This week’s ask an SEO question comes from Jubi in Kerala:
“We changed our on-page content recently as keyword positions were nil. After updating the content, the keywords started appearing, but after four weeks the keywords went back to nil. Why is this so, any suggestions? [Page provided]”
Great to meet you, Jubi, and thank you for the question.
I reviewed your page, and although it is written for the user and in a conversational tone with keywords incorporated throughout, the site, overall, is likely the problem.
SEO is more than words on a page. It is also:
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- How your brand is represented by third parties.
- The code of the site.
- User and spider experience defined both topically and structurally.
- The overall quality of the experience for the user, the spiders, and the algorithms.
- Consumers not needing to do more searches as the solutions are provided by your website, or you give them the resources to implement with trusted third parties (backlinks) when you do not offer the product, service, or solution.
Changing the wording on a page can and does help, but it relies on the rest of the website, too.
I looked at your website for about five minutes, and multiple things popped out. After plugging it into an SEO tool that shows the history of the site, I have some starting points for you to help your site rank, and hopefully, this can help with your client work, too.
Focus On Your Target Audience And Region
First and foremost, your website is in U.S. English, and the language declarations are also in U.S. English. Your target audience is Kerala, India, and you offer digital marketing services in Kerala for local companies.
With a Google Search, I went to see if American English is the common language. Instead, it is Malayalam.
If both English and Malayalam are used, create both versions on your website. More importantly, see how people search in your area.
This is important for both you as a vendor and your local SEO and marketing clients.
I’ve done this in Scandinavia, where TV commercials in Sweden are in English (or were back then), so product searches and types were done in English more than in Swedish.
By having both languages available in content and PPC campaigns, conversions and revenue both scaled vs. only having the Swedish versions when I started working with this brand.
If they are not searching in English as a primary language, use the language they search in as the primary and make English the backup.
Next, look at your schema. You have a local business, which is great, but there are other ways you can define the area you serve and what you do.
Service schema can show you have a service, and you can nest an area served in because you’re a local business with a specific region you service.
Clean Up Hacked Code
Your website was hacked, and the hackers filled it with tons and tons of low-value content to try and rank for brands and brand products.
These pages are all 404, which is great, but they’re still being found. 410 them and make sure you block the parameter in robots.txt correctly. It looks like you’re missing an “*” on it.
You may also want to format a full robots.txt vs. using your software’s default with the one disallow line.
Undo The Over-Optimization
The website follows almost every bad practice with over-optimization, including things that are more for an end user rather than ranking a page.
Your meta descriptions on multiple pages are just keywords with commas in between vs. a sentence or two that tells the person what they’ll find if they click through.
I wasn’t sure if I was seeing it correctly, so I did a site:yourdomain search on Google and saw the descriptions were, in fact, just keywords with commas.
Optimize meta descriptions to let the person know why they should click through to the page. I created a guide to writing local SEO titles and meta descriptions here.
There are a couple of hundred backlinks, but they’re all directories and spammy websites. Think about your local media and trade organizations in India. How can you get featured there instead?
Is there a local chamber of commerce, small business, or local business group you can work with?
What can you share about market trends that will get you on the local news or news and business sites to link to your resources? These are the backlinks that will help you.
Redo Your Blog
The blog has some topically relevant content, but the content is thin, and your guides that are supposed to answer questions start with sales pitches instead.
Sales pitches do not belong in the first paragraph or even the first five paragraphs of a blog post or guide ever.
People are there to learn. If they like what they learned, you have earned their trust. If the topic is relevant to a product or service you offer, that is when you do the sales pitch.
I clicked on two posts, and after the sales pitch, you share concepts, which is good, but there are no examples that the user can use.
The pages are missing supporting graphics and images to demonstrate concepts, information about the person who created the content, and ways to implement the solution.
One of the posts talks about slow webpage speed. Instead of giving a way to fix it or a starting point, the content just defines what it is. The person has to do another search, which means it is a bad experience.
Add in a couple of starting points like removing excess files (give a couple of types), using server-side rendering with how this helps and an example, plugins or tools for compressing images that don’t need to be in high-resolution, etc.
Now the person has action items, and you have an opportunity to link to detailed guides off of keywords (internal links) naturally to your pages that teach this.
This adds a ton of value to the user and gives them a reason to come back to you or even hire you to do the work for them.
On multiple posts, the writer stuffs internal links off of keyword phrases that are not naturally occurring. These are in the sales pitches, the opening, and the closing of each post.
In theory, this may not be bad for SEO, but it is not helpful for the user and may send low-quality page experience signals to Google if users are bouncing.
From my experience, your content is less likely to get sourced or linked to if it is a sales pitch vs. sharing a solution, but that is just what I’ve experienced.
Instead of starting with a sales pitch or having sales pitches in every post, build an email or SMS list and use remarketing to bring them back.
If you start with a sales pitch and no actual solution, they’ll likely bounce as the page is low-quality.
Final Thoughts
Your service pages overall are not bad. It is the rest of the website.
It needs to be recoded and focused on your target audience, the over-optimizations should be undone, and your agency needs to become the go-to digital marketing agency in your region. Most importantly, the code and content need to be cleaned up.
You offer these services, but prospective clients seeing these bad practices may be turned off and cost you business.
Also, don’t forget to create a Google Business Profile; you don’t currently have one even though you have a physical location, have active clients, and offer services.
I hope this helps, and thank you for asking a really good question.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
