Australian search - ZERO visibility and stumped
-
Fair warning, this is going to be long, but necessary to explain the situation and what has been done. I will take ANY suggestions, even if I have tried them already.
We have a sister site in Australia, targeting Australian traffic. I have inherited what seems to be an incredible rat's nest. I've fixed over two dozen issues, but still haven't seemed to address the root cause.
NOTE: Core landing pages have weak keyword targeting. I don't expect much here until I fix this. The main issues I'm trying to resolve first are with the unusual US-based targeting, and the inability of the homepage to rank for anything.
The site is www[dot]castleford[dot]com[dot]au. Here's the rundown on what's going on:
Problems:
-
The site ranks for four times as many keywords in the US as it does in Australia.
-
The site ranks for a grand total of 5 keywords on the first page for AU keywords.
-
The homepage, while technically optimized on-page for "content marketing agency", and with content through MarketMuse, has historically ranked between 60-100, despite having a fairly strong DA with fairly weak competitors, based on AHREFs keyword difficulty, and Moz keyword difficulty. Oddly, the ranking has gone up to 5-7 for three day spurts over the past year.
-
Infrequent indexing of homepage (used to be every 2-3 weeks, I've gotten that down to 1 week).
Sequence of events:
-
November 2017 - they made some changes to their URLs - some on the blog and some on the top nav LPs. Redirects seem okay.
-
November 2017 - Substantial number of lost referring domains, not many seem to be quality.
-
January 2018 - total number of AU ranking keywords more than halved.
-
May/June 2018 - added a follow inbound link sitewide to an external site that they created. 20k inbound links with same anchor text to homepage. Site has a total of 24k inbound links.
-
July-Sep 2018 - total number of US ranking keywords halved
-
November 10 - I walked into this mess.
What's been done:
-
Reduced site load speed by over 150% (it was around 20 seconds).
-
Create sitemap (100 entry batching) and submit to GSC.
-
Improved MarketMuse score for the homepage.
-
Changed language from "en-US" to "en-AU"
-
Fetch and render - content is all crawlable and indexed properly.
-
Changed site architecture for top nav core landing pages to establish clear hierarchy.
-
All version of GSC created, non-www and www http, and non www https and www https
-
Site crawl - normal amount of 404s, nothing stands out as substantial.
-
http to https redirect okay.
-
Robots.txt updated and okay.
-
Checked GSC international targeting, confirmed AU.
-
No manual links penalty
I'm clearly stumped and could use some insights. Thanks to everyone in advance, if you can find time.
-
-
Well, seems that GSC contradicted this report. I don't think that's the issue.
-
Incredibly helpful. Thank you very much!
-
Hey Irene,
Here are a few things to take a look at:
1. Internal linking structure (see image attached via screaming frog) - the homepage is the 5th most internally linked page. Increasing that, should help with ranking it
2. Have you done local SEO work in Austrailia - claimed locations via a tool like https://www.yext.com
3. Build links from .com.au sites to help Google see where you are located.
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
-
Page Replication on Search
Hi. We recently created a Christmas category page on our eCommerce website (christowhome.co.uk). Earlier today, I Googled ‘Christow Christmas Silhouette Lights’ (Christow being the name of our website and Christmas silhouette lights being one of the sub-categories we recently created). I was curious to see how the page appeared on search. Bizarrely, the page appeared multiple times on search (if you click on the link above, it should show you the search results). As you can see, multiple meta titles and descriptions have been created for the same page. This is something that is affecting a number of our Christmas category pages. I don't quite understand why this has happened. We recently added filters to the category. Could the filters be responsible? Any idea how I can prevent this from happening? How I can stop Google indexing these weird replica pages? Many thanks, Dave
Technical SEO | | Davden0 -
Schema markup in tag manager for multiple locations not registering in tester tool or search console
Hi Moz community, I had implemented schema markup for companies with multiple branches. We setup an organization with multiple points of contact tag, a Local Business tag for each branch and tags for specific products/ services - all through Google tag manager. I managed to fix the product markup with a small update to the code I found in a Google forum but have been unable to revive our local business markup. The tags of the schema mark up are active but when I run the Google structured data testing tool it doesn't find any schema tags. We are seeing some of the tags show up in search console but not all of them. Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution? Or, do you have any recommendations on how to markup an organization with multiple branches? Should we have one overall organization tag and a separate one for each business or is there another way of presenting each branch? Appreciate any insight!
Technical SEO | | Alexanders0 -
Stop Google indexing entire website based on search location
OK - bear with me... We have a .co.uk website. However, we only want it indexing in the US Google and NOT the UK Google. Is there a way of configuring this in Search Console /Webmaster tools?
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Indexation and visibility problem
Hi I am working on a website (usarrestsearch org) for 6 months. I wrote about 100 pages full of good content. for some reason I see only 75% of the pages indexed in GWT. and Im having problems with SERP positions not rising. I suspect that it might be connected to the structure of the site. will appreciate any help thanks
Technical SEO | | holdportals0 -
Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
Hello, We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3! We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months. Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | forgottenlife0 -
Domains redirect influence search rankings
Hi seomoz, I'm currently optimizing a website which is www.photobookworldwide.com and the ranking is on 2nd page, but looking at the result this morning, instead of showing photobookworldwide.com, it show other result which is www.photobooklaos.com on 2nd page for the keyword photobooks. Our web developer using virtual domain, and redirected photobooklaos.com to photobookworldwide.com. Any solution for this? need you guys to help me on this. Cheers Gerald
Technical SEO | | greathokage0 -
How should I structure a site with multiple addresses to optimize for local search??
Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock. My question is 1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders? 1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused? Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages? I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?
Technical SEO | | LMDNYC0 -
Up-to-date list of search engine bot user agents
Does anyone know of an up-to-date-list of search engine bot user agents? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | JoeAmadon0