Are sliders killing our site?

[BenjaminH]

Our website, http://shatterbuggy.com, has what I believe is a systemic issue that stems from the heavy reliance upon the Revolution Slider for Wordpress. I am not an SEO expert and our site has vexed many SEOs in the past.

We get feedback regularly from customers (especially those that are not tech savvy) that express gratitude for the ease of use via following an image to image sequence to get to their respective booking. This was our goal when creating the site. Incidentally, in many cases, the only linking from page to page is within the slider itself (clickable image) and there is little to no content. That said, we seems to stumble in SERPS against seemingly inferior competition. For example, we should be ranked in spot 1, 2, or 3 ish for "iPhone repair Minneapolis" but rather we are stuck near spot 15.

Any thoughts on whether this is a strategy that may be harming us? If so, would simply creating content on these empty (slider only) pages help? Should we create "static links" that connect to the same places as the slider? Also, is our particular use of the slider creating H1 issues?

Thank you all!

B.

[DirkC]

Hi Benjamin,

Not sure that it's the slider which is causing your issues.

1. Your site has performance issues - especially linked to time to first byte. Check the results from http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150510_ZZ_QZY/ & https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.shatterbuggy.com. You might want to read this thread on how you could improve this https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-reduce-time-to-first-byte-on-my-wordpress-site You should consider to combine & minify the css & js files (you have an awful lot of them - 27 each for the homepage) and modify your caching settings (see advice pagespeed insights)

2. You have 366 HTML pages on your site - 121 pages are redirected. You should update your internal links so that the links point directly to the final destination. Example: the homepage links to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/plymouth/ - but this page doesn't exist and is redirected to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/plymouth/. Screaming frog can help you to identify which links need to be updated.

3. 128 pages have no meta-description / 38 pages have no H1 title (example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/cherry-creek/ipad-repair/)

4. The images you use on site are quite heavy (almost 50% is over 100KB) - some of them extremely heavy (http://www.shatterbuggy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/waiting-in-line.jpeg) - 123 have no alt text

5. Due to the large slider which always is dominating the page - you push the text out of the visible area. Your regional pages are very similar and could almost be considered duplicates. The region specific content is not visible without scrolling. Google prefers important content to be visible - not hidden at the bottom of the page.

6. You might want to check this article on local SEO: https://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo - it contains a lot of tips & tricks on how to make your locations more visible for Google.

7. A lot of specific pages have http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/ as canonical - example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/iphone-repair/gold-iphone-6-issue/ - not sure if for this specific page the /repairs/ page is the best option as canonical - you might want to point to an iphone repair page.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[MoosaHemani]

Benjamin,

I don’t think the issue is with the slider but there are other issues you should be considering as important. I will quickly go over it.

1. 3XX errors. I am not saying 301 redirection is bad but too many 301s can damage your website so try to minimize them where possible.
2. Few URLs contain “underscore”. Not really a very good practice. Also there are one or two URLs that contain upper case as well.
3. Not saying it’s a ranking factor, but it can affect CTR which again is a ranking factor. You have missing descriptions on different pages of the website
4. Images are not properly optimized.
5. Page load time can be improved.
6. Your DA is not really impressive, so I guess few more links here and there will obviously help!

Just a quick overview! Hope this helps…

[BenjaminH]

Hi Dirk-

Thank you for the detailed reply. Very much appreciated. All of your suggestions make a great deal of sense.

Do you have an opinion regarding linking within the slider though? Specifically, do you know if there would be any advantage to creating static links that are the same as the links that the slider images link to? These would be below the slider.

Cheers!

B.

[BenjaminH]

Hi Moosa-

Thank you for the reply. Much appreciated!

Cheers!

B.

[MoosaHemani]

If the slider is crawl-able, i dont think there will be a much advantage of normal static links.

#personalopinion

[DirkC]

I agree with Moosa - I crawled your site with Screaming Frog, and it had no problem to crawl the links inside the slider.

[BenjaminH]

Moosa, Dirk-

Thank you both.

B.