Newbie off to a discouraging start
-
Hi guys,
I'm just off to a start with trying to work out some SEO, and so far I seem to be making things worse! Would love to get your insight.
I've had a page for quite some time. From what I've learned so far, it seems that the page has had some good things going for it already.
Just to get things rolling, my goal was to optimize my site for just one keyword phrase. The phrase included a location "Brooklyn", so I jumped into things and got a Moz local account. Then I went through the page and made some tweaks that brought my keywords into more of the H1 tags, URLs etc. Finally, I went into Google Webmaster tools and looked through some of the options and submitted an XML sitemap.
When I started things off, I could regularly find my site on page 8 Google when searching for this phrase. Now when I search Google, I can't find it on the first 20 pages.
I understand that it can take months for optimization to kick in, and I certainly wasn't looking for overnight results. However, seeing that my ranking has gone down is certainly frustrating.
My theories on why this may have happened are that either 1) Something in my changes was detected as being "spammy" by Google, and they've penalized me for this, or 2) Maybe there's some means by which these changes are being "processed" by the search engine, and I just need to have more patience.
I'd love to hear if it looks like I've done something wrong, or if it's really just more a matter of patience.
The site that I'm working on is www.jacobarthur.com, and the keywords set is "brooklyn wedding photographer"
Thanks for any insight!
-
Guys, thank you so much for all of this insight! Everything you mentioned definitely makes sense. I'll be diving in and taking action based on all of this as soon as possible, and will report back if I have any follow up questions, and also to keep you posted on the progress.
Thanks for such thoughtful responses!
-
Hi Jacob,
What the others have said is correct, but let me put some perspective on it.
Why is it that when you didn't know what you were doing your pages ranked better then it does after you gained a little knowledge and made some tweaks? Its because what you likely had was well written info and ideas from the heart. Google is very well equipped at understanding sites that are not perfectly optimized in the SEO department. Sure they won't rank as well as a site that has perfect SEO and well written, but they are likely to rank better then a site that only has one of those things.
Why? This is because Google's goal, and I say this very often, is to return the best site for a query to a user. A site that is well written and interesting with no real attempt at SEO is probably better then a site that has made adjustments to what they want to say in an attempt to impress a search engine. SEO is search engine optimization, not search engine trickery. You should ALWAYS air on the side of caution when making any changes to what you really want to say in hopes that Google will think more of you. Its like picking on the fat kid at school trying to impress the popular guy. It may appear like an easy way to do it, but you only make yourself look bad in the process.
That isn't to say SEO is bad, quite the opposite. By optimizing your site you are putting your best face on the site for the search engine, but that shouldn't come at the expense of your users, who are in fact the most important part.
I hope that makes sense and helps you understand what is going on,
Don
-
Hi Jacob,
The others are correct in that the site is a little over-optimised at the moment and essentially every single page seems to be competing for that term.
I won't repeat what they've mentioned here but what I will say to add to their great comments is throw your website into Screaming Frog and have a look at what you see. This is a great representation of just how keyword-heavy the site currently is. As you scroll through the page titles and meta descriptions you'll see a wall of "Brooklyn Wedding Photographer" in there.
My other suggestion would be to consider boosting your content. Look for ways that you can expand on it and pad it out with quality content that will genuinely help the users. Internally for our agency we aim for 1500+ words, just to give you an idea. Most pages on your site seem to sit closer to 200 - 400 at the moment.
This extra content will help answer common questions users might be asking which keeps them on your site longer for all the right reasons and it also helps search engines understand what your site is about. Think of it like meeting a stranger and asking what they do for a job - if they give you a 1-phrase answer, it doesn't really tell you much. On the other hand, if they spend 5 minutes telling you exactly what they do, there's no question about it.
-
Jacob
Had a quick look, besides the fact few good looking people get married in Brooklyn the site looks v good. Checked on some metrics, got a few nice backlinks and loading speed for the home page was excellent. The sites does have a couple of broken links. Though as Logan states you are over optimizing some pages, especially the blogs ie each title has in it Brooklyn wedding photographer - when not relevant to the post. Plus most of your Titles are too long, try and stick within 512 pixels. I am also not a fan of having more than one H1. That I find can confuse google. I would suggest fix the multiple H1's asap. Also most of your images have no alt text which given it is a site of pictures I would resolve asap. So that makes your pages look very thin on content. All that said I am like you a little surprised not ranking at all. One thing noticeable is it does not appear you have any strong domains linking with relevant anchor text. It is a small factor but we have found can be important on niche sites.
I suggest working through the moz technical - if I cant find a solution, have to go back to basics. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
Hope that assists.
-
Hi,
It sounds to me like you might be over-optimizing your site for a single word spread across multiple pages. When you do this, you're doing one of two things; confusing search engines to the point where they don't know which of your pages is the best match therefore they're not showing any, or you're being flagged for being too spammy. Optimizing multiple pages for the same keyword is an old grayish/blackish hat technique that people used to do before algorithms caught up to them.
Might be good to take a few steps back and start at the basics. Have you checked out the Beginners Guide to SEO yet? I highly recommend it as your starting point: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
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
-
Newbie SEO ?: Does my About page URL have to contain the word About?
New to WordPress and SEO. Built and launched my website last week. The URL was originally domain/about. However, I installed Yoast plugin and it told me "about" was a stop word. So, without too much thought (my first problem), I changed the url (before Google crawled me) to clearwingcommunications.com/storytelling. Since then, I've noticed that sites I know are optimized have their URL with the word "about." So, is this considered a bad practice? My site HAS been crawled at this point. If I change it back to About and do a 301 redirect, does that hurt reporting? Thanks for your help! Christy
On-Page Optimization | | christyr0 -
I'm starting an online training school and need some advice.
Hey Moz'ers, I'm looking start an online training website. I feel there is 3 options: Self hosted LMS (Moodle, Litmos etc), Sass solution (Academy of Mine, Pathwright etc) Or DIY with Chargify type payments/subscriptions. To get started it is easiest to use one of the software as a service options. I get to use my own domain but everything else is via the software provider. **What potential problems can you see if/when I decided to do my own self hosted option? Will I be able to redirect the pages to my new site and pass along my accumulated page rank with minimal disruption or am I missing something catastrophic? ** Any advice would be helpful.
On-Page Optimization | | danlovesadobe0 -
Looking for some basic guidelines to start my optmization
Hello Everyone. I recently started getting interested in SEO. I'm the owner os a small mens underwear company we limited staff, limited resources, etc. well I'm sure most of you know the drill. I have read countless articles, guides, starting with the ones here at Moz but when it comes to actually starting to fix the problems I have I have NO IDEA where to start. it is discouraging and to be honest frighting. I know right now my competitors are getting ahead of my while I just stare at my screen thinking where do I start? Do I fix loading speed?Do I repalce the entire content of my site? mostly category texts, product descriptions, do I add Atl text to all my images?
On-Page Optimization | | RaulValencia79
how do I even start building links when it seem the only strategy is to send an email to a related site to link to us? any way. Most of you here are SEO experts and small business owners I would greatly appreciate if you point me in teh right direction, like a 1, 2 ,3 ....type of thing. I might be asking to much but after thinking about it I decided to post something here.0 -
Newbie question - Optimize homepage or create new page?
Hey everyone! I'm new here and wondering if anybody could help with a question. I'm trying to optimize for the keyword "meet people". I've attached a screenshot of the Moz SERP report for the top 10 results for this keyword for Google (UK). Unfortunately my domain doesn't make the top ten - we're currently raked 11th. My domain - tastebuds.fm - has a domain authority of 53 and the homepage has a page authority of 61 which is way way above the scores for the 1st placed result. What am I doing wrong? Should I focus on competing using a page that contains the keyword eg. http://tastebuds.fm/meet-people OR should I work on improving the 11th place of my homepage by tweaking the content? Bear in mind I already have an A grade for on-page optimization of the homepage for the keyword in question. If I decided to optimize a new page... how long would it take before I ranked well for the page if the only place it was linked was from the homepage? Also what should I put on this new page? Our homepage already converts well so should I duplicate it somehow? 4ENqCPz.png
On-Page Optimization | | AlexTP0 -
How To Get Started?
I am very new to this website and signed up within the month. I have seen the crawled results of my website www.davidwaddleton.com but I just don't know what to do with the information. For example I get duplicates/errors/suggestions and I look at them but don't know how to fix them. Can you please recommend how I can move forward as a newbie? I feel overwhelmed with the amount of errors and duplicates. There are hundreds!
On-Page Optimization | | dwaddsy0 -
Next on-page steps for an SEO newbie
Hi there! I'm new to Seomoz and am really pleased with the service so far. I've been doing some On-page optimizations and am gradually getting most of my pages to an A grade, but I wondered what the next steps would be? For example I have been looking at the search term "the shins fans". I have an A grade for my page (http://tastebuds.fm/artists/the+shins) but it lists on the 2nd page of SERPS for the term (in the UK at least). Can anyone recommend any tips for taking my page to the 1st page of SERPS? This site seems to do well: http://www.fanpop.com/spots/the-shins I am aware of the importance of link-building, but I'm specifically looking for tips on optimizing the page itself. Many Thanks, Alex
On-Page Optimization | | AlexParish0 -
How long after a URL starts showing a 404 does Google stop crawling?
Before hiring me to do SEO, a client re-launched their site and did not 301 the old URLs to the new. Only the home page URL stayed the same. For a month after the re-launch, the old URLs returned a 404. For the next month, all 404 pages (basically any non-existent URL) were 301'd to the home page. Finally, 2 months after launching, they properly 301'd the old URLs to the new. Now, the new URLs are not ranking well. I assume it's too late to realize any benefit from the 301's, just checking to see if anybody has any insight into how long Google keeps trying to crawl old/404/improperly 301'd URLs. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | AndrewMiller0