Featuring Temporary Promotions Without Losing Your Keywords - Semalt Expert



We often have clients walk in and ask if they can change the featured offers on their page and not loose ranking for a prized keyword. The answer is YES, and we will be speaking more about that in this article.

Suppose you wondered whether or not you could prioritize promoting a feature with maintaining your keywords, here's an answer. For SEO purposes, you shouldn't modify your H1 text to feature a promotion if that means you hurt your existing ranking and traffic for the page. 

If you hope to maintain your current ranking for the keywords you currently have, adjusting or changing the H1 will hurt your existing rankings and traffic for that page. However, changing your Hero image itself should be safe enough to try.

Keeping Primary Keywords in the H1

Like many possible clients, you may be hesitating to remove that keyword from your H1 because you are happy with how that keyword influences your ranking performance. You are also scared that if you remove that keyword, you will lose traffic. 

You might also be wondering what if you can immediately rank well for the promotion? Will the traffic from the immediate promotion immediately equal or exceed the traffic you previously got.  

Chances are this wouldn't be the case, but with every website, there are different variables, so we can be certain. To answer this question for your website, you would need to do keyword research for your website. Look at the search volumes for the respective keywords and consider the possibility of going from #2 because of phrase on SERP to being unable to get on page one for the new phrase based on the keyword volume. 

If you're assuming that the answer to these questions will be that the traffic from all these promos will immediately replace or exceed the traffic you're currently enjoying, we will say No or, at best, maybe. This is because evergreen keywords are bound to do better than temporary keywords.

Putting these promotion keywords under the H1/ Hero is a better option. This proves to be the safest route because you maintain your mainstream keywords, but you make enough room to feature the promotion keywords. 

If you've been following our questions, you may also have your hero image is wrapped in the H1 tag. If this is the case of your website, you should probably undo this, but we will explain further on this in a different article. 

Either way, you will need to approach this in one of two ways. To give you the perfect answer for both scenarios, here is what to do. 

When you have no visible text and just the hero image

If your hero image has no visible text and the only thing a user sees is whatever is in the hero image, you can change the hero image to do the promotion and leave the alt attribute the same as it is now. For this instruction, we generally assume that the alt text is where you have used the "ultimate" keyword that you wouldn't want to change. Therefore, keeping the alt text as it effectively gives you the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with a stone.

Using this option helps you accomplish two things:
  • You get to keep your trophy keyword in the H1 undisturbed. 
  • You can run a temporary promotion in the featured position of the page.  

When you have visible H1 text above and below the hero image

When you have a visible H1 text, you are still allowed to change the hero image to feature the promotion. In this case, you could even change the alt attribute to match the promotion information. In this method, however, you shouldn't alter the texts in the H1.

Either way, your objective is still to achieve the same thing, which is to keep your trophy keyword or phrase in your H1 when running a temporary promotion in its featured position.

How to recover lost SEO keywords and traffic

What if you've done the promotion and as a result, you've lost some of your traffic? Well, this will help bring your website back on the right track. The first thing we do is to identify the keywords or pages that fell below expectations during a Google search, and we diagnose the problem. So first things first you: 
  • Learn how to find the keywords you lost SEO ranking for and the pages that are performing poorly.
  • Discover ways to start diagnosing this problem.

1. Missing keywords in Google Analytics 

Here, we will assume there is someone trying to figure out which keywords are driving traffic and the result.

This information could be presented as page views, conversions, new traffic, and several other KPIs. The result also shows pages that have lost their traffic. The chances are that the page still ranks, but there may be a keyword variation drop, and it is significant. Other times, you loose a featured snippet, but you still remain on the first page and vice versa. Either way, you must first understand which keywords point to the page and which one slipped and what impact they have on the revenue and conversions. 

To discover this, you should open both Google Search Console and Google Analytics. 
  • Go to analytics and start at Acquisition> overview> organic search. You should then select the landing page in the center of your screen, after this, you select the conversion item from the drop-down to the right of it when you are looking for an impact on conversion. 
  • Set the Secondary dimension to Acquisition> source.  
  • If done right, you should see Google next to the pages, and then you can filter by Google only. 
  • Now, set the date range you're aiming for. You can also make this a comparison period. 
  • Head on to google console and navigate to performance> Pages.
  • Set the date range or comparison dates you've selected above. 
  • There, you're done.

2. Diagnosing the problem    

After your analysis, if you realize that your pages fell or you lost keywords, there could be a number of reasons. Seeing that there are several reasons why this could have happened, there are as many solutions to this problem. However, Semalt can give you some points or tips that help you figure out the problem if you wish to do so on your own. 

Ask yourself these questions when evaluating your SEO traffic Loss or Gain:
  • The traffic that previously came to your website was it because your content featured on Google News?
  • How recent is your content, and is it considered stale? 
  • Are your inbound links to a page or the entire website in good condition, or did something launch an attack?
  • Did you lose traffic to just a page or an entire category of pages?
  • Does your webpage still have other keywords that attract traffic?
  • What are the other SEO properties put in place? How is the page speed, user experience, and is the content of your new page getting indexed? 
  • Can you improve on your webpage?
  • Has your website been hacked, and do you know the full extent of this hack? 
  • Have you practiced anything harmful to your site or played dirty? 
These are some good questions to help you figure out what's causing you to lose traffic. Once you find the problem, all you need to do is reverse its effects, and your website is back on track. With temporary promotions, their benefits, as well as side-effects, can be short-lived. Many times, after such promotions, the trophy keyword is returned, and all goes back to normal. However, you must have learned how to run effective promotions of your products or services on your website and not lose any traffic.  

Thanks to Semalt, you enjoy double the traffic at no loss at all. We understand that some of these things may be difficult to understand. After all, Semalt is a company of professionals, and these professionals can help you and your website. Experimenting on your website is not an ideal way to create a perfect website. You do not want to make a mistake that ends up costing you more money. This is why having the professionals at Semalt take care of your needs is important. You can take a tour around the Semalt website and find tons of other amazing articles that give you more insight into managing a website and ranking on SERP.