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
-
Messy older site
I am taking over a website that doesn't have any canonical tags and spotty redirects. It looks like they have http://, https://, www and non-www pages indexed but GA is just set up for the http://non-www home page. Should all versions of the site be set up in GA and Search Console? I think so but wanted to confirm. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | SpodekandCo0 -
Do Meta Keywords matter?
I am a firm believer in the fundamentals of SEO but is there any data to support its impact positively or negatively towards a sites rank?
Technical SEO | | Brandonp0 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200 -
Whats the best tools for site architecture
Look for tools that can visualise a sites architecture (idealy automated). Also looking for tools that can visualise internal linking sturures
Technical SEO | | Motionlab0