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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Site with both subfolders and subdomains
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | medi_
I'm working on a website that has a quite extensive subfolder structure for product and multilingual purposes.
domain.com/en
domain.com/it
domain.com/fr
domain.com/en/category
domain.com/it/category
domain.com/fr/category
domain.com/en/category/product
domain.com/it/category/product
domain.com/fr/category/product
domain.com/en/category/product/region
domain.com/it/category/product/region
domain.com/fr/category/product/region
and so on... We will soon be launching a completely different service, which would make the subfolder structure become even more complex. As John Mueller recently stated that Subdomains and Subfolders are treated the same by Google, I am now considering building that new service under subdomains for product reason, and for the sake of clarity. 1- Would my subdomains inherit the authority of my main domain?
2- Do I have to keep the language folders with the subdomain structure?
e.g.:
new-service.domain.com/en
nouveau-service.domain.com/fr
nuovo-servizio.domain.com/it OR
new-service.domain.com
nouveau-service.domain.com
nuovo-servizio.domain.com Looking forward to reading you!0 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
Site Has Not Recovered (Still!) from Penguin
Hello, I have a site that just keeps getting hit with a ton of bad, unnatural backlinks due to the sins from previous SEO companies they've hired. About every quarter, I have to add more bad links to their disavow file... still. Is it time to move them to a new domain? Perhaps a .net? If so, do we just completely trash the old domain & not redirect it? I've never had a client like this in the past but they still want to maintain their branded name. Thanks for your feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinaMumm0 -
Htaccess Question - Is this the way to go to consolidate?
Hi all, My site seems to have www.xyz.com, http://www.xyz.com, http://xyz.com and other variations! From an old agency doing this. All showing differing backlinks etc. SO I want to merge them so I can just look at one analytics account - with everything combined. I want it just to consolidate all to https:///www.xym.com as the client wants - how do I do this? Does it take long to take effect?? Also I presume in webmaster I'll have to set up the preferred extension? Thanks very much for any advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VMLQais0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Where would the SEO juice go if I have a wordpress site hosted by godaddy?
I am planning on moving my website to a wordpress that is hosted by godaddy. I am wondering where the SEO juice that my website has already gained would go. Would it go to godaddy when I make the move instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
My site links have gone from a mega site links to several small links under my SERP results in Google. Any ideas why?
A site I have currently had the mega site links on the SERP results. Recently they have updated the mega links to the smaller 4 inline links under my SERP result. Any idea what happened or how do I correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | POSSIBLE0