Two points of view on optimizing our search pages. What should we go with?
-
So we're in the process of going back and forth with our designer about optimizing our search results, which also doubles as a landing page for visitors searching with keywords like "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces" We're on the front page in the SERPs, but still have a way to go.
This is our current page: http://www.evenues.com/Meeting-Spaces/Seattle/Washington
And this is something we've proposed for our designer to work with: http://imgur.com/JU1zg
There search page text and links in the top left corner were to be placed for onsite SEO purposes ie we have no real text/content on the page for relevancy.
We're currently in the process of writing the copy for each city on the search pages.
Our designer made this argument:
After giving it some thought I came to the conclusion that we may want to take a step back, and focus on the overall goal of this exercise.
From what I have gathered, you would like to generate more click-throus and improve SEO, right?
In my opinion, adding all of the provided copy and the link farm to the search results page would not necessarily help that. In fact, I think it would actually push the actual results way down. The content you provided me is more suited for a landing page, not a search results page (that is taking into consideration that you want similar content for other locations).
Redfin has done a ton of great SEO work on their site. Using them as an example, if you go to Redfin.com, you will find tiny links in the footer that say "home for sale in seattle" etc.
If you click on those, it puts you on a page like this: http://www.redfin.com/cities/1/seattle?src=homepage and then from there you can click to a neighborhood page like this: http://www.redfin.com/city/1387/WA/Bellevue.
I would recommend that we create a set of location pages with the content the client is asking for, that are specifically optimized for SEO, and provide links in the footer of the site to get to those pages. Then the links on the new landing pages would land the user on the search results page.
By keeping two different pages for two different purposes separate would help keep content more organized and help user find specific info they are looking for.
As a quick fix we could put one line of text under the H1 text on search results as well, maybe with a strong tag.
By doing that we will be able to keep the page looking clean and easy to navigate through.
Anyways, that's just my two cents.
Any ideas/input on this?
-
I like that idea! Thanks!
-
If users have to click from the landing page to the search results page to see the listings, that's an extra click = fewer people seeing the search results.
You could have two very similar pages - one with the extra text and images, and one without. Add a canonical tag to the one without so all the link juice goes to the one with the extra text and images.
-
Hi Adam,
Thanks a lot for your detailed reply!
We certainly only want to optimize only one page for similar terms. To be more clear, perhaps we should have a landing page with larger pictures/more text optimized for those terms that link to a search page that we don't care about getting indexed? I'm not sure if we have the resources to do this at this time however.
Very helpful, thanks! I'll pass this on to our CEO
Kenji
-
Here are my thoughts:
- I would not use http://www.redfin.com/cities/1/seattle?src=homepage as a template for a good page to emulate - it's just a page with a bunch of links. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future Google decides that page is not providing value to the user.
- You probably want to optimize a single page for "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces"
- You should probably send users who search for "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces" to the same page, too. I see no reason to have them see two different pages for those queries.
- Be wary of creating separate pages for SEO purposes. If you have an existing page for Seattle that most users see, there is no reason to create a second page for SEO. In fact, it could hurt you - having two pages for the same basic purpose (for users to see seattle meeting rooms) will divide your social likes/shares and organic backlinks among two pages. (On the flip side, you could work on getting both pages ranked, but I don't think that is what you were asking about...)
- If you don't want your text content pushing the listings down the page, put your textual content on the right side of the page or even at the bottom, like Zappos does.
Hope these are helpful.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Jquery in top of page vs text on bottom page
Is it the best way to use jquery sliders on the top of your page to still get all your text above the fold and score in search engines? for example: http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-conte... is much better to score high ranks in search engines than http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-conte... ?? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | HMK-NL0 -
Duplicate page
Just getting started and had a question regarding one of the reports. It is telling me that I have duplicate pages but I'm not sure how to resolve that.
On-Page Optimization | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Better page optimization for specific locations
I have a client that gets great ranking in a certain city mainly because that is their main corporate office and the address and city name is all over the place in their content. I am about to embark on getting them higher ranking in other cities as well and am looking for the best approach to make that possible. My thoughts... 1- create seperate content for the other locations, but the body information would probably end up looking duplicate, but I could be more specific with title, description and content realting to that specific city. 2- add the additional cities to the current content??? Need some expert advice. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | brantwadz0 -
"Canonical URL Tag Usage" recommendation in SEOmoz "On-Page Optimization" Tool
Here comes another one related to SEOmoz "On-Page Optimization" Tool. The tool says the following about one of our pages: Canonical URL Tag Usage Explanation: Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH
use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future
developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe
the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic
today. Recommendation: Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page. Let's say our page is http://www.example.com/brands/abc-brand and on its header we'll place the following tag: Is this correct? I thought the canonical tag was meant for duplicates of the original page, for example: http://www.example.com/brands/print/abc-brand href="http://www.example.com/brands/abc-brand**?SESSID=123** Thanks in advance.0 -
Homepage ranking before optimized page
We finally managed to obtain a spot in the first 10 positions of the serps for our main keyword. Since a week, our homepage started ranking in the top 15 as well, so we we're pretty excited about that. On our way to dominate the top 10! Since 2 days we started to rank with our homepage before our optimized page, which sucks because the metadescription (made up by Google) isn't helping our CTR. Is there a way that we can show Google that the other page is more relevant than the homepage? Or do we have to wait until we have build up enough PA to switch places with the homepage (seems unlikely to me).
On-Page Optimization | | duoweb0 -
One domain with keyword optimized pages or multiple domains
Hi There. I have a client in the real estate law services business. Which is better for long term search traffic? 1. A single domain ie. smith and smith law.com with pages focussing on each neighbourhood they operate in ie. .com/real estate law manhattan.php, .com/real estate law brooklyn.php etc or 2. multiple domains each focusing on one neighbourhood the business operates in ie: real estate law manhattan.com, real estate law brooklyn.com etc Thanks for the help, Josh
On-Page Optimization | | dreadmichael0