Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
-
Hello,
Our site
nlpca(dot)com
dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause?
Thank you so much,
Bob
-
It's dropped enough that it's not other sites doing SEO. Lately I've been carefully adding a phrase here and there to our articles' copy to match the keywords in our titles. A while back I added "and Utah" to our home page title tag, but that was a couple of months ago. No striking changes that I can see. We have 2 other sites and all sites have an "Our other sites" link to interconnect, but that's never been a problem before.
Any help is greatly appreciated
-
Hi Bob,
Use this tool in SEOMoz - http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization
As I suspected by simply looking at your homepage, the term NLP appears very frequently most likely affecting keyword density. To search engines, it looks like keyword stuffing.
Running the report check in SEOMoz confirms this. Once place in particular is your <title>tag:</p> <p><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> California and Utah | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Training | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Certification | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Courses</span></p> <p><span>You might try something instead like:<br /></span><span style="background-color: initial;">NLP Institute of California | Training, Certification and Courses</span></p> <p>Also, NLP is a very broad term that is probably highly competitive - for example, Google shows 84 million results for the term. It might be better to do some keyword research and focus on more targeted terms - perhaps in your case, NLP Training. I also assume NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming (oddly I covered this topic as my senior research project in college). On your homepage, that term does not appear.</p> <p>Something that might help others answer your question - when did the drop in ranking occur and did you make any changes to your website shortly before the rank drop?</p></title>
-
Have you made any changes?
Has the site that moved above you been doing 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
-
Site naming - longer tail with keyword or short but off-term - does it matter?
So, we've established that the actual domain name is not a big ranking factor for google. However your chosen domain & site name will feature in your content so I'm figuring it does matter indirectly. Eg given a choice between: bobsfidgetspinners.com, welcome to "bobs fidget spinners", we sell fidget spinners.... or spinnersfidget.com, welcome to "spinners fidget", we sell fidget spinners I'm going on the assumption that the former is better because it introduces more on-term content (as well as nicer branding). For the limit content that talks about your brand name anyway. Is this a correct assumption? Would it make any difference if the rest of the site content was on-topic (and good, obviously)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSDOnline0 -
Keywords and keyword traffic
Hi I am struggling to know what keywords i should be targeting and how the website should be best optimised for said keywords. The website offers bespoke service in the lake district UK a popular tourist destination, The business operates within say a 30 km riadus of the area. So target vistors to the website would specifically be looking for services in the lake district. The trouble is for many targeted keywords for the area are quite low or no data shown. For example: tipi camping lake district, tipi hire lake district, Glamping lake district However nationally keywords for the service have a lot higher traffic i.e. tipi hire or tipi camping, glamping what keywords should be my target? and should I targeting my website for? I don't want to target customers looking for these services outside of the lake district and also by targeting keywords without the term lake district means my competition is greater as i'm competing with the whole of the Uk for serivces It can't provide. please advise thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bengo-990 -
Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings
We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic. Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings. I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised. At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it. Thanks in advance for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Site Rollback for Careless Website Design That Caused Rank Drop
New PPC Client (out of necessity) had their site redesigned for mobile without much care given to it by a "SEO Expert". None of the meta data was copied over to the new images and pages, much of the old content was simply deleted, intra site links completely changed. Huge hits in organic rank, resulting in traffic declines occurred as their lead volume hit zero the following month (April 21 until Present). Any concerns I should have in doing a simple rollback beyond redirects and GWT (Search Console) ops? Current plan is 1. Setup redirects back to old site 2. Launch PPC campaign to recover call volume and leads. 3. Optimize old site for mobile simultaneously with simple responsive framework for menu, text. 4. Start disavowing poor-quality links that were added (got 10 with spam rating >4). 5. Eventually move them back to Wordpress and the theme they paid for with site content, meta data, etc all in tact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jclmns0 -
Subpage ranking for homepage keyword
Hi all, May seem like a simple scenario and I might be missing something, but my subpage seems to be ranking for my main homepage keyword. The subpage PR is 28 and my domain authority is 17, how can I get my main home page to rank instead of the sub page (product page)? I want to stay away from exact match anchor text links, any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Can I rank for 3 keyword phrases using one long tial Keyword Phrase?
I am new to seo and still getting my head around long tail searches. If i use a phrase such as "luxury towels uk", Can i also rank on the same page for "luxury towels" and "towels uk"? Tui means ranking for 3 phrases using 1 long tail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
How to increase the page rank for keyword for entire site
sorry for my bad english is there any way to increase the ranking for a keyword for the entire site .i know that seo is done per page basis .my site contains 1000ds of posts and i cant get back links for each and every post .so i picked 4 keywords which are mostly used while searching my products , is there any method i can increase my ranking for those keywords like increasing domain authority EXAMPLE :like if i want to increase my ranking for "buy laptop" .if any user searches In google with buy laptop i want my site or any of related pages that match the user search query must show up in front
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prakash.moturu0