Optimizing a Webpage without keywords

[lauramrobinson32]

Hi all,

I’m really running into a challenge internally lately in that we have a lot of teams redesigning or building new pages (specificially one team) that do NOT loop our teams in. When we finally get them to work with us, to drive traffic to the pages, they disagree that there must be other ways of optimizing the pages than focusing on keywords with search volume that are relevant to the page. We usually land that they will choose a keyword or two they think a user will search for, we do keyword research and pick something close (because they don’t want to utilize a term that doesn’t make much sense, as they have written the content without involving us from the beginning, but then our search volume is declining).

They keep saying there are other ways than changing the paired down content on their page and adding in keywords to the H1 headers, content on page. they mentioned semantic search at one point.

For example, https://www.entrust.com/products/entrust-getaccess/ currently ranks around #10 for "single sign on solution."  This keyword was on the previous page quite a few times in headers and body copy.  Now it appears on the page 3 times after the redesign and is not in the h1.  The team does for example want to optimize for this term, but there’s lots of pushback as they want a page with minimal content and little design. Just wondering your thoughts on this.

IS this a common challenge you deal with too and any idea on answers as I've tried many with the teams?

Thanks,

Laura

[JordanLowry]

I would use data to back up any changes you would want to make. If you know organic traffic is starting to take a nose dive due to changes the team is currently making then pull some year-over-year before and after snapshots and show them the areas that are declining.

Explain the importance of properly optimizing the pages you are working on and try to find some sort of middle ground.