Where are we going wrong?

[ScottImageWorks]

I've been going over all the top ranking factors, running my site through Moz analytics and page graders, just researching the heck out of this, and I'm trying to figure out where we're going wrong.

The site is www.imageworkscreative.com - and we're being outranked by newer sites.  We need to rank for terms like web design va, custom web design, web design firm, etc.  We publish blog updates on average once a week, and promote those via social media and a few syndication services.

We were using a link builder who wasn't following our instructions regarding competitor backlinks ... pretty sure her work ended up hurting more than it helped.

I'd like to hire a consultant or high-quality link builder to help get things going, for us and for our clients.  Any recommendations would be much appreciated, as well as any advice for us in terms of overall issues that need to be resolved.

Thanks!

[RichardSEO]

Few things.

Reason why your title is below meta description? Seems awkward. Put keyword into H1 preferably.

Put more content onto homepage if that is the page you are trying to rank. I aim for 800+ words.

Your link profile foundation is really good. You have a very easy site to work with and can see some pretty good rankings. Main issue is you lack links with the anchor text you are trying to rank. Thats an easy fix for the most part. 51 DA? Wish my clients would have similar clean sites to work with. Would make my life sooooo much easier.

Your content looks like its farmed. Grabbing it from a content farm? Try to create higher quality content and send social signals to it. Also, its best to put blogs + excerpt + date stamp on homepage.

Lastly, you are getting 70/100 in terms of desktop page speed. Have to optimize images, minify JS/css/html. and move JS to footer. I assume your site is hosted in the US? Response time is a little slow so you might consider using a CDN.

I see that you are located in SD, I am in LA. If you want to chat, PM me.

[Alex-Harford]

Have you checked www.imageworkscreative.com on Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any important site messages?

You have a lot of links to your homepage with the exact same anchor text - I notice it's in the footers of your client's websites, which isn't a good idea when it's done to excess. 'custom web design' is one of the phrases and that's a term you mention, so it's possible you've fallen foul of the Penguin update, especially if you had a sudden drop in traffic/rankings.

I haven't used it myself, but this Google Penalty Checker has been recommended by some of my favourite SEOs who work/contribute here at Moz: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/

If you have suffered a penalty there are plenty of online guides on recovering, let me know if you need pointing in the right direction.

[BWrightTLM]

Hey Jess,

First of all, I want to say AWESOME website. It looks really great and really has inspired me to update ours to something similar. lol

A lot of websites have been hit in the recent weeks due to the Penguin 2.1 update, especially if they have hired someone in the past to just "build links" for them. Have you noticed this drop in rankings in the last couple months; or, has it just always been like this?

Ahrefs.com is good place to start when checking your links. Just from looking at some of these myself, I notice you have links from a bunch of different sites like germany.paristech.com, phillippines.paristech.com, france.paristech.com, and some other sites in foreign languages. These are examples of links that are most likely hurting you more than helping you.

I would recommend starting by doing a link assessment, removal of bad links, and submit to the Google disavow tool. Once you do that, I would begin focusing on the SEO piece more and begin to build quality links through great content and social media.

Shameless Plug: We have some packages to assist with the link cleanup and SEO. Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other questions. ben@todayslocalmedia.com