Why Did My Site Go Limp On Me?
-
One of my clients was once in the #1 position for "Philadelphia interior designer" and other related terms, but her site has dropped significantly. Still it is on the first page, but far from its former glory.
http://www.interiorsbydonnahoffman.com is the site.
What really confuses me is why in her home turf search of "Bucks County Interior Designer" a competitor, http://www.miriamansellinteriors.com, is above her in the SERPS. According to OSE her competitor has a PA of 32 vs my client's 39. My client has 35 Linking Root Domains (and some of high quality) compared to just 11 for the competition. In all aspects her competitor looks weaker and less relevant to me.
Her site has been weak in the SERPs since May/June.
We are redesigning her site- she has a high bounce rate compared to my other interior design clients, something like 55%.
Any insights from y'all?
-
Thanks for that Ricky.
-
Completely agree that on-site is needed, however, i'm not sure HOW much good it would do for that keyword phrase.
You are competing against one site for that term that you are extremely unlikely to outrank due to high DA/PA (2 SERP listings for houzz.com)
That being said you are competing with ashlimizell.com and down2earthdesign.com for the spot just ahead of the local listings (which may be hard to rank for due to the fact you are not actually located in Philly) and I think the on-site changes should take care of winning over that #3 ranking!
I also agree, kill the linked footer text. The anchor text doesn't really even match the corresponding page (ie interior design bucks county links to about page)
Also check out the Moz 2013 ranking factors for other areas that could help you get a boost in the SERPS! http://moz.com/rand/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/rank-factors-pie-2013lrg.gif
-
I didn't realize that by marking your answer as "good" that it was going to show as "answered" on the main thread. Whoops. I am still hoping for some more feedback on the off-site part.
-
No offense taken. I agree with you that this site is in a sorry state. Thanks for reminding me what I am dealing with. Unfortunately I inherited this poorly made website and until we launch her new one it is what I must work with.
I never thought of how the text below the footer could hurt her, although it is obvious now that you mention it. Again, it is an inherited tactic.
My only question on your feedback is about the title tags. They are clearly there: "Philadelphia Interior Designer | Bucks County Interior Design" so what are you referring to?
Thanks so much for your time, Lesley.
Do you notice any off-site red flags/issues?
-
Please don't be offended by this.
Honestly looking at the site I see no effort put into onsite SEO.
- h1 text is mostly her name (if people knew about her they more than likely would not search for her, make it more general)
- Page speed is average, it could be a lot better.
- No title tags
- Too much good text as images
- Missing a few key alt tags
- Your h2 elements are blank, which to me is a spammy red flag.
It honestly looks like a spammy site to me. You have a lot of text included after the copyright, which I am assuming you are using for ranking. Which in my mind amounts to no more than just putting a big list of keywords at the end of the page.
I am a firm believer in onsite first and off site next. You have a lot of on site work to do.
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
-
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
How can i redirect my site to other domain ?
I have been running an eCommerce site since 2008 and have a PR3 with mostly have an authority link from reputed sites, how can I transfer my existing eCommerce site to the new domain so in the new domain i get SEO value from the old domain. Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chandubaba0 -
SEO Link on Clients Site
Hey SEOMozzers, Quick question. In light of the possible 'over-optimisation' penalties pending from Google should we be looking to remove the SEO links to our site from our Clients websites? I appreciate that including a link to our site from an anchor text that includes 'SEO' in it may be like waving a flag to Search Engines saying we are carrying out SEO on our Clients sites. Obviously we would sooner risk a drop in our SEO keyword rankings than risk a penalty of any kind for our Clients. What is the recommended practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Reliable outsource site
Hi which is the most quality site to outsource my backlinks? freelancer.com odesk.com any other? From elance I am very disappointed. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
I want some good bookmarking sites to work with.
I want a list of some good dofollow bookmarking sites and directories so that i can put my site there. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0