No Google Ranking..yet
-
I have een working on my site for soem time. Trying to take the right steps to achieve good ranking in the long run and present the information we need to showcase to prospective clients. After several months I still see no ranking at all and I'm wondering if its becasue the front page is using a design similar to a one page website design?
If anyone can provide some insight I would appreciate it. Even the smallest nudge i nthe right direction.
We are also developing some new content for a blog and expanded written content for our services page.
-
These are all great tips. At this early point in the game, your focus on old-school networking and on-page optimization will have a disproportionate impact.
I would add that your site looks like so many other design portfolio sites in that:
- "Request a Proposal" is a high-commitment call-to-action
- For people who aren't ready for a proposal, there's no clear funnel for leads to move down
- Other than UTAH, there's nothing that identifies your ideal audience
You need to look at your design company as if it were a product. How would you package that product? What are the buying stages? How do you move people down the funnel?
Most design firms have the same issue. They put their portfolio online and expect that to make them stand out. But your really could benefit from product-izing your business.
I think some flagship content could really help with this. The idea is to create a single piece of content - video, info-graphic, long-form blog post, etc. - that is relatively hard to duplicate by competition. Something really useful or informative. Make it free, then focus marketing and link building efforts around it. Bruce Clay, Inc. did this a number of years ago with their SEO Code of Ethics. Moz does it with their Beginner's Guide to SEO. Search Engine Land does it with their Periodic Table of SEO.
You want to gather leads higher up in the funnel and build links along the way.
With well-developed, useful, and focused content like this, it will be more likely for folks to share your site on social media and easier to establish yourself as an authority in something. That will result in easier link building.
If you do it right, it'll also entice qualified prospects. For example, you could create a blog post+video/infographic about 10 Ways Small Businesses in Utah Can Stand Out Online. With a title like that, you will have identified your audience - small businesses in Utah - and their pain - how to stand out online.
You would then have a pretty good hunch that folks downloading that offer are your audience.
I know none of this is technical SEO help for you. But content has the biggest impact on SEO ... plus, I've seen great content beat technical SEO before.
-
Be sure to check in Webmaster Tools to make sure you don't have a manual penalty. I was doing a test on a temporary site to try and spot when Penguin did a data update, and I just copied text from other places to make "filler" content, and I got a manual penalty in just a couple of days because of that :-). So it doesn't have to be links that get you in trouble.
-
Hi Brett!
It's good to hear you're working on more content for the site, including a blog, The main thing that's hitting me about the site, is that while it's visually very nice, the content is duplicated between the home page and the various internal pages. I would recommend that you create different content for each page - it will be more interesting to visit your site and will be a show of greater effort and care on the company's part. There's excellent room for improvement here.
In addition to this, due to the competitive nature of your industry, Local SEO must be considered - but only if you you make in-person contact with your clients. If you do, then seeking rankings for your city rather than your state or nationally will be one way to start trying to break into somewhat less dense local results vs organic results. Here's a good place to start reading about the basics of Local SEO: https://moz.com/learn/local.
But if you don't make in-person contact with your clients, then local is not the right match for you and this means sticking with pursuing organic visibility, in which case it's likely to take months or years to dislodge well-established competitors in this highly competitive market both on a state and national level. You may need to investigate investing in PPC while you are working on other efforts like content development, link earning, social outreach, video marketing, etc.
Competitive analysis will be really helpful at this stage, helping you assess the strengths of competitors to see if you can match and surpass their efforts over time.
Lots of work ahead - wishing your company luck at this exciting time!
-
Hi Brett,
No, I think that's absolutely the way to go. It's difficult for me to propose you qualitative sources/links as I'm based in Belgium. Someone else will be in a better position to answer this question but I would search for:
- communities
- idea/discussion websites
- partners
- ...
I would focus on local sources.
I think the content on the blog will help you. Try to share it on social media for example. At the moment getting links will be difficult because there is no reason yet for people to link to your website (content).
-
We are looking more at local rankings than national. Thus the over use of the work Utah as the keywords we wish to rank in are things like utah web design, utah website design, utah joomla, salt lake web design etc.
Is that too focused/ narrow?
We are adding content to the services page.
What are qualitative sources / links? Can you give me an example even if its in another business area?
-
Thanks for the prompt response(s).
We do accept work outside of utah but I (our dedicated SEO partner is in Europe and unplugged for the next two months) am trying to focus our effort on the local market. My knowledge and experience are largely in design and Joomla/ Wordpress so I am flying a little blind here. Overwhelmed and trying to wear too many hats at the moment.
I'll have to dig even deeper apparently at local SEO, certifications and domain authority.
Thanks for the insights and feedback
-
You are certainly active in a competitive market. Getting a decent ranking on these kind of keywords is difficult. Execute a keyword research and research the difficulty to rank on them. The keyword difficulty tool is very interesting.
On the other hand there are a few things where you should work on:
- provide more useful content where other influencers can link too. I'm referring to your services and portfolio. The blog you are working on is also a step in the right direction. It might be interesting to have separate pages about the different services with loads of useful information. Also try to link out to other qualitative sources (helping your visitors).
- work on a steady and qualitative link profile. You only have 1 root domain linking to you at the moment. You should try to increase your overall domain authority. There are many articles on the Moz blog talking about this.
Just my cup of tea
Sander -
Hi there
I would focus on your on-site SEO, primarily around your title tags and overoptimization of those, especially with the word "Utah" - it doesn't need to be in almost every title tag and everywhere onsite. I'd imagine you take work from outside of Utah, right?
Beyond that, I would look into your local SEO and citation building to see if there are any opportunities there. Are there any web development directories or relevant certifications you know of that you guys can apply for? BBB?
Also, if you're going to be doing footer links (which that appears to be all you have in your backlink profile), make sure those are branded - not exact match. Those are there to reference your work, not for SEO.
This is a matter of building your Domain Authority, so focus on providing value based on intent and user experience that can result in mentions or relevant linking opportunities. There's not a lot of content on the site really; there's a huge opportunity for you!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Homepage is deindexed in Google
Please help for some reason my website home page has disappeared, we have been working on the site but nothing that I can think of which would block it. There are no warnings in google console? Can anyone lend a hand in understanding what has gone wrong, I would really appreciate it. The site is: http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ Seems to be working again but I had to fetch the home page in google console, any idea why this has happened cannot afford a heat op at this age lol?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
UPS bought a domain that was blacklisted and now we cant rank in Google
1. We have the site Holidayshuahin.com Apparently Holidayshuahin.com is on a blacklist of barracuda we think this happens when somonelse owned this domain. What does this mean for our Google rankings today? We did not optimise the site for SEO but i think it should still show up somewhere in top 100 as there are not that many pages in the niche. holidays hua hin What should we do change domain name? 2. We have 346 links from Holtidayshuahin.com to our own site Dreamestatehuahinc.om that we do not spend time to optimize on. Dreamestatehuahin.com Is not ranking as good as we expected could this have any thing to about these backlinks from our blacklisted holidayshuahin.com site? Also when so many links, should i make them no follow link, what would be best for the link profile of dreamestatehuahin.com in context of links from holidayhuahin.com Look forward for your answers thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Fetch as Google - Redirected
Hi I have swaped from HTTP to HTTPS and put a redirect on for HTTP to redirect to HTTPS. I also put www.xyz.co.uk/index.html to redirect to www.xyz.co.uk When I fetch as Google it shows up redirect! Does this mean that I have too many 301 looping? Do I need the redirect on index.html to root domain if I have a rel conanical in place for index.html htaccess (Linix) - RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xyz.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.xyz.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^$ index.html [R=301,L]0 -
Previously ranking #1 in google, web page has 301 / url rewrite, indexed but now showing for keyword search?
Two web pages on my website, previously ranked well in google, consistent top 3 places for 6months+, but when the site was modified, these two pages previously ending .php had the page names changed to the keyword to further improve (or so I thought). Since then the page doesn't rank at all for that search term in google. I used google webmaster tools to remove the previous page from Cache and search results, re submitted a sitemap, and where possible fixed links to the new page from other sites. On previous advice to fix I purchased links, web directories, social and articles etc to the new page but so far nothing... Its been almost 5 months and its very frustrating as these two pages previously ranked well and as a landing page ended in conversions. This problem is only appearing in google. The pages still rank well in Bing and Yahoo. Google has got the page indexed if I do a search by the url, but the page never shows under any search term it should, despite being heavily optimised for certain terms. I've spoke to my developers and they are stumped also, they've now added this text to the effected page(s) to see if this helps. Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanclc
$newurl=SITE_URL.$seo;
Header("Location:$newurl"); Can Google still index a web page but refuse to show it in search results? All other pages on my site rank well, just these two that were once called something different has caused issues? Any advice? Any ideas, Have I missed something? Im at a loss...0 -
Bing Ranking Factors
I have a site and we rank very competitively on Google, but we would like to increase our exposure on Bing and Yahoo. I was wondering if anybody might have some tips or pointers for increasing your ranking on Bing. Also, if anybody knows of any Bing ranking guides or top ranking factors for Bing that would be very useful too. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0 -
Google omitting some entries
Hi, I used this tool to test some domains. The tool can be found at http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content I have no questions about the other checks but with the similarity check. My question is how do i get Google not to omit some entries very similar to the top 1000 pages on my site? Will appreciate your answers, thanks. Suleman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esuleman0