My Site Needs More Muscle
Richard runs a WordPress based affiliate niche site promoting protein based supplements aimed at athletes and body builders. Richard asks the Docs:
“My wordpress site www.proteinshake.org.uk targets the keywords protein shake/s, protein bars, protein powder. The website converts ok, not great but not bad either. Some merchants convert around 5% or so, but this varies alot. Lately the site has only been getting around 13-15 unique visitors per day and it should be performing much better than this.
The site has a fair amount of content and used to rank well for the plural and singular, but roughly 2 months ago it only ranked for the keyword ‘protein shake’. I feel it should be ranking for alot more terms and in a higher position.
The site has a PR of 2 and a few backlinks. Very few of the backlinks are for the secondary and third keywords, the majority are for ‘protein shake’ or ‘protein shakes’.”
What I would like to know is why you think the site is under performing so much in the SERPS?
Thank you for taking the time to review my site :)”
Here’s what Dan, Kier and Elaine had to say:
Dan
Hi, Richard, how are you?
Congratulations on the site – it’s a great niche and should bring you money for years to come!
Here are 3 quick tips that I think will help you:
TIP ONE: Tighten up your keyword/page targeting
Your homepage title tag right now is:
“Protein Shake | Protein Bars | Protein Shakes | Protein Powder – proteinshake.org.uk”
In other words, you’re trying to get the homepage to rank for:
• Protein Shake
• Protein Shakes
• Protein Bars
• Protein Powder
Instead, I’d reduce your homepage title tag to simply:
“Protein Shake | Protein Shakes – proteinshake.org.uk”
Here’s why I’d do that:
1) You rank really well for ‘Protein Shake’, but you could improve the rank for ‘Protein Shakes’. Tightening the targeting of the homepage to focus on those 2 terms only could easily bump you up for ‘protein shakes’ (which seems to be the higher volume term).
2) You already have other pages on the site targeting ‘Protein Bars’ & ‘Protein Powder’ respectively. Therefore, by targeting those with the homepage, you’ve got 2 pages fighting to try and rank for each term. Stop targeting those terms from the homepage and make sure their individual pages work as landing pages for each term.
TIP TWO: Gather backlinks for your secondary terms
Once you’ve stopped trying to rank the homepage for your secondary terms, you can concentrate on building a few links direct to their pages, with relevant anchor text. Concentrate on each as if it’s a homepage for the term.
TIP THREE: Use Your Competitors
Without being spammy… if I search for ‘Protein Shakes’, the 3 sites that rank above you right now are all user generated. It feels like it would be very easy to put together a useful article ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Protein Shakes’, and to post that – quite helpfully and honestly – to each of those forum threads.
It looks like the Yahoo one is now closed, but Google is placing the latest related Yahoo Answers directly underneath it. It would be very easy to set up a google alert for any topics from Yahoo Answers, Mens Health Forums, or PP Online that mention ‘protein shakes’ and to post a link there if appropriate.
Incidentally – I notice Mens Health Forums also ranks first for ‘protein bars’ and the last post on the thread looks suspiciously like it’s been posted by someone from myprotein.co.uk.
I hope this is useful.
Good luck with it, Richard.
Dan
Kier
Hi Richard.
You’re ranking well for your main keywords but not so much for others. Identify those that you want to be ranking well for (use Google’s keyword tool to see search volumes) and start working on it. Add more pages of content optimised for those phrases and build links with them in the anchor text. You know it’s worked well for your main phrase so repeat the process for others.
As you state yourself your back links are mainly with ‘protein shake’ as the anchor text rather than the others, you just need to rectify this by getting more links and building more relevant content.
Elaine
I’m not certain, but it could be a perceived keyword stuffing penalty and internal linking with the same anchor text – ‘protein’. Google does seem to have taken a harsher stand against this recently and I’ve had to cull some of my keywords and think of different descriptions and synonyms – sometimes less is more at the moment.
Might be worth a try.
Hi Richard,
Your main problem lies with your backlinks – the small amount of links you have are from blogs where every post has an external link in it – basically link spam blogs. Although these links work to an extent you need to have some natural more authoritative links to dilute the spammy links. You would probably rank pretty well anyway due to the exact match domain name.
Your competitors menshealth and maximusicle are huge authorative sites, where you have little backlinks and only 72 pages indexed, where menshealth is just shy of half a million pages.
You currently have 30 external affiliate links from the homepage, although I see you have no followed these, it does flag up as being a thin affiliate site of which Google does not like.
Another problem could be over optimisation of tags, although Google pays little importance to these tags – Google does recommend only using tags once or twice per page.
My recommendations:
– increase more natural authoritative links, avoid spammy blog posts
– reduce number of external affiliate links on the homepage
– reduce the header1’s on the homepage
– increase content
I think its a nice niche and don’t give up – you will be surprised what a few good links and fresh weekly content can do.
Good luck!
Carl
I think my post stripped out the (header1) heading tags – can someone add them in please
Thanks for the replies, much appreciated
Will be implenting the changes mentioned today or tomorrow!
Since I submitted the site for review it has bounced up and down for both protein shake and protein shakes and sat at number 1 for both terms for a while which was bringing in alot of traffic and some nice sales. But sadly the site moves up and down frequently.
I’m in the process of adding product pages and a recipes section for extra content. The product pages currently look like this:
http://www.proteinshake.org.uk/maximuscle-promax-protein
I plan to keep adding as many as possible to bump the content up, is this the right idea?
I’ve also toyed with the idea of adding gym memberships and eventually branching out from just protein shakes to other supplements and maybe eventually weightloss. I understand the home page won’t be able to rank for all of this so is the best thing to do create a page for each new targetted nich/keyword/product and go from there?
Thanks again for the reviews
Sorry just to add a quick update since i submitted the site,
currently now i am recieveing between 60-100 uniques per day but still no traffic coming from any long tail keywords.
Hi Rich,
To get found on those keywords you will have to add a lot more content. You will have to write articles or mention the longtail keywords before you can be found on them.
This site shows how it can be done: http://blog.mydeco.com/
They link every major keyword in the article to the product page or category page (=on page SEO). Also by adding new content on a regular basis will make sure the crawlers return to your site and Google loves fresh (unique) content.
This blog is a great resource about linkbuilding: http://wiep.net/
One note, it’s not only the quantity of links that count. But also the quality and relevancy on which the link is placed.
I assume most of your traffic is from Bing and Yahoo as you rank number 1 there for the terms due to the exact match domains.
Just keep building out the content – its a long term project and getting the links.
Its best to create a page specific to each keyword you would like to target.
@carl thanks for the extra tips for Rich – hope I made the changes correctly!
@rich you’re welcome, hope it helps you out with moving the site forward. Would be great to do a follow up in 6 months or so to see how you’re getting on.
@madsurfer – welcome to the site and cheers for the extra info and site suggestion
Hi Richard,
Your main problem lies with your backlinks – the small amount of links you have are from blogs where every post has an external link in it – basically link spam blogs. Although these links work to an extent you need to have some natural more authoritative links to dilute the spammy links. You would probably rank pretty well anyway due to the exact match domain name.
Your competitors menshealth and maximusicle are huge authorative sites, where you have little backlinks and only 72 pages indexed, where menshealth is just shy of half a million pages.
You currently have 30 external affiliate links from the homepage, although I see you have no followed these, it does flag up as being a thin affiliate site of which Google does not like.
Another problem could be over optimisation of tags, although Google pays little importance to these tags – Google does recommend only using tags once or twice per page.
My recommendations:
– increase more natural authoritative links, avoid spammy blog posts
– reduce number of external affiliate links on the homepage
– reduce the header1’s on the homepage
– increase content
I think its a nice niche and don’t give up – you will be surprised what a few good links and fresh weekly content can do.
Good luck!
Carl