Rankings question

[dentaldesign]

We have just taken on a client who is really struggling in the rankings, even for noncompetitive terms.

Here is the URL: www.freshsmiles.co.uk

they are targeting 'dentist york, dental implants york, teeth whitening york, orthdontist york'

The content on the site seems very good (we have been working on ensuring that the content is duplicated and of good quality) They have also been doing blogs http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/blog/

We've installed webmaster tools and there are no manual spam action warnings and I have checked the inbound links to the website and they don't seem spammy.

Any help would be much appreciated!

thanks in advance

Marcus

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Marcus

I'm going to just go through a bunch of items in no particular order;

• Internal links in footer - the anchor "private dental practice in york" linking to the homepage is a little over-optimized.  As is linking to the marketing and web design companies with exact commercial anchors.
• The actual brand name is a little unclear. Is it "fresh Smiles" or "FreshSmile" or "fresh dental" or "fresh dental smile clinic"? It's super important to have this clear to make a strong brand presence. "Fresh dental smile" and "fresh smiles" don't return a normal "branded" search result with 8 or 10 sitelinks. See this screenshot for an example. This has to be 100% clear on-site and off-site, especially in local listings.
• The homepage title tag for example is a bit overdone. It should be the main keyword / service and the brand name. Also, "cosmetic dentist" appears in almost every page title tag. You want to avoid repetition, have the titles describe the page well, while fitting in the main keyword for that page. Follow Google's guidelines on titles.
• For back links, there's definitely some over optimization going on - see Open Site Explorer's anchor text report - and the use of anchors like "dentists in york" "dentist york" etc is a bit excessive. Get those anchors changed to brand names if possible. Believe it or not, there's just too many links in general, and many of them are keyword links. What I mean is - you're not ever naturally going to see 100's of back links for a dentist. Google knows this. So it sends a red flag to have too many low quality over optimized links. I would stress obtaining a few links but of super high quality.
• Social Media - the facebook feed for example is just a blast of "push" marketing - teeth services, photos and so forth. Very minimal activity in general. They should pick maybe one social network that aligns with where their customers are and use it as a communication medium - a place where patients can leave messages, the office can post fun and engaging things. See Social Media Examinar for plenty of social ideas - I recommend possibly using either Pinterest or Instagram as well. Twitter doesn't make much sense for a dentist. I am mentioning social media because in my opinion it helps SEO.
• Rel Publisher - even if they're not posting activity on Google Plus (same as the Google places page now) use Rel Publisher to connect their website to their G+ page. Check that its set up correctly with the rich snippet tester
• Site speed seems poor - here's a test result from webpagetest - note that many of the images (like this one) are taking almost 1 second each to load. You definitely want to try to get those to say 50-75k with some compression etc. Site speed is a small ranking factor as well as UX factor for visitors.
• The site has a lot of pages indexed for a dentist web site - over 1,000 as you can see here. What I would do is see if they are all getting traffic (check in analytics) - and HIGHLY consider killing off pages like this: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/teeth-straightening-in-york/ which are is a blog post format, designed to just target a keyword and even the image is broken now. There are a LOT of pages like that indexed. Here's another: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/we-also-offer-patients-facial-rejuvenation-treatments/ - this will all seem like thin content for sure, and affect rankings.

As you can see, a lot to work on! I don't think any one thing is going to fix the site, it's going to have to be a bunch of improvements.

EDITED TO ADD: I would just kill the tag archives. Remove them from navigation and delete them. Check to see if a few might be getting traffic (using my method here) and 301 redirect the few that might be and just remove the rest. I was trying to crawl the site, and it's already queued up to over 1,500 pages - most of them tag archives.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Marcus,

When a ranking drop happens, there are typically 3 possible causes:

• The business has been surpassed by more active competitors

• There is a temporary shakeup going on, meaning that rankings will likely return in a short time

• The business has been penalized, meaning that time goes by and the previous high rankings do not return

From your description, it sounds like it may be the last of these. You mention "once they had they transferred over" and I'm not quite sure to what this refers, but a key task here will be to see if the client can put a date on exactly when they lost rankings. If they can't maybe their analytics can help you. Then, perhaps you can tie this time period to a known Google penalty, as well as being sure that all of the bases are covered in my original list of Local SEO requirements.

Major penalties and troubleshooting fall outside my areas of knowledge, so I am going to request that one of our expert traditional SEOs might also come look at your question. They will likely be able to ask questions and see things that I can't.

[ClaudioHeilborn]

Hi again Marcus,

In this case I used majesticseo to have a quick glance, you will be able to see these links even with the free version. Remember to start slowly with new links and change your anchor + do not link only to home, build a strong net all over your site. Wish you good luck, keep me posted!

Cheers from another really sunny morning in southern Spain.

[dentaldesign]

Hi Claudio,

Thanks for that - I had a look at the inbound links to the site via Opensite explorer and it didn't pick up the ones you've mentioned, so I will investigate their link profile a bit further.

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for getting back to me, according to the client, the site enjoyed good rankings previously and it now seems to have dropped (once they had they transferred over). I'm thinking it must be an algorithmic penalty because the site doesnt rank in the first 8 pages for 'Dental implants York' despite the high quality on the page and that is optimised correctly. This is the same for most of their other treatment keywords.

Thanks

Marcus

[MiriamEllis]

Hi DentalDesign,

Can you provide further clarification as to what you mean by 'struggling for rankings'? Does this mean the client has lost rankings or is struggling to achieve the high rankings they would like to earn?

As a rule of thumb, high local rankings hinge on -

1. Physical location in city of search

2. A lack of violations of Google's guidelines

3. Consistency of NAP (name, address, phone) across all citations

4. A perfectly optimized website

5. Quality and authority of that site

6. Review acquisition

7. Traditional SEO factors

8. Activities of competitors

Local Search Ranking factors 2013 goes into awesome detail regarding the most important positive and negative ranking factors. It's an amazing resource: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

[ClaudioHeilborn]

Hi Marcus,

Have a look to 1778 backlinks coming from asooy.com they look definitely spammy... probably others, also would advise you to move cautiously with new links 100´s links per day could show spammy also with a site that previously had no backlinks except those spammy ones and also about 3000 from bradford-webdesign.co.uk which don´t either look to much of "natural" sort of links...

Maybe disavow those ones and start slowly and naturally with new links, change your anchor, and work them from different domains.

Hope you good luck from southern sunny Spain!