Have an eBook. What is best practice for SEO?

[LauraFalls]

Hello

We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content.

It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/

The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page?

At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address).

I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)?

Thank you! Laura

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Laura,

It sounds like your ebook is assisting in the SEO of your website, since individual chapters are ranking. You can see how much of a page (or PDF) Google can read by searching for cache:[URL]. Here's Google's cache of chapter 8, which you shared.

But, you're on the right track, turning these pages into HTML pages will make them easier for Google to crawl, and you'll probably get more traffic out of it. Here's one way you could handle this:

• Keep http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ as it is to encourage sign up
• Create a page for each chapter of the book, with the same content. Make sure to canonical the PDF chapters to the HTML counterparts.
• Link to those chapters somewhere else on the site, so it doesn't discourage people who land on the PDF download page.

That way, you get the benefits of the content individually, but keep the landing page.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

[LauraFalls]

Thank you so much Kristina

I thought there would be more benefits having it like a standard webpage, HTML.

Given we already have the eBook in PDF format (72 pages done by a graphic designer), I was wondering if there was a happy medium like creating new web pages and 'embedding' the PDF? This was suggested by the web developer however we weren't sure if/how it would benefit SEO.

I'm just trying to weigh up the cost vs benefit of creating many more html pages. Ideally, I don't think we would have gone with a PDF in the first place. I guess we had seen a lot of eBooks which are in PDF format.

Thank you!

Laura