Q&A with Weebly SEO Expert & Head of Organic Growth!

[Erin6]

Hi, friends!

Today, we'll be chatting with Adam Tanguay, SEO expert & Head of Organic Growth at Weebly. He'll be arriving at 9am PST to answer your questions. If you won't be around then, feel free to go ahead and ask!

Thanks, and see you at 9am!

Erin

Weebly Community Manager

[PersonA]

So, I am already showing up in Google search results.  Do I need to keep working on my SEO to stay ranked?  Will I lose my ranking if I don't keep working on it?  And if so, what are some of the best methods for continuing to stay ranked once you've already done your basic SEO stuff?

Thanks!

[Atom1]

Wonderful question @Eeyore

You can definitely lose rankings over time, but then you can also stay at the same rank with little to no change for years. It depends on the query, the type of competition and the user behavior and interaction with your site. In general, it's safe to assume that change will occur and your site will move on rankings eventually, so it's helpful to think about basic methods to stay ranked. 

The first method is to know when you change rank. I recommend Google Search Console (but any tracking tool you feel comfortable with works) to track your page rank over time. You want to see when things are changing in the SERP sooner than later. 

Next, it's important to have at least a lightweight approach to link building and interaction with your pages over time. Share your content on social or reach out to bloggers or other website owners in your space to keep some link momentum so search engines can see off page factors that signal your pages as maintaining or even gaining relevance. 

Also, it's always good to update content. The importance of fresh content varies between queries, but you can bet that it's never a bad thing to give an update with a new sentence, paragraph, image or section, especially if the topic of your page can benefit from it. 

Finally, one of the biggest factors for rank change over time is going to be user interaction. If people stop clicking on your site or bounce from your site back to search it's a strong signal that other pages on the SERP are more valuable and thus should be ranked infront of you. To check this and potentially make optimiziation decisions, look at your bounce rates from search traffic in Google Analytics and check Click Through Rates in Google Search Console. If you start to see dramatic changes or negative trends, it might be a good signal that you should update your Page Title, Page Description and Page Content to try and be more relevant to what people are searching for.

[Jappaloupe]

@Atom

Good morning. Thank you for doing this. My question is about sites outside of the USA. I travel the globe and have sites that are setup for different locations ( Germany, France, Russia, Latvia, Italy, South Africa, Portugal, Brazil, Patagonia, Saudi Arabia, etc.).

The languages on the sites are in the native language for the most part with a translation tool for others. How can I setup SEO so that search engines know what demographic the site is referenced? For example, my site made for Patagonia; it is receiving a lot of traffic from the US and Europe. When it should receive most from Patagonia.and the nearby areas. I have added Hreflang tags for each page. Those did help, especially in Russia, but what else can I do to target a particular country or area? I used Patagonia because they have a mixture of languages. The official language is Spanish, but also Patagonian Welsh. Very strange to be speaking Welsh in South America. So I think that is why I am getting some Europeans on the site. 

Can you provide some tips on what I can do, other than hreflang tags, to try targeting people in the same country or at least the same continent? South America isn't all that large, compared to others. So the same continent for Patagonia would be okay. But still, it is preferred to be just Patagonia and very close by countries. 

The domains are current subdomains of Weebly, with the exception of Germany, but it's a .com domain. 

Can you add any information you know about how Google and other search engines detect foreign sites? Especially, if no meta tags or hreflang tags have been added? Is it just the language that it can see?

Thank you! 

[Atom1]

Hey @WorldTraveler such a great question!!!!

OK so there a few things you can do. Hreflang tags are super important, so if you already have those I would start by taking each site and setting up it's own Google Search Console account and then going into the Search Traffic > International Targeting section, slecting the Country tab and select the country you want to target users. That way you're telling Google directly want geo you want while your hreflang will be signaling language (and geo). 

Another really good signal for geo specific SEO is a ccTLD (a country code top-level domain). If you can afford move your subdomains to ccTLDs for the geos you want to target it's a very clear signal of your intention with the content. Hreflang + ccTLD + International Targeting in Google Search Console provides a super powerful set of signals. Clearly you also need strong translated content throughout your page and in the title tag and meta description (but I feel like you already have that covered)

It's also important to try and obtain localized links. If you get links from other sites with the same language and geo signals that you are trying to target it can be a very valuable singal of the intent behind your site. Reach out to local networks or organizations or small busiunesses in the areas that you're focsued on to try and get these localized links. 

You also might want to do some research on the types of search engines used in those regions. You might be getting the wrong traffic from Google but the right traffic from Bing!  

[TonySocorro]

Hello Adam,

I am having difficulty with my weebly site showing up correctly on the google search engine results. In order to even find the site, you would have to search "thousandedits.com" and only to find that there is an error as follows:

thousandedits.com/

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt

Learn more

Why is this happening and how can I resolve this issue? I have made everything on my site "searchable" through the SEO settings removing any limits of Google searching my site for accurate results.

I am desperate for any advice! 

Thank you,

Antonio Socorro

[Atom1]

Thanks @TonySocorro

Your robots.txt doesn't seem to be blocking the site, so it should be showing up. This can often happen with legacy issues related to the domain and the index not being updated with a recent crawl. My recommendation, get your site setup on Google Search Console and submit your homepage to Google from the Crawl > Fetch as Google and then submit the URL and all links. You should be able to see any crawl errors as they come up. Most likely, this will help you force a re-crawl and re-index of your site and get back into the SERP!   

[Atom1]

Hey everyone thanks for all the awesome questions! I have to sign off now (Weebly keeps me busy and I need to get back to our own SEO programs!) but feel free to leave more questions here and I'll check back in later today and throughout the week to answer. 

[JustImagine]

I am not sure if this question was noticed, so I will post again.

What is your take on product images URL's and file names? How important it is?

Will Weebly change the way it displays URL's for product images?

Not sure if this question applies to you, but would like to know your opinion.

Thanks!

[Atom1]

Hey @JustImagine thanks for bringing this up again sorry I missed it! 

I do think there is some value on product image URLs and filenames having keywords, basically anything you can do that provides contextual guidance for search engines on keywords is helpful. Do I think it's a killer feature you need to rank? Definitely not. We recently changed URLs for other images you upload on your site and are working on a lot of ecommerce updates, so while I can't say for sure, I do think this would be something we might update in the future. 

What's more valuable for product SEO is the structured data markup we now automatically include on your product pages. You can read more about that at the bottom of this blog post. 

[JustImagine]

@Atom

Adam, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Come back often!