Help with onpage keyword optimization, site architecture, and how those aspects affect the SERPs.

[JDMcNamara]

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

[MichaelYork]

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.