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Gaston has already answered your question well so I won't go into that any further. What I will say though is don't forget to consider the user intent here - depending on what your product actually is, people using that niche word may be looking for something different.

To use your cars vs automobiles example in a research context, you might find for example that people searching for "history of cars" are searching for recent history, whereas users searching for "history of automobiles" may be looking for info dating right back to the very first automobile.

Perhaps a poor example of my point but hopefully this illustrates what I'm getting at. While the two may technically be the same, sometimes we use variations of a word with a different intent. Your keyword focus should always be around this intent rather than just the words themselves.

I hope that makes sense!

Provided each of the subcategory pages are genuinely helpful to users, they're going to be better off sticking with them rather than just relying on filters.

It gives the chance to answer subcategory-specific questions and provide more helpful info about each one, not to mention more targeted info to rank for each of these independently. It's very hard to rank for a particular type of product when you've also go another 20 different types on the same page.

The key here is finding ways to be genuinely helpful with these pages. If you can't find any way to do this then yes, merging them into a single page is your best option since it simplifies the site.

Hi Umair,

There are a few changes I'd suggest here if this was one of our clients. There is no real clarity around the most recent Google updates but there has been talk of onsite elements taking more of a focus either now or in the near future.

Either way, here are my suggestions from a quick glance of the site:

Keyword Focus - The page title for the home page is keyword-stuffed but the page itself doesn't seem to have a focus. The other pages lack a focus as well. Through the page titles, headings and content there doesn't appear to be any particular focus term(s)

Thin Content - Most landing pages seem to have ~100 - 400 words. We consistently see the best results from 1500+ words per landing page, though even boosting them to closer to 1000 words should see an improvement. Just make sure the content is legitimately valuable to the user, not just a sales pitch about your company.

**Site Speed **- GTmetrix gives a page speed score of E. Site speed is quite important these days

Excessive URLs - Some of the URLs are quite excessive. This appears to be done to fit keywords in but this can be done in a cleaner, more succinct way. For example, rather than _www.midigital.co/about-mi-digital-agency-marketing-services/, _either about-us or digital-agency would be perfectly acceptable and still on point.

Footer Links - The use of sitewide footer links on a few sites isn't ideal. The worst example having well over 30,000 links from the one domain

Blog or Comment Spam - Most of your anchor text profile is made up of variations of "louis vuitton sunglasses" terms. While I haven't dug down to confirm this, it does at least raise a red flag for me and search engines.

I hope that helps!

Don't get too caught up in jamming keywords into your titles. Chances are your competitors are already doing this, so use the opportunity to stand out and grab the users' attention; give them a reason to click your result over the other ~9 on the page.

Page titles should be compelling so getting your keyword(s) in there is great, but try to avoid the clunk old [keyword] [keyword] page title style. Sometimes it makes sense and is about all you can really do but if you can avoid it, do so.

I don't agree that you need to have the word Australia in the title either, Google looks at plenty of factors to determine what country you're in so no need to take up those precious pixels in your title with a long, redundant word!

There are a couple of Whiteboard Fridays that cover this general topic which you might find helpful:

• Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World
• Keyword Targeting, Density, and Cannibalization

I'd give you an example of a strong title but I just realised how little I know about wedding dresses! Basically, it should be something like Amelie Wedding Dress - [Something compelling; what do they care about?].

Remember, don't talk about yourself or your product, talk about the benefits these customers care about. If they're sold online, ship fast and this is your strongest selling point, maybe something like Amelie Wedding Dresses - Easy Online Store, Shipped in 48hrs!

Absolutely correct. The only thing I'd add to this is that provided the links make sense, don't disregard them just because they carry less strength; less strength is better than the 0 strength you get from not adding the link!

As long as it's being done in moderation, it's not really going to be a danger either. If a large portion of your site is made up of links from the same IP though, this is going to raise some red flags that maybe you're running a PBN. Just down form sketchy looking patterns and you'll be just fine.

We're in the same boat, Rk.

We did toy with this idea simply because it would mean reducing the cost of a piece of content for us meaning we could increase profit and lower our prices at the same time - the perfect solution, right?

We now have a strong in-house content team because, as you said, you really want to have those SMEs that understand specific client needs and topics. We figured the money saved outsourcing content to Fiverr was likely to be lost several times over in lost clients and additional editing time so the real end result wasn't as great as we'd hoped.

Of course, this is pure speculation - we never did try it out.

We also provide regular in-house training to keep upskilling out team - something you can't do with a Fiverr gig.

This is a tricky one to answer without being able to look at the site, especially given how old it is. A 10-year-old site can accumulate a lot of "cruft", as Rand put it in this WBF, which may be a contributing factor. Even though you have changed quite regularly.

Beyond this stuff, have a close look at your user experience as well - is the nav easy to use? Is there a clear call to action? How hard is it for your users to find what they're looking for? etc. You may find it helpful to get a friend to take a look at it for an outside perspective on this stuff as well.

If you're comfortable with sharing what your site is I'm happy to take a closer look for you.

For us, there are five main elements that we look at if we're trying to determine the likely quality of a link.

• Link metrics for the domain (Domain Rank, Trust etc)
• The relevance and placement of the potential link - editorial link from a relevant page or sidebar link on a random page?
• Perceived quality of the website. Does it look spammy with lots of ads, 404s etc
• The liklihood of relevant referral traffic
• Whether or not a link to our site/resource is going to be genuinely helpful to their users

Wow, that's incredibly confusing! I can't even find any images in the SERPs that people could be using to arrive on your site so it really does make no sense. All the location info seems to be fine as well so it's unlikely you're ranking somewhere offshore, though I'm sure you've look at that in GA as well since you've already been incredibly thorough.

The hostname filtering means it can't be the UA code inadvertently used on another site or domain either. I suppose one other grasping-at-straws test you can do is to set up a fresh UA code and apply that in case there's something strange happening - what may cause that I have no idea but stranger things have happened!

Great tips Bryan! The only thing I'd add to this is to be realistic about your sales funnel expectations and how you structure your site.

Almost nobody is going to spend 10 - 20 minutes submitting personal information (or even generic information for that matter) on their first visit. Tailor your landing pages toward new clients without completely neglecting the returning ones. Capture at least an email address from those interested new users then use a combination of quality content, social presence and email marketing to build that familiarity and rapport to a point where they're comfortable in giving you their personal info and they see the benefit behind it.

You can't just tell someone your product or service is good and expect them to believe it, you have to provide an environment where they can arrive at this conclusion by themselves.

A good example of this being Moz vs a small SEO website. You're far more likely to spend 20 minutes completing a survey and providing contact info for Moz than you are a small firm you've never heard of because they do this stuff very well.

On top of the filtering I mentioned above, it might also pay to have a look at the Content Keywords in Search Console (Google Index > Content Keywords). This will show you the significance of various words across your site.

Though rare, you may find some odd words showing up amongst some of the most significant there - try searching for various combinations of those and see if you rank for them. Particularly if you're seeing a high bounce rate from organic traffic, you may be accidentally ranking for irrelevant terms so that traffic hits your site, goes "what is this?" and they pogo back to the SERPs.

You may also find checking the Search Analytics in Search Console (Search Traffic > Search Analytics) and see what terms it shows you getting impressions and clicks for. It's highly likely this will be no more helpful for you than Analytics but since it looks like you've covered all the usual stuff, we're kind of in a position of looking for hints rather than answers!

Apologies if any of this information is too obvious or you've already checked.

Perhaps a silly question, but have you checked the analytics data to make sure it's not referral spam causing the majority of this? These spammers are hurting organic data these days too and particularly on a site with low organic traffic, referral spam can drastically alter what your data shows you.

The easiest way to see legitimate organic data in Analytics is to open the property and navigate to Audience > Technology > Network. From there, just under the graph you'll see a blue text link for "Hostname". Click your domain name from that list and it will show you visits going only to your host name (domain) which filters out some types of referrers.

Once you've done that, either change _"_All Settings" at the top to Organic, or add another segment next to it. While not foolproof, this filtered organic data is at least accurate enough to work with.

You can set up a filtered view so it's permanently filtered this way, though though doing it properly requires creating a fresh view within the existing property, meaning you'll have no historic data to look at without going back to the unfiltered one - great for the future but useless for immediate troubleshooting.

No problem at all. To be honest, it's really not a huge deal and probably not worth the dev budget or manhours required.

In most cases with a site like this, I'd be more inclined to add good alt text for all images on the most popular pages then, as you're working through other pages throughout the life of the campaign, update the alt text while you're at it.

If you're already updating the page title or content on a page, it's not that much extra effort to do the alt text while you're there.

I'm not sure if you've already resolve the issue or it's coincidence but I can see all of your pages indexed now, at least in a site: search.

Looking at your sitemap and robots I can't really identify any obvious issues there either. The fact that your home page has some degree of rankings suggests to me that you may just need to improve your site strength. Having just 2 referring domains probably isn't helping this

Hi Claudio,

Would you mind providing some more info on your concerns and updating the link to a direct one? Unnecessary shortened URLs smell awfully fishy, especially to the SEO community

Naturally in the perfect world, meaningful attributes should be added. Assuming you're a mere mortal with a limited number of hours in the day... the best short-term solution to this is going to be having the alt attribute applied but empty.

To my knowledge (happy to be pointed towards data showing otherwise), there's no real ranking difference between these two options. The reason I prefer to add a blank alt in this instance is because assistive technology (like screen readers for vision impaired users) are going to have a much better experience on your site this way.

If you have a blank alt, the screen readers will essentially ignore the image since they're going to read " ". On the other hand, if you don't have an alt attribute in the , it's going to read the source instead. Even a short img src is going to be cumbersome, especially if you have an image-heavy site!

As with most things in SEO, a single link like this isn't going to land you in a penalty and honestly, it's more likely to do good than harm.

What you don't want to do is make a habit of this. If you're part of an organisation that has a membership fee and you get a link out of it, it's happy days. If you're just identifying strong sites and throwing money at them for a link that's a different story.

Many will make the logical case that search engines can't tell the difference and a link is a link but they're constantly getting better at understanding context and there are quite a few consistent factors that help them understand the legitimacy of a link. One of many of course being relevance.

You're very welcome. Either way I'd be interested to see how this one progresses.

Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.

On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.

Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.

Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:

• Server location
• HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
• Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
• Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
• Location mentions throughout your content

While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.

Hi Matt,

To answer your question directly, yes you will see an SEO benefit from that in the form of brand recognition and potential referral traffic.

As for ranking improvements though (what many wrongly define as "SEO Benefit"), no.

You've already raised the biggest concern which is posting a link directly to your site which can have a very spammy feel to it. Particularly if you push too hard and actually start to spam, you run the risk of getting picked up by /r/hailcorporate which pretty much marks the death of your brand on Reddit!

As with most things in SEO, if you're offering a truly valuable resource in the right way, there are only positives to be had from it, albeit indirect in this case.