How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
-
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs.
Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
-
Hi Karen.
I can appreciate your desire to keep your #1 ranking, and not make any changes to the page. Your fears are valid as any "improvements" you make to the page can impact your ranking. It's a tough spot. Google wants to provide users with the best experience, but by making changes to improve that experience you risk the #1 spot.
I took a look at your page and your SERP and have a concern. Your title in the results page shows as "Per Diem - Nursing news, career resources, RN jobs and nursing..."When I visit the actual page, the title is "Nursingvillage.com - Career Option". If that was a recent change, I would suggest it is a bad one and should be corrected. It would be a reasonable cause to lose your #1 ranking.
A reasonable title for the page would be "Per Diem Nursing | Nursingvillage.com". The rest of your title would be best left for your meta description.
As far as why you are ranking #1, the term "per diem nursing" only receives 3600 global searches per month according to AdSense. It's not that competitive. Compare that with the following keywords which receive more global monthly searches:
nursing jobs - 1,000,000
nurse employment - 673,000
nursing job employment - 550,000
nursing positions - 301,000
jobs for nurses - 246,000
"Per diem nursing" is a long tail keyword phrase which is why you are ranking so well.
-
Your rankings are mainly supported by title tag, keywords in on-page text and inbound links. If you do not change these you should be able to make page modifications with little risk of rankings loss. If you work to improve your site in a way that attracts relevant links that should strengthen your position.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
What's the average rank update time after site and/or backlink changes?
What's currently the typical time, ON AVERAGE, it takes to see ranking changes when significant improvements are made to significant ranking signals on a long-established (as opposed to brand new) website? Does the rank update associated with on-page optimization happen sooner than addition of quality backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCCMoz0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
H1 tag found on page, but saying doesn't match keyword
We've run a on-page grader test on our home page www.whichledlight.com with the keyword 'led bulbs' it comes back with saying there is a H1 tag, although the content of the keyword apperently doesn't contain 'led bulbs... which seems a bit odd because the content of the tag is 'UK’s #1 Price Comparison Site for LED Bulbs` I've used other SEO checkers and some say we don't even have a H1 tag, or H2, H3 and so on for any page. Screaming Frog seems to think we have a H1 tag though, and can also detect the content of the tag. Any ideas? ** Update ** The website is a single page app (EmberJS) so we use prerender to create snapshots of the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
We were under the impression that MOZ can crawl these prerendered pages fine, so were a bit baffled as to why it would say we have a H1 tag, but think the contents of the tag still doesn't match our keyword.0 -
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
What's the best way to check Google search results for all pages NOT linking to a domain?
I need to do a bit of link reclamation for some brand terms. From the little bit of searching I've done, there appear to be several thousand pages that meet the criteria, but I can already tell it's going to be impossible or extremely inefficient to save them all manually. Ideally, I need an exported list of all the pages mentioning brand terms not linking to my domain, and then I'll import them into BuzzStream for a link campaign. Anybody have any ideas about how to do that? Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonMorrow0 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0