Issue with Joomla Site not showing in SERP's

[CGR-Creative]

Site: simpsonelectricnc dot com

I'm working on a Joomla website for a local business that isn't ranking at all for any relevant keyword - including the business name.

The site is only about six months old and has relatively few links. I realize it takes time to compete for even low-volume keywords, but I think something else may be preventing the site from showing up.

The site is not blocked by Robots.txt (which includes a valid reference to the sitemap)
There is no duplicate content issue, the .htaccess is redirecting all non-www traffic to www version
Every page has a unique title and H1 tag.
The URL's are search-engine friendly (not dynamic either)
XML sitemap is live and submitted to Google WM Tools. Google shows that it is indexing about 70% of the submitted URL's.

The site has essentially no domain authority (0.02) according to Moz - I'm assuming this is due to lack of links and short life on the web.
Until today, 98% of the pages had identical meta descriptions.

Again, I realize six months is not an eternity - but the site will not even show up for "business name + city,state" searches in Google. In fact, the only way I've seen it in organic results is to search for the exact URL.

I would greatly appreciate any help.

[CGR-Creative]

The site is still not showing for any relevant search terms (which is wildly frustrating) - however I have noticed some movement in Webmaster Tools in terms of pages crawled per day.

2jdrivd.jpg

[CGR-Creative]

Hi Keri, I am looking into that for sure. I also enabled gzip compression which has had a positive impact on overall loading times as well.

In Google Webmaster tools, the graph for loading time has gone down considerably and the crawl activity has gone up. I'm hoping this is a positive sign.

[KeriMorgret]

I would still look at your image size while you waited -- getting the load time down can only help things.

[CGR-Creative]

Thanks for the suggestions. Other than building links, it seems there's little left to do except wait.

[alhallinan]

Sure thing!

The post can be found here:

http://tampaseo.com/2011/03/joomla-seo-tips/

[KeriMorgret]

Go ahead and link to the post -- seems quite appropriate and on-topic.

[alhallinan]

Joomla is very duplicate content challenged.  I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, but I won't link to it so I don't look like a spammer.  Here are the highlights:

1. The natural installation of Joomla comes with silly things like "print" and "pdf" icons. Both of these will lead to duplicate content issues.

2. Joomla's categories will lead to duplicate content

3. Different URL structures will lead to duplicate content issues

Still, not being indexed for the branded terms is a tough thing to be a part of.  What is the niche you are in?  Could you possibly be black listed? Is the domain new or did he buy it "used"?

[CGR-Creative]

Adam, thanks for the input. We are now working on a couple of link campaigns and are slowly starting up pick up some here and there. We are definitely suffering from a lack of links.

Not ranking for company name and location after six months still seems strange to me despite lack of back-links.

And I agree with you and  Keri regarding the links in the footer - we will look into eliminating that.

[KeriMorgret]

The site looks visually nice, except for the list of keywords at the bottom that Adam mentioned. I agree that some good backlinks are needed.

For user experience (and a bit for ranking, but primarily user experience at this point) I suggest looking at the file size of the images on your page. My first impression was that the site was slow to load, and I noticed you have several large image files that could be reduced either by saving a png as a jpg, or compressing the jpg (investiate smush.it from Yahoo).

[AdamThompson]

Jason,

I believe the greatest reason you are not ranking (even for company name + city) is lack of backlinks. I would definitely recommend working to build quality backlinks.

These resources will help you get started:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z

Also, I would consider removing the list of keywords at the bottom of the page - that could be viewed as keyword stuffing.