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My understanding is they do look at H3 tags and valuate them as being higher emphasis than normal paragraph copy, however, they do not have a much "weight" in the on-page algorithm as the H1 or H2s. If having H3s makes sense for your page's content and helps the user better read and understand the content, I say H3s are positive and I would not hesitate to use them.

I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.

Just took at look a the site and ran a Link Analysis in the Moz Link Explorer.

Technical Analysis: Https= Good, Site Speed is good (under 2 seconds according to Pingdom), 44 pages on the website (not bad for a local business), and 0 broken links found throughout the website according to BrokenLinkCheck.com

On-Site: Meta Titles & Description could use some help. Try editing the Meta Titles especially on pages you would like to rank on Google, the homepage and service pages especially. If you are trying to rank for "New Jersey" searches, ie "SEO New Jersey", mention New Jersey more in the copy, H2s on occasion, etc. I don't see the homepage or service pages mentioning it once, except for the "NJ" abbreviation in your footer address and it being on the back-end of your Home Page Meta Title.

**Off-Site: **The website has a pretty bare link profile as you mentioned, and unfortunately blogging every week is not going to compensate for not having inbound links, unless you are doing some hardcore outreach to get your posts linked to. I would put a focus on this, even if you start with simple high-quality directory or content sharing websites. Use the Moz Link Explorer to see what sites are linking to your competitors, then strategize on how to acquire some similar links.

Hope this helps and best of success to you!

Shorten and Redirect (With keeping the URL keyword-focused). If there is an opportunity for those website pages to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and spend a few minutes optimizing them as well.

You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one, and then re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

We have seen good results from doing this on our website and it can be an easy win to bumping up rankings for those pages.

If you are on a Wordpress website there is an "All 404 to Homepage" Plugin that you can install for free that makes all 404 pages redirect to your homepage. This is what I have found to be the easiest solution to this, otherwise you can setup individual 301s from each broken URL to a relevant live URL.

Personally, I would still de-optimize the blog, just keep a notes document of before/after changes that you make during de-optimization, that way if the worst case scenario happens and neither page is ranking for your keyword, you can undo the de-optimization and look for another solution.

Also, after you de-optimize the post it may be worth it to utilize Google Search Console's Fetch & Render tool to request Google to re-index and crawl all of the direct links on the product page and blog page. This can sometimes work like a "refresh" to get Google to properly index both pages quicker. I would still wait like a week or so after you de-optimize the post page to see what happens.

Impossible to say for sure Tom, I would give it a go personally, especially if there is another keyword you want to target with the blog post. If Google is currently only allowing one page of your website to rank at one time for your keyword, de-optimizing one of the competing pages for that keyword should lead to more consistent ranking for the other page with all else being equal.

Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.

One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.

Hope this helps and best of success!

I would make sure your homepage is in Google's index first by searching "site:yourwebsite.com". If it is indexed, then work on building some internal and external links to it, making sure your Google My Business is linked to it, and then putting your brand name somewhere in the Meta Title and Meta Description of the homepage. This should help your homepage rank more for brand name searches.

Did you mean https://www.gizmocombat.com/? If you did, your website is live, but according to https://ismywebsitepenalized.com/gizmocombat.com, it is penalized by Google. You can get more insights on why if you set up and verify Google Search Console for your website and then look under Manual Actions.

In theory, it should result in your product page ranking more consistently. One way to help solidify your product pages rankings for your target keyword would be to add an anchor text link with your target keyword pointing to the product page within the blog post (which has more external links). This would help "transfer some authority" that the blog post has to the product page.

To be safe when making these changes to de-optimize the blog post, keep track of every change you make just in case you need to revert back to the way it was, and also keep track of the rankings for both the product page and blog post separately.

Hope this helps and best of success!

Hi Ross,

Several years ago we used to use Google+ with a mediocre level of engagement, but today it is mostly a dead social site. Google has even begun deleted profiles that are unused and appears to be showing signs of dissolving it completely in the near future. In my experience, I would advise you make sure you have a filled out profile on it (usually it will be tied to your Google My Business account), but then not invest a ton of time with posts after it is created.

Agree with Miriam, especially if you have a larger company or one that focuses on a national presence.

If you are looking for a local SEO expert, I would potentially be happy to help, as that is more of my specialty.

Another option if you want someone who is located in your city is to see if Upcity.com has a list of SEOs for your location.

I personally would do bulk 301 redirects for this, and would not anticipate a negative impact on organic traffic. If anything, you are shortening your URLs which is a good SEO practice, you could probably look at shortening the "thisistheblogpost" part of the URL at the same time you are creating your 301 redirects to make sure the URL is a short as possible, while still including the blog post's target keyword or phrase. Hope this helps and best of success!

Good to hear. Although this is solved, I did want to say the "Redirection" plugin is Wordpress is free and easy to use.

Best of success to you!

If there is an opportunity for those blog posts to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and optimize them. You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old to the new ones, and re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

No problem Neil, on-site SEO often makes me feel the same! It's easy to go from "following best SEO practices" to "over-optimization", and constant testing, checking results, and striving to always be learning what works today is essential. Best of success!

No problem. URL shortening with 301 redirects and making sure it is a keyword-focused URL path is a great way to often get some quick wins and improvements in rankings. Godspeed!

Hi Howard, to answer your question, in my experience 9 times out of 10 the answer is Yes.

An example of this is a page on our website that we were trying to rank for "PPC Kansas City".

Initially, our URL was https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/, but we then changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/ and added a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL.

This resulted in our rankings jumping from page 2 on Google to the top 3-5 positions on page 1 of Google. We also still rank in the top 3-5 for "google adwords kansas city" and "google adwords campaigns kansas city".

I would just be sure to be tracking the target keyword rankings for that page specifically before you make the change.

Hope this helps and best of success to you!

Very interesting situation Neil, it sounds like you did the right thing with looking at what the competition was doing, and then just making one change at a time, while using the Fetch & Render tool in GSC to see results faster.

While keyword density is a factor, Google is constantly trying to figure out the "searcher intent", and it is possible that adding this keyword in that seemed like a no-brainer changed Google's perspective of the page's "searcher intent". Just spitballing here of course, as there a ton of potential on-site factors at play. It sounds like you are on the right mindset though and I wouldn't totally throw keyword density out, just focus more on "content depth" and helping solve the searcher intent.