SEO: what part art and what part science?
-
Hi All:
Just writing in the hopes of a reality check. When I compare the first page or two of companies in any field it's usually clear why the top two are on top and why the bottom two are on the bottom, but for everything in between, it often looks pretty gray to me. It's very difficult to find a smoking gun as to why companies rank where they do. While looking at one you could say it ranks because of Yelp reviews and another because of links, but then there are other completely contradictory examples. So I guess I'm asking, is this just the nature of the business? Is a lot of this simply unknowable and you look at what you can do that is most expeditious and will have the most impact, as well as more expensive longer term steps, decide what is practical, move forward and see what happens?
Grateful for anyone's thoughts so I can better understand just how lost i should feel.
Cheers, Wes.
-
Good advice, thank you. Luckily I know some of those other things better than SEO, so that works out well.
Cheers,
Wes
-
We have a very basic mobile site as we have not put our full attention to that yet. It's not responsive, it's just basic. I think it will work for now, but I want something better as the brand definitely suffers. I'll check out dudamobile. I need simple. Thanks very much for the tip.
-Wes
-
Wes,
Do you have a mobile site? Or a responsive design site? Or neither? We are in the works of creating a responsive design site, because that's what google says to do. However, for now, we just have the desktop and mobile ones. if you don't have either, I would recommend dudamobile. It is super easy to build and very cheap. (I mean cut and paste easy. No tech skills required).
- Ruben
-
There are multiple ways to do everything in SEO. Multiple ways to rank highly, multiple ways to lose all rankings. I'd say it's pretty much 0% science, because if any part of it was then it wouldn't be nearly as hard. Even the things that one might say we have down to a science (proper title tag structure, well written meta description, etc.) aren't really because Google can display them how they want to display them - not how you wrote them.
The most important thing I can stress is don't rely solely on SEO. Don't rely solely on any one strategy. That's a guaranteed way to fail. Use SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc. Diversify your strategy and you won't freak when Google changes the algorithm and everything goes upside down.
-
Hi Ruben:
Thanks very much for writing. That's pretty much what I'm doing as well. Hats off to Moz for keeping things simple and making it accessible to folks who aren't as computer literate as a they might like to be. Step by step works. I am doing local and the Moz Local is definitely where are start. Thanks again for the note.
Cheers,
Wes
-
Hi Wes,
It's okay to be lost. I've been on this forum for about 6 months, and I still feel insanely lost...but our rankings have improved. I'm not particularly good at understanding why one page ranks higher than another in the cases you've described, but I can tell you how our rankings improved. Most of it is very "knowable" and while, it may not be the best strategy, it has worked for us.
Not knowing much of anything when I started, I started with on-page optimization. I just filled out the Moz's Page Grader with the keyword and the URL. Then, I followed the steps till everyone was an A. Ironically, when I started, we did have some pages with "C's and F's" that still ranked well, and pages with "A's" that didn't, but that wasn't the norm. All of our rankings have improved from the on-page optimization.
Another easy-fix for us was improving our pagespeed and loading times. I just used pagespeed insights, and followed their instructions on what Google wanted me to do to improve my score. Though, some of that got pretty technical, so I did have to outsource some of it. However, there's a lot of competition for that type of service, so it's not very expensive.
Blogging: I try to write at least one article a week that is useful and/or topical. Like "Why your primary care doctor won't treat you after a car accident" or "Jameis Winston's Current Legal Situation" and I make sure there are not any grammatical errors. Also, I make sure I'm allowed to use whatever pictures I use. I do not know how to make something go viral, but I do know if you consistently write unique, quality articles, google will like it.
Duplicate Content: We had a ton of duplicate content, because most of our pages were almost exactly the same. Just the area of practice or location was changed. That was very time consuming to fix, but it was not difficult to understand or change.
I'm just now trying to get us ranking well in the Local category. Not sure if that applies to you or not, but it will help our company out a lot. What am I doing since I don't know much about Local? I put my citation in the Moz's listing checker and I do what it tells me to do to improve my score...(noticing a theme here?)
More generally, assuming you use this forum to ask a lot of questions, read through the responses, research terms that you don't understand and keep up with the blogs, you'll be surprised how quickly you'll learn.
Best of luck! Happy Friday!
Ruben
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
-
Quick SEO Audit of my site.
Hello, I hope you are doing great. I am working on a website that is related to flea collars for cats and dogs. And I want you to make a quick audit of the site where am I lacking. It could be great if you can help ASAP. You can view my site here :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Request4peace0 -
Audit my SEO Project
Hey professionals, I works on "MyInfo Community" as a SEO worker, anyone can help me to audit my this project? Because i am newbie in this field. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartpoedgr0 -
SEO- Manufacturer v Distributor
In respect to a safety clothing manufacturer manage SEO on behalf of, I've noticed that product distributors own 85% of the page 1 SERPs leaving product manufacturers such as my client largely under represented for the vast majority of search queries such as 'safety boots'. Love to hear your opinion on why this is and how I can combat it? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | resolved0 -
Gallery maintenance and the effect on SEO
Basically we get a lot of users uploading photos as part of their review, but many photos aren't moderated into our pages and therefore are never displayed. Things like selfies rather than photos of the product or just random google images that are completely unrelated to our products or services. Is there any benefit in cleaning up the gallery since some images we don't use are just sat there in admin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
when a page loads, would it be quicker if we had less content in the gallery? With our SEO hat on.
or does it not matter since it's not loading that content (photos) anyway?0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Part of Page with Highest Viewership
Just got my newlsetter from LinkedIn with a link to an interesting article about the part of a webpage that gets the most viewership. Are there any page tools out there that will tell me the pixel measurements on a page as shown in the article?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
How does badly formatted HTML affect SEO?
Our website uses a custom built CMS, but uses a fairly standard WYSIWYG text editor. I've looked at some of the code it produces, and it's not pretty. My gut feeling tells me that this extra bloat is bad for SEO. Am I right in thinking that Google doesn't look kindly upon badly formatted and bloated HTML? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
List of Best SEO forums
Could I please get some input on a list of the best SEO forums out there besides SEOmoz? (Both mainstream and non mainstream)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luia0