would do some competitive analysis - look at the Moz Keyword Difficulty report to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the pages you're competing with in the search results.
Take a look at the competitors pages. What are they doing that you're not? Be honest and consider whether your page is really the best page for someone searching for "ping test".
It'll be super-tough, but can you come up with something that'll make your ping-test stand out? Some USP that you can use to promote your tool (and maybe get some more, relevant links.)
Once you've got something worth promoting, it'll make it easier to get links.
You might find it worth your while to look at what other opportunities you may have to attract search traffic.
Hope this helps.
-
More of a minor point on your blog you can also rel=author on your blog to help establish your self as a bit of an authority on your niche (not forgetting the buzz word of rel=canonical too!). This ties in with what Karl said about G= accounts too. Obviously this isn't going to help massively but I'm sure Google trusts this kind of source more.
You can also always take a look at your competitors see why they are ranking better than you and learn a few tips & tricks from them.
Best of luck!
-
Ron,
Our target is not local and we do not consider local SEO for now, although I am very much interested in local search.
Thanks for adding up!
-
Lily,
If your target market is localized you may want to consider doing some local off page SEO. Getting these directories set up has created some dramatic results for our clients. A simple first step is to use the get listed.org tool to get the basic local directories set up.
Ron
-
Hey Karl
Thanks so much for your tips! I will definitely prepare link analysis and emphasize on our Google+ presence.
Anyone else would like to add up?
-
Hi Lily,
I think the first thing you need to do is a full back link analysis because it sounds as though you may have been hit a little with the Penguin/Panda updates. Have a look through your links and be really strict about the ones that you know are quality and get rid/disavow the others. That will give you a good starting block.
The next thing is, what are you going to do with this fresh content that you are producing? You need to find websites where it will add value, it doesn't necessarily have to be about the ping test but it adds to your credibility in the industry. Make sure you have your Google +1 account setup. There has been a lot of talk about it recently with Moz directors getting a bit of negative comments from Matt Cutts but it will definitely help to have a G+1 account up and running.
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
-
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Swapping page keyword?
If we have swopped the keyword (leaflet printing) from this page http://www.fastprint.co.uk/leaflet-flyer-printing/ and moved it to http://www.fastprint.co.uk/ But the inner page is still ranking for the keyword is there a way to tell Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Keyword Rankings: One keyword dropped, dragging other rankings down. Possible or not?
Hey moz fans, So these week I noticed significant drop in rankings... But what caught my attention is that one specific keyword dropped 18 positions, and all the other just 1-3. Print screen: http://prntscr.com/7fb4g4 Do you think it's possible that the drop of that page, that went 18 positions down, brought the whole domain down? Or is it another cause?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kokolo0 -
Optimizing for Two Keywords - H Tag Best Practices?
Hey Everyone, I have to do a local SEO campaign. My landing pages need to target two keywords. I was wondering if you could look over this proposed H tags I've written and give me your thoughts. Houses for Sale and Commercial Real Estate in Houston, TX Houses for Sale in Houston, TX Commercial Real Estate in Houston, TX Am I heading in the right or wrong direction?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles_Murdock0 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
What is the best way to get anchor text cloud in line?
So I am working on a website, and it has been doing seo with keyword links for a a few years. The first branded terms comes in a 7% in 10th in the list on Ahefs. The keyword terms are upwards of 14%. What is the best way to get this back in line? It would take several months to build keyword branded terms to make any difference - but it is doable. I could try link removal, but less than 10% seem to actually get removed -- which won't make a difference. The disavow file doesn't really seem to do anything either. What are your suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Question on Moving Content
I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain). I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a). Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here. Really appreciate your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheBatesMillStore1 -
What is the best metric to evaluate keyword difficulty?
Which is better seomoz's keyword difficulty tool or wordtracker's KEI index? Or, do you have another metric you utilize when evaluating a large list of keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0