This is not a very exciting blog post to read again in the future, but it’s important for me to think through this because it could have a huge impact on my success.
I’ve been working on improving my website from a technical SEO perspective and also just more broadly trying to improve its rankings. It has a lot going for it, yet I still have not been converting many visitors into clients. For a few years now, I’ve slowly been losing traffic but at least I’ve gotten to a point now where that is no longer the case.
So that brings me to today’s task.
I’ve made the realization that all my top-ranking pages are essentially irrelevant to building or maintaining websites. Most are random tutorials involving Photoshop or other misc. programs. I couldn’t tell you why these happen to rank so well when my far-more-relevant content does not.
Either way, I have learned that this could actually be quite counter-productive. I used to think that all traffic was good traffic. But if my top-ranking pages are irrelevant, Google won’t know what I actually do and will never rank my for what I want to be ranked for.
So first, I’m going to try to make those pages more relevant.
I started today with a Photoshop-related tutorial. I added a handful of references to website design and building websites, and generally framed the whole thing as a website designer’s guide to this particular problem.
I’m hoping that this – along with adding some links to other website-related pages – will indicate to Google that the real topic is websites.
So now I want to go through all of my top-ranking pages (perhaps the top 20 or more) and re-write them so that they are more relevant to websites. It’s possible this will have a huge impact.
There’s also the chance that it won’t.
If months go by and it hasn’t made a difference, I may need to consider trying something else. I maybe even want to consider removing the posts and redirecting their URLs to somewhere else on my site.
It would be a shame to lose that traffic, but if those rankings are actively preventing me from ranking my other pages, and none of those visitors are ever converting, why would I keep them? It doesn’t make sense.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might. We will see!