Is This Over-Optimizing for On-Page SEO?

MichelangeSEO

MichelangeSEO

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I'm doing some serious on-page work to try and improve some rankings that seem to shift from the bottom of page one to the top of page two.

I'm wondering if I'm over-optimizing some of these pages. It's an ecommerce website and in the URL, it has the word /buy. So, it has a main page showing all the categories, which is /buy then each category has this structure:

/buy/category
/buy/sub-category

Then I have the word buy in my Title, Meta Description and H1 (e.g. Buy Category Online...)

If I were to just have it in my Title and use some variations on the page in in headings, would that help? Or should I maybe even remove it from the Title?
 
This is impossible to answer in a vacuum like this without broad generalized answers.

I'd leave it as is and get some links to move it up higher.
 
How much content is on these pages as they are now?
 
That's way too many "buys". Title, meta, h1-2 tags, and url. I consider "buy" and intent word and Google uses these intent terms to understand users, but if i were Google having5 of the exact same intent triggers as a pattern, meh i'd consider that keyword stuffing.
 
I agree with @CCarter it's going to look like keyword stuffing. You're essentially talking about creating a hallway page and that's not good. Consider your on-page in this scenario equal to good UX...

Does having a hallway page make it easier for your visitor to navigate around your site?

What's wrong with having /electronics/lcd-televisions/samsung-bla-bla/ instead? You may as well just use a good structure for your site, do you think you'll be the first eComm or Affiliate site that has tried to game the SERPs like you're thinking of? Trust me you're not, the fact they're not showing up in the results doesn't mean they're not out there, it means that Google doesn't like it and you should imitate what does work instead.
 
One thing to consider is that the OP might simply have competitors who are better with their offsite link building and therefore out ranking him and it has nothing to do with his onsite. If a majority of his pages drop it might be new competitors entering the market or an old competitor doing research and starts to kill it with SEO. But if only this segmented category, the "buy" pages, is dropping it than could be they are getting hit a bit. A Penality comes in the -50 or -100 or -1000 ranking drop phases. I'll get the exact numbers, but dropping from bottom of page one to top of page to isn't a penalty. You are just dropped. The word "penalty" is way too harsh for what just happened to you.
 
@Ryuzaki Currently, there are over 1,000 words, but we're about to launch it with way more. It's all high quality, we have experts in the field writing the content. It's going to hit about 3,000 words and be completely semantically optimized.

@CCarter Thanks for the tips. I was thinking myself that "buy" was in there way too much. We do have some strong competitors, but our link profile is getting better and stronger everyday and for some of the longer tail buy terms, we're consistently at number 5 to 8 (though, of course, we'd love to move up those too).

What's interesting is, we're ranking for a very broad, one-word term. So, let's say we're targeting "buy nunchucks". We're sitting at number 6 for just "nunchucks" and sometimes move up to number 4. We're also around number 6, 7ish for "buy nunchucks online".

That's what makes me think we need some on page work. We're consistently doing off page, so I've been spending a lot of time with on page stuff.
 
Sounds to me like your competitors just have more domain authority in general. The upper half of page 1, especially top 3, can be very tough to crack in a competitive serp.

If your on page was hurting you its likely you'd rank much lower than where you do.
 
Test it and see. On page is the one SEO factor you have 100% control over, most SEOs are remiss when it comes to testing in general and you'll learn a ton in a hurry by overopt'ing and de-opting pages and watching the rankings fluctuate.

Link profile goes a long way towards finding your sweet spot too, highly over opt'd page with only a handful of links using the anchor the page is opt'd for is one viable route, barely opt'ing the page at all and going anchor heavy with more links works too. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot and you'll only get there from trial and error.
 
I would second that "too many buy's" out there (no matter anchor profile etc.). Google knows you have something for sale, repeating the word "buy" is 2009 at best, which means... problems in 2016 (not to mention 2017 and further...).

Maybe test your headline in more descriptive words? Maybe something like: "Ha! That's Your Light Brown Leather Jacket. For You, and Right Here"

Then give it some time (up to two, three weeks) and see what's going on. But change just ONE thing at a time, so you know what impact particular changes actually have.
 
Andrewkar said:
Then give it some time (up to two, three weeks) and see what's going on.
Click to expand...

If you're on page 1 you should be able to see the impact same day, 2-3 days worst case scenario. Crawl rate on high ranking pages is a different animal.

But change just ONE thing at a time, so you know what impact particular changes actually have.
Click to expand...

This. 100% this. Don't pollute your data.
 
Agreed 100%. However, while you can see this "Impact" (in some niches...) it's not equal to solid, more stable movement.

Grind said:
If you're on page 1 you should be able to see the impact same day, 2-3 days worst case scenario. Crawl rate on high ranking pages is a different animal.
This. 100% this. Don't pollute your data.
Click to expand...
Show me the site, and I will tell you everything about it :wink:
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks for all the suggestions. Just wanted to give an update.

I'm about to update that page with a new H1, removing the word "buy" and adding over 2,000 words of quality content. (There was about 1,000 words on the page of high quality content, this just goes into more detail with better formatting: H1, H2, bold, italics, more white space...)

So I'm launching this today and will keep this thread updated with any results.

It's sitting at number 9 for the target keyword (it moved up from 12, 3 days ago).
 
But change just ONE thing at a time, so you know what impact particular changes actually have.
Click to expand...

removing the word "buy" AND adding over 2,000 words of quality content
Click to expand...

Making both changes is fine. Just remember that you can't draw any conclusions from it even if you go down.
 
@Calamari dangit, you're right. I was excited to change the content but changed the H1 too without thinking.

It did move up 3 spots for a buy term... but, like you said, I can't be sure which change helped the most.

I'll keep this in mind moving forward. Thanks!
 
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