Local Personal training studio needs SEO advice. Is directory submission they way forwards?
-
I have a local personal training business and am struggling to push our website to the top of local personal training searches despite already having a better domain and trust score than almost all of the higher ranked competitors. The website has only been live around 4 months but I was wondering if submitting to paid directories would help me to rank on page one? our website is www.danielalexandra.com
-
Thanks so much for your help here, please let me know when you post your article up so I can have a look through.
Best wishes
Daniel
-
You'll find that compressing a lot of your images will help considerably with page speed. I've a great fan of pingdom.com and have seen load times go down with direct correlation with increased rankings. Watch out for redirects which add load times and limit the in page coding and calls to scripts.
There is still a place for directory submissions as a part of an overall link building strategy but you need to get the technical and content parts of the '3 pillars' sorted first.
-
Hi Daniel,
While 11.3s is bad, I had a client who had 14.x seconds and when it was all said and done we were able to get him down to 0.86s on average.
You bet there is a quick way to speed up your website. And you're in luck since you are running WordPress... go install the free plugin W3 Total Cache (W3tc). There are others... don't use them. W3tc is by far the best, albeit it can be a little complicated at first blush.
To overcome the complications, either hire a pro to set it up for you (around $250) or go to gtmetrix.com and do a test on your site. Keep in mind that GTmetrix will always understate your load times so only use webpagetest.org or pingdom for getting an accurate result.
Once you have the results, scroll down to the tab labeled "Page Speed" and you will see where it says "recommendations." When I run a test on your website the #1 thing it shows to fix first is combining your images using CSS sprites. That might be a little hard unless you've done it before so I would skip it and go to "leverage browser caching". Click on it and it will drop down and tell you what you need to do and what are the problem pages. In this case, you need to specify browser caching of at least one week. So now go to your website and to the W3tc plugin you just installed and look for the browser caching setting... if I remember correctly it is in the general settings but I could be wrong. I believe you'll have to set it in seconds.
Then do that for the rest of the items on the GTMetrix report.
Once you are done with that, go install Yahoo's SmushIt plugin for Wordpress. Then navigate to it a do the bulk smushit... part of the problem is just the fact that your page size is almost 2MB... mainly because of photos. Once you run the smushit plugin, your page size will be more around 500KB. That's still about 5 times what it should be so you should really take advantage of CDNs (W3tc will help with that) and maybe hosting all your images on a subdomain so that you can take advantage of HTTP's ability to load from multiple resources at once.
Last thing, in the future, when you upload photos to your website, make sure that you are uploading in a size that is just the right fit. WP will allow you to upload a photo with sizes up to 2MB and then will resize for content but you'll still be loading the full size in the background... thus killing your load times. And if you have the option, choose JPG over PNG as it compresses better... unless you need the alpha channel.
Be on the lookout... I hope to be posting an article to SEOMoz's UGC blog that covers all this in more detail soon.
Best of luck!
-
Hi there,
Thanks for this, very useful.
Is there a simple way of speeding up my load times significantly, 11.3 seconds is very slow, I wouldn't hang around to have a look.
Thanks
Daniel
-
Just after a cursory glance at your site, I noticed that your load times are horrible. So I ran a test at webpagetest.org and your load time is 11.3 seconds. You probably don't see that because your browser has a cached version of your website since you've visited it repeatedly. However, Google is grading you based upon a load time of 11.3s.
See here for the results of your website:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121228_X3_AGM/Then see here for why that is negatively affecting you:
http://www.socialdesignstudios.com/webpage-speed/Some other points:
1. Add rel=author
2. Start driving a social media campaign (it will help you in the SERPs as well as your audience particularly loves it)
3. Offer a scholarship (see here - point D)
4. Create a Meetup, link it to your page and get a Bootcamp going... Meetup.com will provide great referral traffic as well as clients.
5. Run your site through an HTML/CSS validator to make sure you're not getting held up by simple corrections.
6. Create some "big content" and then push it to your distribution channels to get some good backlinks.At the end of the day you have to remember that you've only had the domain for 4 months and only have a PR1 rating. But whatever you do... don't focus on directory submissions. It'll end up biting you in the end.
Best of luck!
-
No, paid links go against Google’s guidelines and your website will get deindexed for that.
Here are the few things that you can do -
1. Get your website listed in Google Places
2. Add a link back to Google Listing Page from your website
3. Get listed in some high quality local listing sites
4. Use microformat code for presenting contact information in the footer section of the websiteAnd no idea why you are addressing the same user agents twice
User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
# End Link Mask Generator output
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Directory Listings no longer counted in Backlinks?
Interesting situation when I looked at Google Search Console this morning, I found that back-links from directories had dropped off and am wondering if anyone else is seeing this? Specifically, I am in Australia and had links from Yellowpages.com.au and Truelocal.com.au to my primary domain. Interestingly, Yellow Pages had gone a bit crazy recently in that the number of links to my site seemed to balloon exponentially from about 50 when I first listed to 700+ to 1500+ to 1800+ and then the balloon popped. Truelocal in contrast was only ever showing the 1 link. There have not been any changes from my end, and I only ever had one listing in these directories so not sure what generated all these extra links in Yellow Pages. Anyone else in Australia noticed a sudden drop off in Google Backlinks from Directories? If not it may just be a temporary blip.
Link Building | | Excal0 -
Worth paying for directory listings?
I'm going through the recommended SEO directory list but I notice that most of them are paid listings. I have been told that it is not worth spending any money on this, so why are there so many recommended in this list?
Link Building | | BridalHotspot0 -
How to make a Blog for SEO?
I just create blog then review my product in my post with put the keyword and link back to my product. So if you have more detail please tell me and strategy. I would like to see case study. Sometime I read some blog I just know but I can not implement that for successful.
Link Building | | taradmkt0 -
Links from Directory's
I have been looking at the Directory's recommended on the SEOMOZ site. All of those that I have looked into do not appear to have a page rank for the actual page that my link would be appearing on. They all appear to offer N/A as the reply.Is this a problem? Thanks in advance for any replies!
Link Building | | Babyshoe0 -
I need suggestion on how to increase our page authority.
I'm looking for specific suggestions on how to increase PA on different pages. Specific site I could link a page to link Pintrest to increase PA.
Link Building | | cfield_splashmedia.com0 -
SEO Submission Service or Ads on Blogs?
1. Can anyone recommend a good SEO Submission Service? Or do you not recommend using them? 2. What do you think is a better way to build links? Directory listings or place ads on blog sites? Each post a blogger post would have the ad link. Thoughts?
Link Building | | mof3kz0 -
Do you think it is worth using this directory?
I mean if it will be beneficial for my project (site) to get listed at web-designers-directory.org Any thoughts on that or you had the experience of working with that site?
Link Building | | VinceWicks0 -
Question about forwarding domains and link juice
We currently have a domain that has a small amount of inbound links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.1800wecoach.com/a!links We decided to switch over to a different domain name, which currently has 0 inbound links. What we were wondering is which would be better: link to the new domain from the old domain in a prominent location on all pages. or forward the old domain to the new domain? does forwarding a domain pass linkjuice?
Link Building | | adriandg0