Often as an SEO consultant, I work with companies to optimize their websites for the content that is already existing on their site. Unfortunately, this concept of upgrading existing content with selected keyword phrases seems ambiguous and undervalued by many companies.
Yes, I said ambiguous. SEO is often viewed by business owners as an electronic mystery that must be solved. This belief runs counter to most business challenges since most marketing initiatives are governed as much by the amount of money budgeted as well as time devoted to a particular initiative. Most business owners don’t really see the clear picture of why organic search optimization is so important. It becomes clear after spending time going over how people use the internet to find what they need but, that again is an education process.
As I was saying, many business owners and especially those with small websites tend to look at SEO as a set it and forget it tactic. We SEOs know that the best way to keep your website performing well in the organic SERP is to continue to add content which adds to the freshness of the website.
This effort can be a bit challenging for most businesses since they start by basically putting their company brochure on their website. What they don’t realize is that local results, especially those from sites like Yelp! along with other vertical ranking sites, continue to acquire additional content in the form of reviews. This new content adds to the value of the site from the perspective of the search engines causing the review site to overtake a business’s website performance in the search results.
The idea that a non-brand site (such as a rating site) will outrank a brand site has been a subject of great debate with Google and other search engines. The Google search team addressed this issue by intentionally favoring brand results, especially when it comes to large brands. Google also stated that there is no correlation between the amount of money spent by a brand in paid search and the change in the performance of brand terms in the organic results.
But I think it is better to be realistic here because these big brands have a voice within Google whether we like it or not. Google is, after all is said and done, a for profit public company that is beholden to its investors to increase revenue. Google would have you believe there is no correlation between the amount someone pays for PPC and how the site performs in the organic results.
I don’t believe Google is intentionally being nefarious when trying to improve performance of brand terms especially when these brand sites are being outranked by keyword aggregator sites which tend to drive traffic with low value content. Some would say that artificially favoring brands in the organic search is still counter to the purpose of a truly organic search experience. More on that subject another time.
What is the best way to expand keyword content?
Let’s start with an example such as an auto repair shop that wants to improve their websites performance or keywords that target their local customers. If we stick with the normal scenario it would appear that I would just need to post my brochure of services and be done with it.
We know now that the local rating sites such as Yelp! can often overtake a local business’s website performance in the organic results. One way to challenge this tendency is to expand on the number of pages and keywords on my local business site.
Today, we may promote the repair of a specific brand of cars along with promoting a specific type of repair specialty. Specialty services might include engine tune-ups, transmissions, oil changes, electrical, suspension and the list goes on. Here is how we can structure the keywords on individual page <title> on the site:
- Homepage: Car Repair Hayward | Dick’s Auto Repair
- Services page: Car Repair Services, Engine Tune Hayward | Dick’s Auto Repair
- Pricing page: Car Repair Estmates | Dick’s Auto Repair
- Contact page: Car Repair Appointments, Schedule Repair | Dick’s Auto Repair
Once you have the basic site built and keywords for the main pages, you can begin to think about expanded keyword strategy. A common place to start is to build out a section for frequently asked questions or FAQ section.
I like this tactic because it can expose areas of knowledge when people are evaluating whether or not to use your business. Often sites will address frequently asked questions by creating a single page that has multiple questions and answers.
Unfortunately by using only one page you limit the number of keywords you can use and thereby the opportunity to expand the number of keywords your site can rank for in the search results. A better strategy would be to separate your top 10 frequently asked questions into separate pages so that you can provide both a complete answer and a unique piece of content on your site. Let’s look at another example that includes titles for suggested question pages.
- Main question page: Car Service Questions | Auto Repair Answers
- Question page 1: Causes of Engine Noise | Cars Using Bad Gas
- Question page 2: How Often to Change Oil |Oil Service Intervals
It’s important to confirm the selection of keywords by looking at the search demand for the chosen keyword sets. Here is a screen capture of the search demand for each of the 12 terms used in our example:
As you can see the location-based keywords have the least amount of demand. Some additional searching can yield better versions of the location-based terms. But I didn’t show here is the set of suggested keywords that the Google Adword tool provides as a suggested list of expansion terms.
Another tactic for our auto repair example would be to create unique pages for coupons. You could post each coupon on your home page with links to the expanded coupon that details the complete offer. The key word set would include the type of service and the word “coupon” such as “Oil Change Coupon” or “Tune up Coupon”. In addition you could add a location-based keyword such as “Hayward Oil Change Coupon”.
Now that we’ve picked keywords you still need to build a page with relevant content that supports the selected keyword. This should be pretty easy since there are so many examples of sites with this type of content that it should be easy to find content that can be cobbled together to create unique verbiage for each page.
I am not suggesting any kind of plagiarism just that it’s easy to get content ideas from existing sites. Most small and some medium businesses have a big challenge of finding or creating good content that supports their web presence. There is an abundance of websites that provide the service of writing articles at literally pennies a word so the opportunity for outsourcing content creation has never been easier than it is today. Sadly this means that good writers can and end up writing endlessly for next to no money.
Simple and easy! Straight to the point! Thanks for tips
Thank you for example. You are an expert in Seo. That why I’m asking you. How do you build links? What is the process?
Anastasia, I’m not a big believer in “building” links. I create content that people want to link to and I am patient about waiting for the links to come in.
Some people go to a lot of trouble to acquire links. You need to build relationships with good, trustworthy Websites to help get the word out about your content. When you’re acquiring links for clients as an agency SEO, you have to build up a large inventory of resources you can turn to when you need to promote new content on client sites. That takes time and practice.
Quick thought on title tags posted above
What are your thoughts on NOT having the brand name on inner pages?
So how about if the example is modified as follows?
— before —
Homepage: Car Repair Hayward | Dick’s Auto Repair
Pricing page: Car Repair Estmates | Dick’s Auto Repair
— w/o branding on inner pages —
Homepage: Car Repair Hayward | Dick’s Auto Repair
Pricing page: Car Repair Estmates | Auto Repair Cost
How about if we give an extra keyword for the inner page title tag instead of Brand name? Homepage would rank for brand name anyway.
Would love to read your thoughts on this.
Ujjwal, you make a really good point for removing the “brand” from the internal pages sync as you said “Homepage would rank for brand name anyway”. I have done this both ways where the brand name follows the keyword and where the brand name is removed from the title. The best method would be to take off the brand for any page that is not trying to rank for that keyword especially when there are no references to the brand on the page outside of a logo. You would be surprised at how often companies require the presence of the brand in page titles when it does not help with ranking and could even hurt relevance for the pages primary topic.
Great question. Thanks.
The best method would be to take off the brand for any page that is not trying to rank for that keyword especially when there are no references to the brand on the page outside of a logo.
Easy and smart method. I am doing the same thing when we launched a new (small) site inside my company.
Even if the Adwords Keywords External Tool is really old and not precize, this is still a gold mine for keywords ideas :).
Nice tips