Forum Moderators: phranque
I am at the point with my site that I am afraid to mess with its success. The site is producing excellent traffic (and sales) through a wide range of targeted search phrases as well as on topic peripheral search phrases ... in my regional market.
It is a vacation site serving an area with three, regional location identities and one umbrella identity. For the purpose of using an example, let's say ... "North York, Toronto, Ontario" being the regional names and "Canada" being the umbrella name. However, I have not been able to produce traffic for the umbrella term "Canada" due to the amount of competition for the keyword and my wish to have an important presence for the regional names.
As a result, I decided to de-emphasized the broader term throughout the site in favour of the more targeted regional names. My traffic for the regional keywords tripled within two months of de-emphasizing the umbrella location!
The broader term eg. "Canada" ... is much more competitive in my industry and is a guaranteed traffic producer. But as I said, I am afraid to mess with the success of the site.
According to traditional SEO, I have done pretty much everything wrong on my site. Conventional wisdom shared by most WebmasterWorld members says to target one keyword per page.
On my site I have:
- Targeted many keywords per page including regional names and the various vacation products I sell.
- Targeted the smaller regional names ... rather than try to play with the big boys and go for the broader, more competitive term(s).
- Emphasized peripheral terms used in our industry, rather than go for the "ONE" major keyword or keyword phrase.
- Effectively cut myself out of the biggest "umbrella" market in my industry.
By using this approach, I have successfully captured a very large chunk of my regional market and am producing very respectable sales. Some of the big companies (which I have managed to tick off because I have taken eaten into their sales) have quickly been generating new sites and redesigns of old sites in an attempt to regain their foothold in my region. They have even started using my exact page titles and mimicking some of my pages. So far though, my site is holding its own ... but I don't know how long that will last. They have a lot more money and can hire the best in the business to boot me out of the rankings.
Although I am currently enjoying great rankings in my little corner of the world, I know I am working on borrowed time and am missing a huge market by having de-emphasized the main umbrella region as well as the most important keyword phrases all my competition are battling for.
The question is, should I produce a second site and attempt to go after that market (using only 5 or 6 main keywords throughout the site and ignoring the smaller regional names) or is there a way to target the umbrella location within my existing site ... without degrading the results I am currently enjoying for the more targeted region and products?
There is no cloaking, no doorway pages, no frames, no javascript, a small amount of CSS (in the nav bar only) and the rest is straight HTML. Anyone can see exactly what I have done and how I have done it. The site has a PR5 as do most of the sites in my industry. I figure its only a matter of time before my site becomes the targeted "enemy" ... if it isn't already.
What should I do next to protect my hard earned market placement and grow it in the big market? The site has 110 pages. Producing a whole new and completely different site would be a major undertaking ... but I'm willing to do it if it is the only way to stay in step with (or ahead of) the competition.
While it looks like a major undertaking, recycling of your current content will reduce the amount of work needed (it does not need to be "completely different").
It will probably pick-up a few good links and, together with your on-site optimization, should give you sufficient power to compete well. (While your industry is fairly competitive, it is not hyper-competitive - as far as I know, you don't have heavyweights of 2.000+ domains there:))
Another thought: Would it be feasible to build a general resource site (THE guide to *Canada* industry)?would your competitors be willing to pay for business leads? My experience is that this type of general "guide" sites with some e-commerce flavor usually get much higher linking potential than pure e-commerce sites.
I was afraid a second site might be needed. Sigh. Oh well, there's another few months of rewriting I guess.
>THE guide to *Canada* industry)? would your competitors be willing to pay for business leads?<
There are already several (so called) "authoritative guides to *Canada* and my industry" in existance. They have very actively and aggressively been taking over the entire industry world wide. In fact, the only area they don't dominate entirely is my particular region and I have been told they are out to get me. I don't know how much longer I will be able to stand alone ... but I'd like to try for as long as possible.
They are what I would term "cartels" and it was because of them that I decided to target the regional keywords to begin with. Since I currently have them beat in my region ... I wondered how I could go about expanding into the umbrella region on my own ... and compete with them head to head on very targeted phrases and keywords. It would not be possible (I don't think) for them to compete using just a few keywords or phrases as they are so broad based at this point.
I think I could beat them at their own game with the right domain name, 5 or 6 targeted keywords and the right content ... but it will be no small feat. They are very, very good!
Their strength is in sheer numbers with hundreds of sites listed in central (pay for inclusion and pay for placement) "directories". I don't want to feed these cartels (and their strenghts) with my content, so have stayed far away from them despite all efforts made to recruit me and a few other (small) holdouts in my region.
I already have a very well placed regional (directory) site for my country apart from my (moneymaker) site which lists all tourist related businesses in the country for free. I get great traffic and quality referrals from it to my moneymaking site. I have done very little optimizing on that site and I'm sure I could improve that without too much effort ... but it still doesn't include the "umbrella" region.
The real trick will be to go after that "umbrella" region and the 5 main keyword(s) for our industry.
This is not something I can do overnight. I know I will need to do something soon though, because they are not going to sit still and watch as my business grows. They have financial resources I can only dream of and I know they have targeted my company because I won't join them.
They are web site developers, offering hosting and listings in their directory. What I hate about their whole concept is that there is a major conflict of interest. They are developing hundreds of sites for the same industry, hosting them and promoting them in their directory. They can't possibly optimize each of the sites for all the main keywords and phrases because they are virtually competing against themselves! As a result, they only target one or two keywords per site. I think their customers are getting the short end of the stick ... but most site owners know so little aout how the web works, that it is impossible to convince them to leave the "cartel".
Its a shame really, because they have the potential to take over the entire industry and at the same time, they have the potential to destroy a lot of small businesses along the way.
