I'm having an exteremly hard time with SERPs despite my best efforts. Can someone help?
-
My site is www.drupalgeeks.org
Our traffic is going up but our SERPS are not. We simply don't rank for any of our targeted keywords.
I have covered nearly every white hat SEO strategy possible. Our site has a great social presence (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest), we write blogs regularly, and even guest blog. We have a YouTube channel, an RSS feed. We've cleaned up page speed times, set 301 redirects, checked for duplicate content. We use Bing and Google webmaster tools and have submitted a sitemap. We are indexed and webmaster tools see our keywords as relevant in our content. We have a robots.txt file configured properly.
The only thing I can think of is that our services pages also display (as a truncated summary) on our homepage. Could this be considered duplicate content, and is this causing a problem?
Is there anything else we can do? Or are we missing something vital?
We thank you in advance for your help!
Candice
-
You're very welcome Candice - I've gotten a bunch of inspiration and motivation from this site from other members in the past, so if there's ever a chance to impart the same on someone else, I jump at the chance.
I do like the Q&A idea, as it opens you up to being both a service and an educational resource, kind of like the guys at Distilled, with their SEO service but things like their blogs and their DistilledU ideas. So it can and does work. It also gives you a long lasting effect from your social media interactions.
All the best going forward, can't wait to see what you can come up with!
-
Hi Tom,
Thank you soooo much for your very thoughtful response. It's nice to hear words of encouragement while I'm beating my head against the wall I really appreciate you taking the time to look at my site and offer your words of wisdom and helpful suggestions. The Q&A idea is fantastic! We do get some questions from Facebook and this would tie in nicely also with our tutorial videos.
Again, your help is greatly appreciated. Faith in humanity: Restored.
Thanks,
Candice
-
Hi Candice
I've only had a brief look at your site and your link profile, but while I can see you've made a solid start, I think the reason why you're not ranking is that you'll need to be doing more of what you've done already.
I can see a a lot of links from directories in your link profile. Personally, I would expect these to add a very small, if any, amount of benefit to your SEO, so I would focus elsewhere from here on in.
Content marketing could be a great strength of yours as you certainly look like an expert in your field. This blog post, for instance, is very thorough and in-depth. While I think guest posting on relevant websites is definitely worth your time, I think you should reserve your best content for your own blog and try and attract links to those posts.
The way to achieve that is to do marketing by more traditional means - get your message out there. Your social media presence is definitely going to help with this. But in the example of the blog post that I linked to earlier, could you maybe envisage something like that in the form of an infographic, perhaps? That way you could get people to link to your website by also sharing with them the image that they can post on your site. Or perhaps you can make it an interactive guide? I remember this guide on how to learn robots.txt with interactive examples - I can imagine something like that would be incredibly useful for your industry and would certainly get people talking about it and linking to it.
Similarly, tutorial videos hosted on your site can make a great educational resource that people will want to link to. And how about a Q&A resource? I'm sure that you'll get a lot of common questions from clients about certain drupal problems. You could fashion these into a really cool resource. It's a bit out there but have a look at this Q&A that the McDonalds Canada site has done. I can totally see an equivalent for your industry - you could utilise your social media channels as well and invite people to ask any questions they have on Drupal. It could really take off - just look at the links on that McD's subdomain. Big brand, obviously, but with thousands of links and hundreds of root domains you can see how many people like the resource. If you can create something like that for Drupal, the links are sure to flow.
Set up some alerts on twitter using RSS feeds and IfThisThenThat that will trigger when someone asks a Drupal related question. You can hit them up and say you've answered the question on your online resource - this may encourage more links. Similarly, Pinterest could be a great channel for you. Showcasing the best or most visually pleasing Drupal sites on a public board could be a fun idea.
It's gonna be a bit of hard work, but I think you've made a great start to the site already - it's now a case of scaling these methods up. The great advantage that you and your team have is your expertise and the fact that you're already producing excellent content. If you can market those out in different ways and encourage people to see you as an authority resource, as well as an excellent service, then I think you could go really, really far.
Hope this helps Candice! Give me a shout on Google+ if you fancy chatting some more.
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
-
Should I better noindex 'scripted' files in our portfolio?
Hello Moz community, As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant). For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in: thin content no H1 missing meta description missing canonical tag I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable. Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files. Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files? (And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BentoPres0 -
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Best time to choose a canonical URL & 301 redirect
I have taken on the task of getting a fairly huge eCommerce site more SEO friendly & have just realized that no URL has been chosen as our preferred domain. Should we designate a preferred domain now or wait until after the first of the year since we are hitting our busy period right now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Winoman0 -
Emergency Help...
Hello All, I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher" i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position. Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog. He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file. He also installed the following plugins: Link Juice Keeper NoFollow Free The SEO Rich Snippets Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Robots Txt WP-PageNavi Add Meta Tags These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help. My blog link is : http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/ I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located. Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | symbolphoto0