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I agree with the others, this is mostly likely acused by a temporary change int he way Google si viewing your site. Possibly by a link apeparing/disappearing or possibly from an algorithm change. I ntoice this on my sites all of the time.

It is, of course, also possible that the other sites reacted to your ranking increase, and started to do more SEO and now rank above you because of that - but this is highly unlikely in my experience.

The best next steps is to keep building your link profile. Ensure you get good quality links and Google will recognise this and start to attribute more rank.

One point that is worth mentioning, is do you think that the site you've sent should rank at #2? Taking a look at the SERPs that are more relevant pages to rank at #2 then the sub domain in question. The top leveld omain of your site is in fact #1. Maybe you need to increase the on page relevenecy of your sub domain to the keywords you're ranking for?

That's a good point.

Does your CMS allow you to updaet the URL of an existing page? If it does, I would recommend doing this (rather than recreating the pages) and then making sure you have a static rewrite setup for that page. This is pretty easy to do in Apache and IIS (there are plent of guides available through Google)

This is something that interests me as well. One of my sites has a very similar setup to you, and I ahve considered doing the same (submitting all of the venues to Google Places with the comapny name and h/o phone number)

I have refrained from doing this so far though, and my reasoning is as follows. If the venue (in your case training location) is already registered will Google mind? Can you have multiple business registered at one address?

The second reason I've not done is that it feels a little spammy. The business doesn't necessarily own the venues (training locations) so why should you be listed for them?

I wonder how this works for serviced/shared offices?

I recently did a similar thing on my site. I created a redirect (301) for all pages on the site. I then crated all new pages with exactly the same content using a friendly URL.

I didn't notice any drop in traffic or ranking (in fact it increased), but this was for a fairly small site in a not-overly competetive niche.

It is normal for 301 redirects to cause a temporary drop in ranking, but this should be gained wback within a coule of weeks and in my experience exceed because you now have nice seo friendly urls.right

According to Google a rel=canonical is just a hint 9although they say they strongly honour it) - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html. This might explain why your old page is still showing up int he results.

Has your new page been indexed yet?

Switching to https by using a 301 redirect will probably cause a temporary dip in traffic, but this should only be temporary.

It would make sure that you use a "rel=canonical" tag on the pages just to be clear to Google that the HTTPS version is what you want users to see.

I use OSE for competetive analysis. For me it's greatest benefits are in seeing how competetive my niche are, but more importantly what competitors are doign to get their links.

Once I have the link information I can find out where competitors are getting links, the types of links they are getting and how valuable these links are. I can decide which of these ideas are worth copying, which areas they don't appear to have targeted or whether they may have targeted an area but didn't get any joy. That last part comes with knowing your niche well.

I would certainly put alt tags on all images for accessibility and usability reasons. The SEO impact of alt tags on images is minimal, but I've never heard of alt tags diluting the SEO success - it sounds ominous to me.

I would be wary of being "too spammy" with your alt tags, as it is entierly possible that googlebot might pick up on this.

It is important to note that good descriptive alt tags (with your keywords) and keywords within your iamge fielnames will certainly help your images rank better on Google Image search. This may or may not be an alternative vertical source of traffic to your site that you may or may not want - really depends on the type of site you're running.

Gianluca,

The free version of click tale allows you to record 400 page views a month on any page (not just the most viewed) but you can only record 100 per week and you can only the view 2 page visits. So if people are landing on the homepage and the going to the contact us page - the free version should suffice.

Other areas such as heatmaps etc. will onyl work on the most visited page (which in this case would not work) but there are other services that provide this tracking if required.

Plus as a side note, there is no need to enable clicktale on every page - the user might only enable it on th contact us age - in which case he will have access to all of the heatmaps, recordings etc.

There are possible a few reasons for this:

1. The user is filling in the contact form, but then decides not to send it

2. The user is filling in the contact form, but then can't send it because of an error with validation or something server side

3. The user is filling in the contact form, and is sending it (you don't specifically say that they don't take any action on that page)

4. a percentage of the users will almost certainly be looking at the contact page for social proof - is there an email address I can copy, is there a physical address, do they have a phone number, is there an easy complaints procedure etc. - these people will then often navigate on (back to the homepage or another site page)

5. People might want to see where the company is based and then decide that the company is not relevenat to them because they are from a different, country/state/country/town/city/etc.

Plus, I'm sure there are a million other reasons.

I recommend installing ClickTale on the site. The free version of the product should be sufficient to gather some video recordings of what the userts are actually doing on the page. This is the best way to see what the user is doing (but not a great way to know what they;re thinking! - although you can make some educated guesses). Check it out at http://www.clicktale.com

I don't really have much experience in using these toolbars, but taking a tep back from the SEo side of things for a minute I can see that these could have a huge impact on user experience.

It you want the users of your clients sites to interact socially, then this is an ideal way to do it. It is out of the way, but accessible, and you have all of your social links in one place.

I noticed there is a link back to wibya in the toolbar, but I think that even if you're losing a little bit of link jjuice (I've not checked to see if that's the case), I think the user experience would probably outweigh it.

As long as you have your 301 redirections setup correctly and your sitemaps updated appropriately, I don't think there will be any additional penalty for making both changes at the same time.

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Have a look at the reference, it shows that what I was saying about the "-" is true, although whether it is always honoured is another question!

It also suggests about arithmitic operators (-,+,/,*), as these could all be part of your part number,a nd your part number could sometimes look like an equation, google may try to "solve" the equation. Ig uess the way to get around that would be to put your query in speach marks, but you can;t train your user base to do that!

Out of vuriosity, what pro video do you find your answer in. I wouldn't mind taking a look myself.

One of the most important factors on a PPC landing page is message match. You must ensure that your ads message is cleearly repeated on your landing page.

From an SEO perspective, this means making sure that your page title and h1/h2 tags align with the messaeg you are putting across in your ad copy.

Something I have been working on is having my ad headline as the H1 on my landing page, and my ad body as a H2 on my landing page. Then having the title of my page be something like "%Ad heading% | My Site".

It is definitely worth trying this out as part of your A/B testing. some of my landing pages using this technique are getting conversions around the 8% mark.

It is also worth trying to get your message match in your URL title as well. If you are ad heading was "Top 10 SEO Tactics" for example, why not have your landing page URL be something like http://www.mysite.com/top-10-seo-tactics.

On another note, I don't think you would need to create 100 different pages for 100 keywords. you could have just one page that does some text replacement to ensure you keep your message match. I usually create a landing page and then replace some tags within the page depending on what ad users come from. This is pretty simple to do in .net/php and will save you recoding up lots of pages.

My personal thought is that you're doing the right thing as you are. You could possibly have an area on your page that lists possible varients of the part number in a box titled "Also known as" or something similar to increase user experience. I'm nto sure it will have a huge amount of SEo benefit though.

Whilst nto an expert on Google query syntax, I'm pretty sure things like full stops, slashes are more or less ignored. dashes are used by google to remove a part of a qury (e.g. "cars -audi" - find sites with the keyword cars but not the keyword audi) so maybe that is why you're experiencing sme differences in the SERPs when searching for the same part number with different combinations of slashes, dashes and stops.

I'm not sure footer links necessarily carry much SEo weith anymore, but from a user perspective I definitely find them 100% useful.

If I'm reading a long blog post on SEOMoz for example, the links at the bottom allow me to navigate where I want to go next without having to scroll back to the top of the page.

It is also always the first place I would look to find contact information for a website and also for a TOS/Privacy policy.

This is certainyl the type of feedback I was after. Having revisited the homepage and landing pages it nwo seems obvious that the landing page doesn't give enough detail about the product.

I've been toying with the idea of removing the video for a while, as I'm not sure (in it's current state) it adds much value. Do you have any examples of videos that you consider to be "dyanmic enough to whip out your credit card"?

I will certainly test out some of the other elements you've pointed out.

PPC keyworsd are the same as the organic keywords. More than 95% of my total traffic comes from the keywords "driving test cancellations". this is split between PPC and organic in an 80/20 ratio.

Thanks. Are there any specific factors that you feel are missing from landing page. How could I increase user confidence? Was there anythign on the other pages of the site that made you feel more comfotable?

Hi,

I'm having a few issues with my landing page conversion. I have followed several guides found on this site (especially the unbounce.com ones) but what'ever I try my landing page CRO doesn't seem to increase.

the landing page in question is http://www.drivingtestnow.co.uk/find-driving-test-cancellations.

I'm getting traffic to my landing page solely through PPC traffic from Google. My stats are rough as follows:

Arrive at landing page - 100% (obviously)
Click through to buy now page - 15-20%
Actually complete the buy now process - 1%

Conversion from organic traffic landing directly on the homepage at http://www.drivingtestnow.co.uk is having a conversion rate of about 5%. It seems odd to me that my highly targeted ad campaign and landing page are convertign so badly compared to the less atrgeted organic search traffic and homepage.

Have you got any ideas why this might be occurring and also any tips on how I can improve the conversion rate for my product?

Gary...