Organic Search Problems?
-
Hey guys,
I am in need of a little help!
I am currently an aspiring SEO (trying to absorb as much information as I can and implement changes to help my site organically)... Most of my experience revolves around SEM.
That being said, I have a problem. My site is doing well through paid search... great quality scores, etc. However, the content on my site (and even my site as a whole) does not "appear" to rank well in Organic.
To explain further... My site is federalautoloan.com... and when I type in exact article names (or even federal auto loan) into Google, nothing shows up. And yes, my content is all original/unique content. I've even recently added a unique Calculator to my site.
site:federalautoloan.com in the search bar shows results for all of my pages... but it just seems as though Google does not like my site for some reason. At least in Organic. The odd thing is, none of my other sites have this problem.
Do you guys have any advice?
The only thing I can think of is that somehow my 301 redirect was performed improperly. Yes, I had a permanent redirect performed on my site about 4 months back. The URL we were using prior just wasn't performing as well in Paid Search. But seeing as how that is the preferred method by Google... I'm really at a loss...
Again, my site is FederalAutoLoan.com.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Even generic SEO advice would be appreciated.
Edit: Two other things to note... I have plugged my site into the SEOmoz Pro tool... the tool is not showing any issues for my site. I am also making use of Google Webmaster Tools and the only error that shows up for my site is a Soft 404 for one of my pmcs... Not sure why it is even pulling one of my pmcs... but as far as I can tell, there really shouldn't be any problems.
Note on the 404 for anyone who might give a response on that issue... http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers returns a 200 OK response.
Edit2: Question presented below.
-
Colt, many of your blog posts have multiple links to the home page and all are using the same anchor text. That on the surface looks a little spammy. That might be sending up a red flag to someone, because I know that if I were a customer reading them for the first time, and since they're all in red, I'd be thinking something along that line too.
Good luck finding the issue, Lowell
-
Thank you all for the responses so far.
Based off the responses thus far, it seems as though the site doesn't have any Google-related issues (I hope).
However, I am still concerned that specific article names do not show up. For example, when I type "count the costs before you get an auto loan" into the Google search bar... our article doesn't show up. At least not for a substantial number of pages.
I'm deeply worried that this is an issue related to our permanent redirect... as none of our other sites have this problem (sites that haven't been around for as long... counting the time before the redirect). The original URL was GetGreatAutoLoans.com if that helps at all.
Thanks!
-
Great!
Thank you very much Nux! Really appreciate the help.
-
I'm not sure if you can use htaccess with your hosting, but if so this will force www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
and this should force no Default.aspx:
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*Default\.aspx\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)Default\.aspx$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
References:
-
Hey Kyle,
I guess my problem is that I am trying to "compare" SEO and SEM a little too closely at the moment. Right now our content, etc. is doing great for our SEM strategy... So obviously I'm wanting to see the same for Organic.
Everything I've read so far speaks to really focusing on quality/original content that are keyword specific. I assume I can't go wrong by building an extensive database of articles for specific (and long-tail) keywords.
Thanks for the Tool link! Glad you liked the site. We put a lot of effort into each of our sites.
Thanks for the response Kyle!
-
Hey Nux!
Great idea, thank you! Transitioning from FederalAutoLoan.com to Federal Auto Loan makes perfect sense.
http://www.federalautoloan.com
Both of these links point to http://www.federalautoloan.com. As far as I know, this is a pretty standard tactic for users that don't use www. when typing in a URL.
As for the /Default.aspx... I'll check into it. Our IT is using it for some reason. I'll have to get back to you on that.
Thank you very much for the response!
-
Hey Zsolt,
Thanks for the response!
I'll get on the H1 tag issue right away.
As for the code issue... is that really a significant problem? It's how my in-house IT department has coded all of our websites... and frankly, they are pretty good at what they do. Unless it is causing us major issues with Organic Search, I'm inclined to leave it as is. Let me know.
I have done a bunch of keyword research as of late - and read a lot about the importance of long-tail keywords - so this is good advice... and currently in progress. Obviously over-night results aren't to be expected. Is there a specific way I should be developing content for these keywords?
I'm working on our linking strategy as well. And will definitely avoid purchasing links.
Thanks Zsolt!
-
Two things I see when I did a quick look at it.
First, I suggest you change the title to "Federal Auto Loan: Fast and Easy Auto Loans" instead of "FederalAutoLoan.com: Fast and Easy Auto Loans". Right now your first keyword in the title is your domain name. Ranking for this keyword won't be an issue at all and will happen naturally. Federal Auto Loan would be a much more relevant keyword to push for. The keywords in the title are given importance from left to right.
Second, I would make sure your homepage is only accessible from one URL.
I see you can access the homepage with these different URLs right now:
http://www.federalautoloan.com/
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx
Google may be able to differentiate between all of this, but links built in with one URL will quite possibly only benefit that one URL and not the other two.
-
Hello Colt,
First and most important thing is that organic SEO differs from paid search. One thing is that you have multiple instances of h1 tag and that is spamming. Just leave the most important as h1 modify all other to h2.
I think you have quite a long code for this short page. I would try to shrinken the code somehow. One other problem with the code is that your page is built using tables: that is not up to date anymore. You should use divisions and format them via css.
The hugest matter of all is that you have only got 2 inbound links: all two from the same site. If you want to rank in organic search with compatitive terms like loan and credit you should have tonns of inbound links. Read more somewhere on linkbuilding what is possible and what is forbidden. Do not purchase links.
Do some keyword research or get some from your paid campaigns: optimize for long tail words, loan and credit are so compatitive words, that with really hard work you need at least a whole year to get to first page, and i am not sure that is even enough.
Why you are not ranking for federal auto loan is that it contains loan as a compatitive words, federal that is another nice word used mostly on governmenr sites, and auto that can be a lot of things. So your brand name is composed of three really compatitive and hard words, you need patience and lot of hard work to rank for that.
-
I just did a quick analysis and it looks like your domain strength is low (DA 17) and you are trying to rank for moderately competitive keywords 30-40%
The only way you can rank for the keywords mentioned with that low of a domain strength is by AWESOME on-page-optimizations. Use the Term Target Tool tool to help with the process. Shoot for an "A" on each page and definitely have an exact match in your title tag. Currently your home page only has a grade of "C" for the term "federal auto loan" so there is room for improvement.
Keep focusing with your on-page, you have a sharp looking site so once you get traffic there you should be all set!
Good luck - Kyle
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
-
Not showing up in search results for non-branded terms
Hello! Can anyone see any glaring reasons why this post: "98 Book Marketing Ideas That Can Help Authors Increase Sales" isn't on page one of Google — or even page 10! — for the term "book marketing ideas"? Many other sites with lower domain and page authority — even ones linking to this article — are ranking on the first ten pages for this term, and I can't figure out why we're not appearing anywhere. The same thing is happening for ALL of our other blog posts, and the keywords they're optimized for. According to GA, the only terms we're getting clicks from are branded keywords. This subdomain is now 2 years old, and the domain bookbub.com has been around for 5 years. Our domain authority is 61. We have the Yoast SEO plugin installed and are following all the standard SEO best practices. We have enough external links to at least be ranking within the first 10 pages of this Google search. I feel like there's something technically wrong, maybe in the code or backend, but nobody here can figure it out, and our hosting provider WP Engine has no ideas. Moz is returning crawl errors on our site, mainly "Error Code 804: HTTPS (SSL) Error Encountered" and "Error Code 803: Incomplete HTTP Response Received." I have confirmed with WP Engine that everything is set up correctly on our end, and that this is a known Moz issue. I've reached out to Moz's support team about this, and am awaiting a response. But what else am I missing? There's got to be something — I've been blogging for 10 years for different companies and my own personal websites, and I've never come across anything like this before. I'm completely stuck! I'd appreciate any insights you can offer. Thanks in advance! 🙂 EDIT: I heard back from Moz on those errors. The 804 errors are a Moz-side issue — their crawler isn't equipped to be able to handle SNI. They're looking into a resolution, and this wouldn't affect search engine crawlers. Regarding the 803 error: "When you see an 803 error, that means your site closed its TCP connection to our crawler before our crawler could read a complete HTTP response. You don't see this error when you go to the page in your browser because content-length is an outdated component for modern browsers and they will disregard this error, but the intention of our crawler is to report any errors that might be occurring. So the crawler is configured to detect and report such errors." The only thing I can think to do here is go back to WP Engine with this information, but other than that, I'm not sure what this could mean or how to fix it, or if this might be the underlying technical issue keeping us from ranking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bookbubpartners1 -
Travel site schema problems
I'm developing a travel site for my home state (Kansas - http://www.kansasisbeautiful.com though it's still has some development being worked on), but struggling to find scheme to work with for some items. So far my site is laid out by both region (northeast Kansas, western Kansas, etc.) and location types (waterfalls, parks, etc.). I'm currently working on coding in schema markup. I've found schema types for waterfalls, parks and landmarks, but I'm struggling to find anything for scenic drives (or highways, drives, anything related), hiking/biking trails and regions (northeast Kansas, southeast Kansas, etc.) The question I have is: What can I do to still try and put some kind of markup when there's nothing available that fits the item I'm trying to markup?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | msphoto0 -
Some sitemap xml apprears in google search
some sitemap, i have observed, that google is showing in the result for our website.. wht is wrong? any idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1190 -
Problems in indexing a website built with Magento
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web marketing agency. Recently we're having some problem in indexing this website www.farmaermann.it which is based on Magento. In particular considering google web master tools the website sitemap is ok (without any error) and correctly uploaded. However only 72 of 1.772 URL have been indexed; we sent the sitemap on google webmaster tools 8 days ago. We checked the structure of the robots.txt consulting several Magento guides and it looks well structured also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
In addition to this we noticed that some pages in google researches have different titles and they do not match the page title defined in Magento backend. To conclude we can not understand if this indexing problems are related to the website sitemap, robots.txt or something else.
Has anybody had the same kind of problems? Thank you all for your time and consideration Riccardo0 -
Canonical URL on search result pages
Hi there, Our company sells educational videos to Nurses via subscription. I've been looking at their video search results page:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9868john
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd When you click on a category, the URL appears like this:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=Medications Would this be an instance where i'd use the canonical tag to redirect each search results page? Bearing in mind the /cpd page is under /Nursing cpd, and that /Nursing cpd is our best performing page in search engines, would it be better to refer it to the 'Nursing CPD' rather than 'CPD' page? Any advice is very welcome,
Thanks,
John0 -
Sitemap Folders on Search Results
Hello! We are managing SEO campaign of a video website. We have an issue about sitemap folders. I have sitemaps like ** /xml/sitemap-name.xml .** But Google is indexing my /xml/ folder and also sitemaps and they appear in search results. If i will add Disallow: /xml/ to my robots.txt and remove /xml/ folder from webmaster tools, Google could see my sitemaps? or it ignores them? Will my site effect negatively after remove /xml/ folder completely from search results? What should i do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roipublic0 -
Impact of SSL - switching from http: to https: on organic rankings?
Hello, just paranoid, but thought i'd ask. We are installing an SSL certificate on a site ranking very well organically in all the engines. This will change our site from http:// to https://. Is there an risk to our rankings in doing so? What might I need to consider? Changing my htaccess redirects to https: instead of http;? Any ripple effects from switching to a secure site? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0 -
Temporarily Delist Search Results
We have a client that we run campaign sites for. They have asked us to turn off our PPC and SEO in the short term so they can run some tests. PPC no problem straight forward action, but not as straight forward to just turn off SEO. Our campaign site is on Page 1, Position 4, 3 places below our clients site. They have asked us to effectively disappear from the landscape for a period of 1-2 months. Has anyone encountered this before, the ability to delist good SERP for a period of time? Details: Very small site with only 17 pages indexed within google, but home page has good SERP result. My issues are, How to approach this in the most effective manor? Once the delisting process is activated and the site/page disappears, then we reverse the process will we get back to where we were? Anyone encountered this before? I realise this is a ridiculous question and goes against SEO logic, get to page 1 results only to remove it, but hey, clients are always presenting new challenges for us to address..... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency0