Keyword in URL?
-
I have a website that has been live for about 8yrs. I do not have any significant rankings for my main keywords but am now starting SEO on my site. I am contemplating changing the url to contain the main keyword prefixed by my brand name. Any views on the ranking benefits and or CTR benefits.
Example:
Main Volume keyword - 'car leasing'
current url - www.bobleasing.co.uk (made up name)thinking of changing to - www.bobcarleasing.co.uk (made up name)
Any advice would be much appreciated.
John
-
Thanks for the response guys. I think I will stick with the current URL and just work hard on all the right SEO stuff and try and experiment with my title tags and meta descriptions to help CTR.
John
-
I honestly would not change your domain. Domain age - like yours being 8 years old is very advantageous to your SEO efforts. Another thing to consider is that all of the links you currently have going to your site which is probably a lot because the site is 8 years old will be broken. So you could argue that this would actually hurt your rankings rather than help you.
Focus on good meta tags, H1 tags and performing link building and social media marketing for the site. Any effort to improve your site in those ways will be far more beneficial than changing the site name to include a better keyword.
You could also try buying that other domain and forwarding it to your existing domain as that won't hurt you.
-
Absolutely not, for a few reasons.
- Google says they've de-emphasized keywords in the domain, meaning the benefit you'd get would probably be extremely minimal.
- Changing domains can be a complete nightmare. There are several steps in the process where a single screw-up can have a huge negative impact.
- If your current domain has been around for a while, that may be a positive ranking signal. This is a controversial issue, but everyone can at least agree that an established domain is definitely NOT a bad thing.
- When you have to redirect all your old URLs to your new URLs, you will lose some of the value of links to the old site. If the old site has zero inbound links, this isn't an issue, but if it has some high-value inbound links, this could be a big issue.
Plus, you'll have to reprint your business cards and letterhead.
-
As David said, you will get nothing for doing this, unless it were a re-banding exercise and was unavoidable.
Stick with what you have and just write more great content as that is where the big benefits will come from.
Andy
-
I would not change a old domain with links to it for the value of adding a keyword to the domain especially since google is giving less reward to EMD's. Read more about that here
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
-
Unsolved How to add geo keyword without it looking keyword stuffed
I'm updating my mobile home inspection page and I want to add geo keywords with my seed keyword Mobile Home Inspections. How do I add these so that the page do not look like it keyword stuffed? Is there a technique that you use for this? I was thinking something like internal links to the City pages of have but then the Anchor text landing page would be a cite page and not a mobile home inspection page.
On-Page Optimization | | Vallerinspects1 -
Is this keyword stuffing or best practice?
I'm a psychotherapist here in California. Its common practice for people to say "counseling and therapy" on their websites. Although the two are technically different, most people consider them to be synonyms. Do you think google would consider this practice to be keyword stuffing? Also, I am making a page for the forms I need people to fill out before they see me. Do you think it is bad to list links to the forms like this:
On-Page Optimization | | joebordersmft
-counseling / therapy intake form
-informed consent for counseling / therapy
as opposed to
-intake form
-informed consent
.....I think this falls under the idea that readability is important. I'm just really struggling because recently google decided my main keywords are things that have very little to do with therapy/counseling.0 -
Schema.org Article, itemprop keyword, what is it?
I've wanted to know the answer to this for a couple of years now and haven't found anyone ever talking about it. So here goes ... For schema.org markup on articles, http://schema.org/Article there's an itemprop for keywords: http://schema.org/keywords keywords
On-Page Optimization | | SteveRDM
Canonical URL: http://schema.org/keywords
Keywords or tags used to describe this content. Multiple entries in a keywords list are typically delimited by commas. What's that do? Like if I use that markup with an article I publish on my site, will that get those words given that property keyword value? Will that affect SEO value? Do those replace what metatag keywords used to be? Or are they just like what metatag keywords are these days, no real value?0 -
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.
On-Page Optimization | | BabyBeauBelle
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!0 -
Title tag and URL Optimization
Hello guys, Should the URL reflect the structure of the title of a webpage? This is the old title with the Url: 20mm O/D Black Polypropylene LSZH Flexible Conduit 100m Coil /Product/20mm-o-d-black-polypropylene-lszh-conduit-100m-coil/1352 I changed the keyword position and it looks like this: 20mm Flexible Conduit | O/D Black Polypropylene LSZH | 100m I kept the same Url for now, should I change that too? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Optimize URL
Hello, My website have been running over five years. I have just reviewed and seen some URLs had not good. It is http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/who-need-visa-to-vietnam---1.html, containing characters "---1". Should I remove unnecessary characters "---"?. Thanks for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
On-page keyword usage
SEOMOZ gave me all zeros for keyword usage. Why? The site is www.grass2greens.com and the keywords are "Asheville Landscaping Edible." The site includes these words in the title page and throughout the body text. I am not really sure, but maybe one cause for these low keyword usage ratings might be redirects or some meta tag issues, but I am really not sure. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | dcaudio0 -
New Url Structure
Hey Guys We are working on a new site and in order to implement some of the new functions we need to restructure our url's , Will redirect everything correctly but I was looking for advice on the structure we need the word product / category subfolder for speed but would there be any benefit making them shorter ? what would you guys advise ? Category Current http://www.freestylextreme.com/uk/Home/Brands/DC-Shoe-Co-/default.aspx **New ** freestylextreme.com/uk/category/dc-shoe-co Product Current http://www.freestylextreme.com/uk/Home/Brands/DC-Shoe-Co-/Mens-DC-Shoe-Co-T-shirts/DC-Black-Unwind-T-Shirt---.aspx New freestylextreme.com/uk/product/dc-black-unwind-t-shirt
On-Page Optimization | | elbeno0