Under-performing blog as part of main site

[KateWaite]

Hi

I was hoping to get some thoughts and opinions on our blog. It is part of our main site (not on a subdomain) but performs very badly, pulling in very little organic traffic (only accounting for 0.6% of our organic traffic).

Every page of the blog is listed in our sitemap, and using Screaming Frog I've done spot checks of several pages to see if they are indexed, which they have been. Looking at Google's text cache, all the content is visible.

Pages are often well shared on social media (for example): http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog/2014/10/antarctica-photography-safari-2014-updates.aspx

I'm aware that we do need more links coming into the blog but I still feel that it should be performing better than it is.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[White.net]

Hi Kate,

From a quick browse, one slight improvement that you could implement is a template for your title tags and meta descriptions.

Google uses your title tags as ranking signals, and at the moment, yours don't seem to follow any kind of pattern. Best practice would indicate that you include the brand name at the start or the end, and that you could pull in the title of each blog post to use in the title. You should also try to include some sort of keyword for the page in the title if you can.

Although the meta description is not used as a ranking signal by Google, it is one of the first impressions a users gets, so the meta description should be enticing and make the user want to click through to the page.

Hope it helps! Good luck!

[max.favilli]

I am not sure the blog is the problem, if I search with a query containing the title of that article: https://www.google.it/webhp?q=antarctica+photography+safari

I can find it as third result. Which keywords are you after? Because if I narrow the search to just antartica+photography things change.

If I look at the keyword density in that article (like just using this tootl http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/), I get the impression without going black hat or irritate google copy could be a little bit more keyword focused.

The body is 900 words which is not so bad. But if I query for antarctica+photography competitors have a much larger copy and a probably better structure (headings are not just dates but do feed keywords to crawler).

Have you run a report on semrush for the domain? http://imgur.com/1pJ3G1i 229 positions is not much. Expecially given the 243 backlinks, which is not bad either: http://imgur.com/cuIwiLa

I would try to improve the copy of the articles, check the html in more depth, and review the backlinks profile for all the usual things (link quality, anchor diversity, deep linking, etc..).

[Ron_McCabe]

Kata,

I would suggest the following. I am assuming you are using Moz Pro.  What i would do is work with your client on a key word list. I would have them list the searches that they want to show up on and then enter these search strings into the key word tracker.

I would then work with the client on a content plan that is closely tied to ranking on these searches.  This works well because the content that you or your client writes that ranks is then shown as the ranking URL in the key word ranking report. This visual feedback seems to really help clients see results form their work. I had one client go from 4 ranking URLs to 67 in under six months once they had this feedback look. This tool also had them go through the web site with the page grader and make sure they had pages on their main site ranking for their most important key word strings.

Hope this helps,

Ron

[EGOL]

I think that the blog has nice content.

Many of the posts are competing for queries where there is very little search volume.

Go to this page... http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog.aspx?destination=india   read the titles of the posts.   Are people are searching for those topics?

I think that the blog posts will get more traffic if their titles align with search volume or if their topics align with search volume.