Low Ranking Mystery

[Social_Media_Mentors]

Hello fellow MOZzers..!

I am fairly new to this community but have been working on my SEO skills for a while.. I have created over 20 websites for myself and various clients, and all of them are doing fairly well ranking n.1 for their targeted keywords... except 1 WEBSITE THAT IS BECOMING A ROYAL PAIN IN THE BUTT!

The website is www.dancepartycentral.co.uk and this is why it's a mystery to me:

• The on-site SEO seems to be on point (getting an A on page-grader for desired keywords)
• "Dance Party" does not seem to be too much of a competitive keyword
• Many of the other competitors do not seem to have very professional websites (apart from 3 or 4) or that have as much targeted content for the relevant keywords
• I have over relevant 20 sites and industry directories for Entertainers that are linking to the site (even though not all of them are appearing on page crawls)
• Please keep in mind this site has been created using webs.com so I have little control over the coding
• I seem to only be getting a 6.5% TXT/HTML ratio even though the site is made up mostly of original content

This business highly relies on organic SEO searches and as my site is not ranking in the top 50, it's become a bit of a head-scratcher for me.. if anyone is kind enough to help me shed some light on the problem and how I can resolve this, I would be eternally grateful!

Many thanks

Jessica

[Tony-Dimmock]

Pleasure - glad to help

[Social_Media_Mentors]

ooohh Tony that is VERY interesting as ZooDance is supposed to redirect, definitely NOT be a duplicate (this was our old domain). This REALLY helps I will look into this now. Many many thanks!

Jessica

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hey Jessica,

Just had a quick check and you seem to have 2 x duplicate sites live: www.zoodance.co.uk/ and www.dancepartycentral.co.uk (not sure if you have any more?) both with identical on-page SEO. You mention that you have 20 x sites & ind directories that you own that link to your www.dancepartycentral.co.uk site but if they're all hosted on the same server (a who.is check showed 26 x sites hosted) then Google may consider your set-up a link farm.

So 2 x issues for starters (and big ones at that!) - 2 x duplicate websites (with Google ranking neither) and same IP address web hosting. Plus neither site 301 redirects from non-www to www - so in effect you have 4 potential duplicate sites (2 of each www and non-www).

Suggest removing 1 of them (review your link profile, branding, followers, analytics, offline outreach to confirm which to remove) and hosting on different server to others and adding a 301 to non-www to redirect to www.

Hope this helps?

Good luck

[Ron_McCabe]

Jessica,

I was referring to on line reviews.I was specifically referring to Yelp, Google, and Bing.   I tell all my clients that their goal should be 10 reviews on each platform. I get a lot of pushback on Yelp because of the filters.  There is a perception that Yelp does not publish positive reviews. This is not true as ar as I can tell. What is true is that they do filter people out who do not write reviews on a regular basis.  Unfortunately the guys that review all the time often had a bad childhood ;).

So along with getting them to review I would encourage them to have their clients write multiple reviews while they are on Yelp.  A way to encourage people to write these reviews is that Google is using these local "citations" as evidence of a local establishment.  This will give companies a boost on mobile if people from the company are writing reviews on a regular basis.

Ron

[Social_Media_Mentors]

Thanks Ron for the clarification! I will have a look to see if there are any local directories that I have missed. In terms of reviews do you mean on the directories directly? Just because our clients send them to us by email so I will have to try and get them to write them on the local directories instead in that case..!Haven't heard of Spyfu so I will definitely have a look at that.Thanks again!

Jessica

[Ron_McCabe]

Jessica,

I would look at a few things.  First I was not clear on my earlier comment.  Have you set up all the local directories? This would be both Google and Bing local, yelp,text,merchant circle, etc...

Second I would look at relative review strength.  Your quantity and quality of reviews can be up to 40% of your ranking if everything else is equal.

Finally I would look at your competitive position on key words.  I would use a tool like Spyfu to find out how your content compares. If there are some short falls you can expend your content in these areas.

Ron

[Social_Media_Mentors]

Hi Ron.. yes thanks for this, we have done as much as we can in regards to off-page SEO and we have as many relevant articles and incoming links form industry websites but it doesn't seem to have much effect unfortunately..

[Ron_McCabe]

Jessica,

I would suggest some off page SEO if you have not done this already.  I have had phenomenal results in a situation like this.

Ron