Keyword targeting by page, site, or both?

[ninjaprecision]

Hi,

We recently discovered that a product we sell has a misnomer, and that a ton of people take to Google and use variations of that misnomer while trying to find us. Unfortunately we don't rank in Google for this keyword, and its costing us thousands in lost sales.

I've been slowly building the misnomer into the content of our site in hopes that the spiders will pick up on it. It has started to work in the last couple weeks, but we're nowhere near the top (and we are #1 and #2 for most of our other prime keywords.)

The site which sells the product is specialized, and only sells this specific product (in different models, but they're all the same product essentially.) With that in mind, I'm trying to figure out the best way to attack a new keyword.

I know that normally you would dedicate a specific page (in an eCommerce store probably that  product's own page) to employ your SEO tactics. However, because this site specializes in this product and offers different models and information about it I'm confused about the best approach.

Does Google take into consideration the entire site a s whole, or are the pages within my site competing against each other for rank?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Google take sinto account the entire website. Your pages arent competing against each other for rank, but one page might have a higher quality and relevance score than another page.

If you are focused on crushing your competitor and taking away the number #1 rank then you need to build unique and relevant content around the misnomer keyword. Several product pages around the misnomer is an easy way to start to build your relevancy and quality score for the keyword,

When we try and maximize the value of an e-commerce site, we leverage the specific products and variations of the product. For example if there is widget number 1 in white and widget number 2 in blue, we will create two separate pages working through the description of the product. Because we do not want to be penalized for duplicate content, we make the second page have unique content, rather than copying and pasting the same description and changing the color. We have found that to be safe you need 80% original content. We have gotten it to work with as low as 60% original content in certain situations.

Hope this helps..

Mark

[Unity]

If you want to rank for a new keyword and that keyword is not a primary target then you will most likely need to do this by optimizing a section or page within the website specifically for that term; otherwise you risk affecting your primary keyword ranking by diluting the goodness you have already created.

If the content across these product pages is similar Google will choose to index the one that it feels is most relevant, meaning the others won't rank well or at all. So with this in mind if you are trying to add a new keyword and your pages aren't unique then it's going to be hard to rank for the new term because search engines will have already marked it as a secondary/similar page to the one that is being indexed. You would need to build links to those pages to get it seen as a page with different content.

1. Ensure you have unique content across all product pages (targeting the misnomer by page or section)

2. Optimize those pages/sections using the misnomer only (title tag,

   header, alt tags, body copy etc)

3. Consider adding a page to the website that talks about the misspelling of the business name - make it fun and entertaining. It's a bit of a creative idea but it might help! Just don't be spammy.

4. Build links to your website using the misnomer name in the anchor text (use variations of phrases with the term); be sure that the links are from quality websites and that content is relevant to your/their audience.

5. Make sure you also have an automated XML sitemap (or that you are refreshing often), this can help communicate new URLs etc.

6. Perhaps you could run Adwords for the misnomer so you don't lose that income (as you mentioned). Once organic starts to rank you can remove.

Useful: It is possible that the misnomer is seen by Google as a synonym. To find out do a google search for your keyword and place this symbol ~ before it and with no space (e.g. ~apples). Look for the terms that are bold and these will be the synonyms.This could be useful in seeing how Google views your website and the keywords associated with it.

[ninjaprecision]

Hi Davninia,

Thank you for touching one of my main concerns - I didn't really mention this, but I was very worried about the risk of diluting my other well-ranking keywords.

I am happy to report that w have invested countless hours in tailoring each of our product pages to be unique. While they do contain common keywords and phrases the majority of their descriptions are quite unique.

3. I'm glad to hear this - it was actually one of the first strategies we employed (and basically at the root of my question about pages competing against each other.)

4. Great idea.

6. We've been doing that for a few months now. It can get quite expensive when there's no nearby organic link, but a sale for us is one that the competition doesn't get.

Your last suggestion is really interested -  I didn't realize that was something that could be done. I'll be using that regularly from here on in I'm sure. Thanks!