Why Did My Site Go Limp On Me?
-
One of my clients was once in the #1 position for "Philadelphia interior designer" and other related terms, but her site has dropped significantly. Still it is on the first page, but far from its former glory.
http://www.interiorsbydonnahoffman.com is the site.
What really confuses me is why in her home turf search of "Bucks County Interior Designer" a competitor, http://www.miriamansellinteriors.com, is above her in the SERPS. According to OSE her competitor has a PA of 32 vs my client's 39. My client has 35 Linking Root Domains (and some of high quality) compared to just 11 for the competition. In all aspects her competitor looks weaker and less relevant to me.
Her site has been weak in the SERPs since May/June.
We are redesigning her site- she has a high bounce rate compared to my other interior design clients, something like 55%.
Any insights from y'all?
-
Thanks for that Ricky.
-
Completely agree that on-site is needed, however, i'm not sure HOW much good it would do for that keyword phrase.
You are competing against one site for that term that you are extremely unlikely to outrank due to high DA/PA (2 SERP listings for houzz.com)
That being said you are competing with ashlimizell.com and down2earthdesign.com for the spot just ahead of the local listings (which may be hard to rank for due to the fact you are not actually located in Philly) and I think the on-site changes should take care of winning over that #3 ranking!
I also agree, kill the linked footer text. The anchor text doesn't really even match the corresponding page (ie interior design bucks county links to about page)
Also check out the Moz 2013 ranking factors for other areas that could help you get a boost in the SERPS! http://moz.com/rand/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/rank-factors-pie-2013lrg.gif
-
I didn't realize that by marking your answer as "good" that it was going to show as "answered" on the main thread. Whoops. I am still hoping for some more feedback on the off-site part.
-
No offense taken. I agree with you that this site is in a sorry state. Thanks for reminding me what I am dealing with. Unfortunately I inherited this poorly made website and until we launch her new one it is what I must work with.
I never thought of how the text below the footer could hurt her, although it is obvious now that you mention it. Again, it is an inherited tactic.
My only question on your feedback is about the title tags. They are clearly there: "Philadelphia Interior Designer | Bucks County Interior Design" so what are you referring to?
Thanks so much for your time, Lesley.
Do you notice any off-site red flags/issues?
-
Please don't be offended by this.
Honestly looking at the site I see no effort put into onsite SEO.
- h1 text is mostly her name (if people knew about her they more than likely would not search for her, make it more general)
- Page speed is average, it could be a lot better.
- No title tags
- Too much good text as images
- Missing a few key alt tags
- Your h2 elements are blank, which to me is a spammy red flag.
It honestly looks like a spammy site to me. You have a lot of text included after the copyright, which I am assuming you are using for ranking. Which in my mind amounts to no more than just putting a big list of keywords at the end of the page.
I am a firm believer in onsite first and off site next. You have a lot of on site work to do.
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
-
Site Speed Testing Tools For Production Sites
Hi Guys, Any free site speed testing tools for sites in production, which are password protected? We want to test site speed before the new site goes live on top priority pages. Site is on Shopify – we tried google page insights while being logged into the production site but believe its just recording the speed of the password page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup1 -
Best way to do site seals for clients to have on their sites
I am about to help release a product which also gives people a site seal for them to place on their website. Just like the geotrust, comodo, symantec, rapidssl and other web security providers do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssltrustpaul
I have notices all these siteseals by these companies never have nofollow on their seals that link back to their websites. So i am wondering what is the best way to do this. Should i have a nofollow on the site seal that links back to domain or is it safe to not have the nofollow.
It wont be doing any keyword stuffing or anything, it will probly just have our domain in the link and that is all. The problem is too, we wont have any control of where customers place these site seals. From experience i would say they will mostly likely always be placed in the footer on every page of the clients website. I would like to hear any and all thoughts on this. As i can't get a proper answer anywhere i have asked.0 -
How much change should you make to your site in one go?
Hey everyone, So we are currently working on a new website and are in the final stages right now. We have some plans for a brand name change too and there is some debate internally whether we should: a) roll out the new site now and hold off on the rebrand - let the redirects kick in and the site bed in so to speak. Then when the dust settles look at a domain name change b) Roll out the new site with the domain name change too - an all in change A bit of background on the changes being made: The new website will have some structural changes but the main blog content will remain the same - this is where we get the majority of our traffic. The blog will have a slight page layout change but the core content, structure, urls, etc. will be exactly the same. The core website surrounding the blog will change with 301 redirects from old out of date content pages consolidated to fewer, more relevant pages. I hope I've explained enough here, if not please let me know and I'll add more detail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hotchilidamo0 -
Disavow files on m.site
Hi I have a site www.example.com and finally have got the developers to add Google webmaster verification codes for: example.com m.example.com As I was advised this is best practice - however I was wondering does this mean I now need to add the disavow file. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How would you fix this site?
We're currently in the IA and design phase of rolling out a complete overhaul of our main site. In the meantime I've been doing some SEO triage, but I wanted to start making a longer term plan for SEO during and after the new site goes up. We have a pretty decent domain authority, and some quality backlinks, but we're just getting creamed in the SERPs. And so on to my question: How would you fix this site? What SEO strategy would you employ? http://www.adoptionhelp.org Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdoptionHelp0