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I'd have to 3rd the wordpress suggestion, if you had a big site with lots of pages and a involved user portal then Drupal would be the goto suggestion. But if it's a smaller site, no need to deal with the issues of a huge site if you don't need to.

Joomla isn't bad, and can be managed but unless you're a webdev you'll want access to info and scripts and by far the most popular choice is wordpress.

Just make sure you do a thorough product audit so you can reduce the overall amount of product before you put them online, this will help SEO drastically, since you'll have less pages that users would draw attention to that don't work too well.

Screaming frog is pretty easy to export to excel or google sheets, as well can connect to google analytics too.

I was going to link a url about connecting but it was 2 years old - if you still want here you go - https://authoritylabs.com/blog/use-screaming-frog-excel/

Watch a few video tutorials and you'll be up and ready in no time, there is a free version but it has a 500 url limit for crawling among other limitations.

I've had good results grouping the keywords by synonyms and longtails.

Using my main keywords and their synonyms on that keywords landing page, while using longtails of that keyword on different material related product pages and product landing pages. Google picked them up right away, but you need to make sure content is there.

Write down your pages ( as long as their not into the hundreds ) if so do the top 50. And write down lists of keywords to target on each page, then the content can be worded naturally to best fit and rank for.

If you do this right, you can rank multiple pages for one keyword due to the context of the content. If it's different enough but still relative google thinks it's all that and so do your users.

Well for starters, it will level the playing field that has been altered pending what SEO tools site you use, each site having their pro's and con's about them, with google releasing their 360 suite, these site's will up their game that much more to retain users meaning we'll not have to pick or choose what site to be a part of, we'll have the same tools available, at the same indexing power.

Or google will be so good with their indexing that these sites we all use will be for community questions and answers / blogs only.

I would like to see a better backlink index setup from MOZ, as I'm not paying for ahref.com and others if I already have one here.

IMO google sees adwords writing on the wall of SERPs and knows that organic search will become the norm and they'll either get rid of adwords completely or stuff it to the side again so they don't lose users to another less ad crammed SERPs. Their moving towards mobile mainly right now, which ads really should have no place in, since the size issue is that much more stressed. With virtual reality and augmented reality, SERPs will change as well as ads, this archaic means of paying for exposure works but won't for much longer as users have more and more avenues to turn to when frustrated.

The 360 suite interests me, however I don't see myself jumping ship just yet.

I must second Jordan's reply that Screaming Frog is the best you could spend 100 bucks on a year! You can fully crawl any site, and then clicking the internal tab, then dropbox to html, can set these to be displayed in tree view which will as you imagined, display in a hierarchy which makes research 100 times easier.

Plus it's ability to create reports, check for basic but major SEO issues make it one of the most important swiss army knives you can have in your SEO toolbox.

Do yourself a favor and buy the year license, you won't regret it.

Hello, I also run a few adwords campaigns,

What I've been learning is:

• Making sure landing pages are relevant to user's search queries
• Taking about 2 hours a week or more just for negative keyword adding
• Take twice as long as you do for negative keywords for positive keyword adjustments
• Always watch ad listings like a hawk to adjust when a competitor swoops in so you can adjust accordingly
• Maybe set up a few auto reports if already haven't for things like quality score, ad CTR% and cost overall to see where you can improve.
• Change up ads every so often just the wording and save the older wording to use at a later date, just to keep things fresh.
• Using the above, try new action words and measure any changes via the auto reports

Now with the 4 pack listings, seems number 1 isn't the most desired rank, it's number 3 and 4, since when you scroll down just to see organic listings, the 3 and 4th spot is still visible, creating a very pleasurable price decrease overall by 50% in some cases for EXTREMELY competitive keywords!

I don't know how much longer these awesome prices and google's 4 ad pack goof will continue, but it won't last much longer I'm sure, until google get's data and either reverts back to 3 pack or moves number one spot to 3 or 4th spot to recoup their losses from everyone trying to pay less to rank 3rd or 4th.

But you could or might be enjoying that already if your niche handled the 4 pack listings this way.

I'm on this same path since we too cannot use noindex / nofollow due to limited backend interaction with Bigcommerce.

I like to block all cart related pages, which for ecommerce sites can be a boat load.

• /cart.php
• /checkout.php
• /finishorder.php
• /*login.php

just to name a few, then you have the sorting and compare pages, they have to be blocked or a mess unfolds.

• Disallow: /*sort=newest
• Disallow: /*sort=bestselling
• Disallow: /*?page=       ( Big duplicate page issue if you don't block this one with a wildcard, and cannot access your .htaccess file or the backend properly to noindex / nofollow )

Just to name a few, in my case, I only want the meat of the site to be indexed and rank for. Otherwise one client's site was ranking terms that more related to web development than the niche industry they lived in. Plus with a limited index budget, why would you want google or anyone else to crawl pages on your site with no SEO value towards your niche?

Unless you sold carts as in web developed carts for ecommerce sites you wouldn't want much of that indexed anyways, and even in that case, those pages aren't too useful for ranking. At least from what I've gathered in the niche industries.

So far in my experiences, backlinks especially quality ones are a piece of the SEO golden ticket, closer to a full ticket you piece together, the closer to page 1 you get.

Funnier thing is, backlinks are also some of the hardest to achieve SEO wise, even more so in niche industries where even your competition ranking page 1 has blog comments as backlinks, I'm not ditching blog comments, however they really aren't providing much usefulness to your site's user's.

I'm willing to bet this domain is doing just enough SEO that when combined with the backlinks they have, means they get the SERP results they want.

If your SEO is on point, focus on a effective backlink campaign. It's still the closest thing SEOs have that works well for short game, long game is always content that even your high school teachers couldn't say wrong about.

It's very possible, just don't do anything blackhat or try for fast results. What is impossible is getting to page 1 fast, there just isn't a fast way to do it and stay there.

It will take time, 6 months + kinda time, but once there, you'll still be working hard to stay there, but will be much easier.

I agree wholeheartedly that you should be trying to rank for as many keywords as possible, think of it like honeypots, can catch a few bees with one pot, but the more you have, the more bees you'll catch.

Then you craft the content and page creatively and within regulation standards, you can rank a page for multiple keywords that could potentially rank on page 1. But be careful not to use the same keyword on other pages, and if that keyword is part of a longtail, make sure you craft the content to show that the page is about that longtail.

If you stay relevant with the content compared to the keyword, you'll further increase CTR and conversions.

Also I'd like to add, your homepage should be ranking for what your overall site / service does, not the main things it sells nor the main service. Kinda like a very general keyword usage there, since you want more control over how these keywords rank in SERPs.

I just got done redesigning a client's site that had most of it's keywords ( main ones included ) ranking the homepage for those keywords, which was kinda nightmarish, since customers were hurting our overall CPC campaign and our organic results since they were bouncing so much. A homepage isn't going to be the info hotspot a user wants when they search for a keyword, since it normally is the spot you do brief eye catching highlights of items or services. Think of the homepage more like clickbait.

When you have subpages that specialize on keywords, you have a better chance to give the user what they wanted when finding your page in SERPs which will improve overall rankings and if you advertise, can help lower costs and improve quality scores.

You basically answered your own question just didn't realize it, using example.com/key-word-example should be a subpage targeting a main keyword you want to rank for. That way you'll be able to focus on content for that keyword easier, without worrying about other factors that a homepage needs.

Hope this wasn't TL:DR

Just to be clear I used placeholder examples so not to give out too much info to competitors if reading.

But yes to both, it's trying to optimize for the longtail with our main keyword in it, and with the above aside, it would be " laptop bags " is what we want to overall be our main keyword or main keyword group.

But inside that group, we have very important longtails, that use that keyword but are different material types, so " leather shoulder laptop bags " would be one of those important longtail keywords.

We have a landing page for the 2 word keyword, and child pages for the longtails, so that's where I feel it's kinda over reaching to include the 2 tail keyword twice, once in the parent category and again trailing the material type.

If it will help I can include the actual page and keywords in a private message, otherwise I don't feel it's in my best interest to unmask these details.

Hello,

I have a keyword for lack of providing too much info we will say my keyword is laptop-bags.

Now we have a /laptop-bags/  page and inside that page

**/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder/ **

We got a score of 95 for that page.

Now I got a score of 99 when I changed it to

**/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ **

The way Bigcommerce handles is it will use the product category title in the url, page title and site links, to me it feels like it's spammy, as well as on my /laptop-bags/ page, I now have 18 keywords of " laptop bags " on that page when before it was 12, since I added laptop-bags to all 6 categories inside the laptop-bags page.

How would you handle this, use the /keyword/ then /longtail-keyword/ in full or would using /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ still rank for leather shoulder laptop bags? I've asked this before and was told to use whatever sounded better to the user, but now moz is telling me different.

I'd also like to point out that I too have come across a new competitor who just popped in with a new url / site and started out ranking us on our major keywords. I mean page 2 right off the bat, when I audited their site, I saw:

1. many 404s,
2. bad link structure but good enough to function,
3. a shoty backlink campaign that was using a SEO company's site 7 times for various keywords just to rank, and had one actual backlink that would be considered whitehat.

The end result after watching them enjoy page 2 for 2 months, was one day while scanning the SERPs found them not on page 2 but on page 9, then they popped back to page 2 three days later. About 2 weeks later, they were page 10 and still are. Seems the got hit or google caught on to their backlink fun.

Stay whitehat, stay busy / productive and always push forward! Slow and steady does win the race.

The url without a slash seems to be the default now, while url with a slash redirects to one without, only for homepage. all other subpages have slashes as preferred and no matter what result in trailing slash, which is a major thing I wanted.

Thank you, am looking into things further via a Bigcommerce post on their forums, however I'm not holding my breath as some responses can take a good bit, since there is a ocean of users seeking responses as well.

Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues.

I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com.

I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers.

Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this.

What says you?

This is exactly what I was going on about, it's great for onsite and offsite PR.

See about turning some of your guides into infographics, summarizing the data into easier bits of digestible tidbits. In the world of scan happy folks with a perpetual 5 min attention span, longer is better for SEO but not always for the user unless it's presented in a way that keeps them engaged.

Break up text with interactive bits like links or downloadable pdfs, and even images like many others say. Video is always helpful, but balance is even more important. Like a bag of trail-mix, PR needs a proper mixture of content.

As a fellow eCommerce admin, I believe that the best PR / Outreach we can do, is in terms of customer assistance means, what I mean is, customer help aides, information funnels that better explain, then further breakdowns of those explanations.

Reach out to your manufacturers, services that use your products along side their own ( information for items they may use but don't focus on, ( example would be if you sold lawnmower accessories, reaching out to lawn services and pitch your information pages, if they like it, they'll link to it to spread to their employees maybe or even send to clients to further back up their quality ))

When selling items, we can't really reach out to other sites / services about selling our items, that doesn't get much in return, however we reach out to them providing information that relates to them, they feel you're doing some work for them and then become more receptive.

Think back to web rings / circles back in the early days of the internet, if they were done right, sites with relative content linked up and provided this inner circle of related sites that would play off one another's information.

It's the digital's age of scratching their back while they scratch yours.

Thank you!

I've gone through a 301 the urls we were doing good SEO wise with, however I would rather let the ones that panda seemed to not like get 404d and let them start a new with the revised urls as we bring them online at a later date.

This site had most of the SEO mojo going to the homepage since before I got my hands on the site, they didn't monitor backlinks well nor keyword usage and focused on the homepage as the SEO hub. Not knowing to tamper keywords accordingly throughout the site, keeping relative keywords only on the pages they best fit on.

The site ranked so poorly for the urls we're removing, as well the products weren't very profitable it at all. So keeping what worked best on the site was our focus while removing what wasn't helpful to the user or us.

Thank you again for the advice and I've certainly utilized what both of you have mentioned for what we really want to keep. And will be allowing the urls we're not happy with any longer to 404.

Thank you,

So what's the best course of action to take, if I want to keep these categories off the new site but will be adding them later on? How is it recommended to handle the resulting 404s?

I'm sure this happens in other sites, either a discontinuation of a product category, and a consolidation of products in general, or even site's hit by panda, how do they keep the content not seen and not affect them with the 404s if they do remove?

I thought about nofollow noindex but these products they want off completely for now.

We're going from about 664 pages to 130 pages internally.

We'll be removing 531 urls when we launch this new site in a week. All 531 pages are products that we will be working on their descriptions and overall SEO in general, but are not ready to go live with them.