Australian search - ZERO visibility and stumped
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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:
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The site ranks for four times as many keywords in the US as it does in Australia.
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The site ranks for a grand total of 5 keywords on the first page for AU keywords.
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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.
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Infrequent indexing of homepage (used to be every 2-3 weeks, I've gotten that down to 1 week).
Sequence of events:
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November 2017 - they made some changes to their URLs - some on the blog and some on the top nav LPs. Redirects seem okay.
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November 2017 - Substantial number of lost referring domains, not many seem to be quality.
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January 2018 - total number of AU ranking keywords more than halved.
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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.
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July-Sep 2018 - total number of US ranking keywords halved
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November 10 - I walked into this mess.
What's been done:
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Reduced site load speed by over 150% (it was around 20 seconds).
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Create sitemap (100 entry batching) and submit to GSC.
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Improved MarketMuse score for the homepage.
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Changed language from "en-US" to "en-AU"
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Fetch and render - content is all crawlable and indexed properly.
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Changed site architecture for top nav core landing pages to establish clear hierarchy.
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All version of GSC created, non-www and www http, and non www https and www https
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Site crawl - normal amount of 404s, nothing stands out as substantial.
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http to https redirect okay.
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Robots.txt updated and okay.
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Checked GSC international targeting, confirmed AU.
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No manual links penalty
I'm clearly stumped and could use some insights. Thanks to everyone in advance, if you can find time.
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Well, seems that GSC contradicted this report. I don't think that's the issue.
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Incredibly helpful. Thank you very much!
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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.
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