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Woohoo!

A question that I can definitely help to answer. I was in the Hospitality industry for 2 years working on purely hotel sites, from large international chains to small family owned businesses.

The hospitality industry is definitely one of the MOST competitive industries that I've ever been in and competed on. The majority of the SERPs are already dominated by OTAs and Google's HPA isn't helping much either. Here's my answers, I hope they help!

1. I totally hear you on HPA. It's a very specific product that's rolled out by Google to target the hospitality industry and one that does NOT get as much attention as HPA. What you CAN use HPA for is for data-mining purposes. HPA offers quite a bit of insight into the search behavior of the possible customers for your hotel clients. That data can help to guide you in focusing your efforts for organic search. For example, looking at the historical data in HPA, what are the top sources for bookings? Is it Google Maps? Which countries are they coming from? What days of the week are they booking for and when are they booking? (This was particularly useful as I was also managing their PPC search campaigns.)

2. I might be wrong on this as it's been about 6 months since I stopped working on the Hospitality industry, but I think you can find the CTRs for the knowledge graph or 3-pack in Google My Business, and the CTRs for SERP rankings in Google Search Console.

3. SERPs are essentially dominated by the OTAs for the top converting keywords. Fist-bump I totally get how you feel about this. 
   My strategy for traffic was to build up the OTHER pages. Smaller sites aren't going to rank for top-level queries like 'chicago hotel rooms' for example. They can however rank well for associated keywords that are relevant to the hotel itself. For example, 'beach front hotel in east florida' or my personal favorite type 'family rooms near ****'

Also look towards the property's other features. Restaurants, spas and other facilities are key targets to work on for SEO.

Another tip I can give you is to analyze the countries that the site's traffic comes from. I saw some decent results from optimizing the site for Naver (Korea), Yandex (Russia), Yahoo (Japan), and Baidu (China). It's definitely challenging to try to optimize for other search engines, especially the language barrier. But I definitely saw good results from this.

Feel free to reach out to me for other queries!

Are you making any changes to the site's backlink profile? I took a quick look and noticed that the site has some spammy looking backlinks pointing to it. That might be a reason for the decrease. Also, I think Moz has since updated their index and the metrics they use. Might be a good time to check on your metrics again!

Hi etakgoz,

That's a huge drop. I've actually seen a similar drop in traffic before in the past, specifically due to a site redirection issue and also Google Penguin penalties. What caused a mis-diagnosis for me in the past was that our site redirection happened at almost the same time as Google core algorithm changes during the same period.

Have you taken a look at the algorithm change timelines to see if it's possibly an external factor that caused the drop in traffic?

Other than that, did you have any tracking tools or software similar to Moz that you were using to keep track of site issues or the backlink profile? The decrease in traffic is pretty severe and there could be a multitude of issues possibly causing this. Was there a similar decrease in search rankings along the same period of time as well?

Sorry for the questions, but it'll really help if you could provide more details for further diagnosis.

Heh, I'm in Singapore and I feel the same way. Been a long time Moz Pro subscriber and a huge fan, but I gotta say that us folks in APAC don't get as much love.

I'd be interested to help out. Let me know if this is still something you're helping them out with!

Sounds like you're talking about optimization for Local Search! 
Here's a resource I used to help educate myself on local search optimization in the past:

https://neilpatel.com/blog/definitive-guide-local-seo/

Hope it helps!

Hi KanikaG,

The difference in rankings can be due to several different reasons. Moz's crawlers are pretty accurate in my experience but I've usually got to make sure that the settings are correct.

How is your client checking the rankings? If the client is simply opening up a browser tab and Googling the keywords for example. they might get an inaccurate ranking, especially if they've visited competing sites before. The reason for this is simply their search/browser history. If they visited a site before, even more so if they searched for a keyword then clicked into the competing site. The best way to get a 'clean' read on the rankings is to simply open up an incognito window (if they're using Chrome), or a new private window (for Firefox). That way, their cookies/browsing history/previous queries don't influence what they are seeing in the search result pages.

Hope this helps!

Hi Fubra,

First thing that I can recommend that you do is to go into your AdWords account, then into the campaigns, then into the tab titled 'Keywords'. Once there, click into the tab titled 'Search Terms'.

Once in the 'Search Terms' tab, you should see all the keywords that triggered your ad to show. In this tab, look for the specific keyword that is unwanted. Select this keyword by clicking on the selection box on the left and you should see a bar pop up that allows you to select what you want to do with this keyword. Select the option 'Add as Negative Keyword' and that should stop the ad from triggering each time someone searches for the unwanted keywords.

Pro-tip: As part of your PPC optimization process, you should also be looking in the 'Search Terms' section of your campaigns/ad groups on a regular basis to see exactly what search terms are triggering your ads to show. There's bound to be search terms that are non-converters and also irrelevant search terms. By continually adding those to your list of negative keywords, you make your PPC campaigns more cost-effective.

Good luck!

Trust me on this one. I've cancelled my  Moz Pro account and sometimes neglected due to expired credit cards or updated payment methods etc and so far have never had an issue with any lost of data in my campaigns etc. in the past 5 years. That's one thing that keeps me coming back to Moz after having been a paid member for so long.

Hello idosmaccount,

Sounds like your site is a news site? I'd probably need more information to help out.

There's multiple approaches to this issue. If you've no-indexed or blocked off the pages in your robots.txt, you also lose the possible search traffic that those pages could bring. What other news sites have done to try to resolve this is to build in a on-page paywall similar to this https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/pocket-rocket-packs-a-punch

This approach allows for a 'sneak peek' of the page's content, also allows for the page to be indexed, and also allows for the user that comes in via search traffic the chance to convert to a paid subscription that unlocks the page's content.

More likely than not, schematic markups aren't a high priority for Moz at this point. With a thousand and one other items to address and work on, prioritization and allocation of resources kicks in and schematic markups might not be as important for Moz. I also think that Google does a pretty good job of marking up Moz's content without active intervention on the part of Moz's staff, so they've de-prioritized that.

Hi,

Wow, that's a really broad question! (And one that I'd love to have the secret formula too)

In all honesty, I follow a pretty simple framework for optimizing a new site or working on a new project.

1. Find out what's the main Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the site. For example, if it's an e-commerce site, then the main KPI is most likely conversions into sales ($) rather than just traffic. So in that case, the aim is to get ranked for high converting keywords. If it's a local business with no e-commerce function, then localized search ranking for relevant keywords might be best. So find out what's the KPI before anything else.

2. Do the keyword research! This is pretty much the MOST important part to me. Rankings can be worked on and improved, but if you start off on the wrong keyword, it can be a massive pain to redo the entire site, just because the targeted keyword is wrong! I've got the most experience working with e-commerce sites, and what I do typically is to run some traffic for a first batch of targeted keywords via Google Adwords (if it's not too expensive!), to see if the traffic is useful in converting to actual results. AdWords will take a few minutes to set up, but to optimize the site for organic search is a bigger project! If the traffic from AdWords pans out, then it's probably a good set of keywords to work on for organic search too.

3. Once I've established the keywords, the next thing i work on is the on-site stuff. Site architecture, URLs, domains, page titles, content relevancy, internal linkages, the whole works. It might be a while before you look at all these stuff once the site is up and running again, so you want to make sure it's all right and in-place.

4. Prep for the launch of the site by creating all relevant social media pages/profiles. Social's a big part of search too and for overall marketing purposes too. For search optimization, it's also best to ensure that all your social media profiles are linked to the site you're working on.

5. Once the site is live, tap on whatever quality backlinks you have. I'm pretty certain most of us here have a secret cache of backlinks that we secretly hoard. So tap on those to give your new born site that little bit of boost at the start. You can also consider a few (just one or two) directory links. For directory links, I'd highly recommend DMOZ since it's free (might get a link or might not, but definitely worth a try), and Yahoo's directory (paid inclusion at $299/year but actually worth it).

6. Now that everything is in place, this is where the real work begins! Ensure a constant (and quality) presence on social media, continue to create good quality, relevant and most importantly, share-worthy content for the site, build relationships and get links either organically or through social engineering, try to get PR coverage if possible (not press releases, but relevant and hopefully good coverage of the business), and grow your traffic!

Hope this helps!

Hi agsIn,

Domain authority has a ton of other factors beyond just domain age. Rand Fishkin from Moz actually did a great video on it, but for some reason, the videos aren't accessible right now, maybe someone from Moz can check on them? It'll be great to take a look at those videos again.

http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics

Also, I took a look at the site you mentioned, and though it was registered back in 1996 (which is really old), its backlink profile isn't fantastic and includes quite a few backlinks from link exchanges and pay-for-links directories. I think it would be a good idea to take a look at this infographic: http://searchengineland.com/seotable/

I use it as a constant reference point for optimizing a site and it was great for helping me learn more about optimizing sites in general too.

Hope this helps!

Hi Zippy-Bungle,

Personally I think it's definitely worth it. It's great if you've found a vertical directory that lists companies in your relevant industry! When I built my site, there weren't any great backlink opportunities immediately available, so I created business profiles in the few general directories recommended in the book Rand Fishkin co-wrote 'Art of SEO'. These were BOTW, JoeAnt and Yahoo's Directory. I pretty much saw the effect these links had in about a month or so, bringing up my brand-new site up to the first page for bunch of semi-competitive keywords.

Because my site is an online marketplace, I couldn't find any good vertical directories. If your business has a relevant vertical directory like azom.com, go for it! Besides the backlink, they could also bring you organic leads too!

Hope this helps!

The general answer would be 'Depends on the agency'. 
I've worked with agencies in the past that would charge USD$500 per campaign set up, but this also doesn't include the creatives and coding of landing pages as those would be additional costs. For the monthly management, 15% of the total adspend is the usual fee.

Hey Issac,

Not necessarily true. The PA is calculated quite similarly to the site's DA. Which means that (as a rough example), the older blog post you checked the PA as 33 on, might have earned more backlinks, been around longer etc. It's not a confirmed thing that the page with your backlink will eventually have the same PA.

PA and DA are interlinked in the sense that DA will affect PA, but often times, you'll actually see a wide spread of pages with different PAs under every site. For example, my site's home page PA is 42, but a lot of my other pages have PAs ranging from 1 to 19, depending on how much emphasis I've put on them, or if they've earned more backlinks over time.

Hope that helps!

Ecommerce marketplace for local classes here. We have over 3K SKUs on the site and I'd agree with what Dimitrii suggested. As an add-on to what he said, I'd also strongly suggest that you ensure the site's overall SEO architecture is well positioned to rank on a variety of keywords (depending on what your keyword research says of course).

For example,

• Our home page targets the broadest keywords (local classes etc.)

• Category pages targets 2nd tier keywords (baking classes, cooking classes etc)

• Product pages targets long-long-tail keywords (macaron baking class in the east)

I find that this approach works very well for ecommerce sites with a broad range of categories. In your case, Evening Dresses might be a category of it's own, with each SKU page ranking for its own long-tail keywords. As Dimitrii mentioned as well, image search does contribute a fair amount of traffic on it's own, and we've even received backlinks from site-owners who found our image via image search, and credited our site with a backlink

It's best to optimize the images you post up to be as descriptive as possible. Being an ecommerce site owner, I personally know your pain with hundreds if not thousands of SKUs, but cumulatively, it does make an impact and will help!

Hi vtmoz,

I don't think there's any issues with a high number of internal links pointing to the homepage. In fact, for nearly all sites, I'd say that the number one linked to page would be the homepage. I've built and ranked multiple sites, all with the top linked to page being the homepage and have not had any issues. Could you post a couple of links that say otherwise?

Hi Jarno,

This happened some time ago and I actually exited the business.

In hindsight, what you commented on was exactly correct. At the launch of the business, I had 0 brand queries. A year later, I had over 2000 monthly brand queries.

What happened was that the press covered us in print, but we also became a 'resource' for the reporters. Every time they had a question or were writing an article for something related, for example seasonal trends in classes, or newly popular classes, they reached out to us and would often quote us in their articles.

Interestingly as well, offline articles in the newspapers eventually made their way online and when i found these articles indexed as well, I reached out to my new-found contacts there and they were glad to link the company's name over to the site.

Much obliged for the update! I was checking on a backlink profile just yesterday and had seen the domain authority increase to 21 and then when I checked back again today, it was down to 20 again. I'm curious on one thing. Moz Local submits to BOTW, but why do we not see the BOTW link in the backlink profile from Link Explorer? I'm guessing that BOTW should be one of the sites indexed as well correct?