Keyword Variants - Low conversion rates - Is a site redesign required?

[Chris_CDC]

Hi Guys,

I'm Chris & i'm a noob to SEO.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for offering your support! It is greatly appreciated!

I work for a small family run company called custom designed cables and we manufacture bespoke cable and bespoke retractable cables.

I posted a couple of days ago about how to move forward with our site.

Our website has been targeting specific keywords and their variants across the relevant pages to somewhat reasonable effect.

Since signing up to SEOMOZ, i have been trying to narrow down the keywords that we target per page and also tried to improve the content on the pages with the help of the on page optimisation tool.

I have a few questions that i would like somebody to help me with please if it isn't to much trouble.

Firstly, for our keywords, there are a lot of variants. For example, we braid cables.

Here are some of the variants of this keyword: cable braid, cable braiding, cable screen, cable screening, cable shielding etc etc.

The way i have gone in the past has been to try and target all of those keywords on the relevant page. Now, writing content has been the issue as whilst trying to write good informative information, squeezing in all of the keywords has been a problem and more than likely affected the readability of the page.

From what i have learnt since i signed up, this is not a good practice and therefore i have tried to narrow it down somewhat yet i don't really want to lose potential customers finding us by only targeting one or two of the keywords. This is a similar situation for most of our keywords on the majority of our pages.

What is the best way to approach this? If i was to write a page per keyword, i don't believe that it would look very good as we could end up with over 100 pages with say 5 or 6 of them talking about the same subject which then leads onto the problem of writing good content. It would be difficult to write good content for pretty much the same thing across such a wide number of pages. If this is the solution though then i would more than happily tackle it.

What would be the best way to move forward?

The next issue that I have is that since i have been modifying the pages with the help of SEOMOZ, the number of enquries that we have received have fell off the charts.

We used to average around 50 enquiries a month from the website and since i have modified the site, i'd say we've had probably 20 since the end of February.

The funny thing is though, we have also averaged around 200 hits more per month since the changes. So the hits have increased yet the enquiries have died.

I was wondering if anybody was willing to take a look at our site: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk to give me some general feedback as to why this may be happening and what your overall opinions of the site may be with regards to the layout, look and general feel etc because i am beginning to wonder whether or not the design is what could be causing us to convert so little of our new found visitors.

If anyone could also provide me with actionable feedback with regards to our keyword targeting for our pages that would also really really help!

I am currently considering re-designing the site in it's entirety and i am interested in your opinions on whether or not this would be a good way to go.

Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated guys!

Thanks again!

Chris (Just another website/seo noob desperately attempting to avoid the sack)

[EvolveCreative]

Hey Christopher,

You're right in not writing content for all of those keyword variants. Check out this post from Google:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Key takeaway from that post is this:

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Some may disagree, but the only form of on-site SEO optimization I do is in the title tag, H1 tag and 1 time in the copy. I use a different keyword in the title tag, H1 and in copy as well. So for you:

Title: cable braid

H1: cable braiding

in copy: cable braids

[Chris_CDC]

Hi Todd,

Thank you for the response!

So following on from what you have suggested, would i be better off selecting the three keywords with highest traffic and optimising to them specific keywords?

Thus cutting out quite a lot of the variants?

Would you suggest that i run with that then for the time being and see how we rank/how many conversions we get whilst leaving the site design the same?

I've just loaded up the link, i will read it now!

Thanks again Todd!!

Chris.

[Chris_CDC]

Hi Todd,

With regards to SEOMOZ's on page optimisation tools.

Would you suggest that i only include the keywords in the body just the one time or would you suggest that i should go with the minimum of 4 mentions?

Thanks Todd!

Chris.

[EvolveCreative]

I wouldn't 'cut them out' per say, but put them lower on the priority list. Make sure to use the most searched keyword furthest to the left in the title tag.

As far as everything else goes - try setting up some goals in Google Analytics to see which keywords are converting into sales. If you find one converts better than the other - swap it out for the furthest to the left in the title tag. Doesn't matter how much traffic it brings you if it doesn't convert.

As with most people, I can see that you're pretty concerned with your on-site optimization. On-site is a very small percentage of the reason why your website will rank. Links from external websites do most of the work.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Chris-        Hoping I can help you avoid the sack!!!

I will divide my feedback into four areas:

• Website layout
• CMS
• Analytics
• Creating unique content focused on your keywords

Website layout is average....the fact that you have used so much of your home page real estate for navigation doesnt make sense. you have multiple options for home, about us, custom cable and links.....the red is overhwleming....the choices are overwhelming. Way too busy.....

Take a step back and think about why is someone coming to the page? what are the top three things they might want to accomplish?  then get rid of everything else and focus on those three things....you cna remove all of your other headings and subheadings that are not call to action items, down to the footer or condensed into one heading.....

• If your goal is to get them to order cable now then there should be a box "Order cable now" or "check out our prices now"...
• If your goal is to get their email information to follow up market to them, then there should be a call to action box that says"save money with our cable now" or "Sign up for special weekly deals" and then you would have an email box they could fill in and submit.
• If your goal is to get them to see why your cable is unique....then post that information with a call to action.

CMS.  Im not sure what CMS you are using, but hopefully you are being indexed correctly and the sitemap is being generated that is solid and provides guidance to the search engines. We recommend wordpress because we have seen that when we convert the same exact content from another site to wordpress, we not only upgrade the user experience but it gets better SEO value instantly because of the architecture and ease of use with plugins. Whatever you are using, make sure you have a solid foundation.

Analytics. You need to install google analytics on your pages so you can track the activity on your site. You need to find out where people are going on the site, how long they are spending on each page and where they are abansdoining. Just install the code on every page in the footer and then set up some basic reporting to get you vital information related to what you are talking about above. You dont know what you dont know....get the data and you then will have some clarity on what is happening.

Creating unique content with keywords. Let me offer you a few suggestions....

• Pick one primary or money keyword on each page. And then pick 2-3 sub keywords that are important and relevant. Just focus on those....don't pick 10 keywords a page....
• When writing content make sure you include the main keyword in the title, in the first sentence and the last sentence.
• Make sure you mention the other sub keywords at least 2-3 times in the main article/content.
• Make sure you use bold, italics and underlines at least once in the content.

Don't stuff the keywords in the content......use the keywords only if it makes sense in the context of what you are writing about.....

Lastly, it sounds like you might not be maximizing your seo value for alt tags and meta tags.....make sure your meta descriptions and picture alt tags are seo optimized with your keywords for that page.  Again, with wordpress this is a simple process of filling in the required fields for one of the wordpress plugins.

Good luck. Hope this helps. Please show me the three thumbs up!

Mark