How to move rankings up on older existing content, SEOMOZ whiteboard Friday.

[Marie Ysais]

I thought the whiteboard Friday from seomoz with Rand was pretty good today. The discussion shows details of how he would attack moving the needle up.

How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content - Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz

Sometimes you've got a situation like this. Someone's performed a search for air conditioners. You're ranking number four. From an SEO perspective your real need is not, "Let me expand things and look at bunch of different channels." It's, "If I could move this ranking up, I could really move the needle on our business because this is a highly performing, a highly converting term, and I really want to move it just on this particular piece."

One of the tactics that he mentions is regarding the focus of the website and the focus of the content that is targeting specific keywords. This is the tip that I LOVED as a good reminder because this is what I see with my clients a lot. It is easy to have a website become unfocused and it can easily confuse Google.

Consolidation. This is a really powerful one. So this is essentially saying, "I'm going to take all the pages that are targeting that same term or phrase and 301 them all together." We've done this a number of times on Moz, because we'll have a bunch of old blog posts or old content pages that are all talking about exactly the same thing. Then we go, "Man, why do we have seven of these? And, by the way, six of them are more than three years old." Let's just take those and 301 them back to the most relevant, most high-quality content. If we have some content that was on those other pages that we want to put on the existing one, let's do that. Let's consolidate so people don't get lost in terms off which is the most relevant page about air conditioners on your site. Google shouldn't be confused about that either, and that can actually really move the needle. I've seen that a number of times pop us from page two to page one, or pop us from the bottom of page one to the top five results, that kind of stuff.

There was other information I found relevant so be sure to check it out when you have time.