Organic Rankings - Y=5, B=2, G=Not Found!
-
My on-page SEO efforts are focused on generating higher visibility in Google's SERPs for my site: http://www.thegrossmanlawoffice.com. My primary keyword phrase is "winter garden divorce lawyer"
I have noticed that my home page ranks higher in Yahoo (5) and Bing (2) for my primary keyword, and Google does display my site in the 7-pack local results but does not rank my home page organically. It actually ranks my business's Facebook page on page 3 of the SERPs. Yahoo includes me in the local listings in position #2...at least today it does!
I am happy that Google includes me in the local results, and I am curious why it does not rank my home page organically at all.
Yahoo's rankings seem to be accurately tracking my keyword phrases and the appropriate pages, and it has me ranking really well for many of my keyword phrases.
I am not quite sure why Yahoo and Bing see my relevant pages and seem to be ranking me appropriately, but Google is not. I recently (within last week) cleaned up my backlink profile per a great suggestion I received here. Is that the likely culprit?
Any thoughts? Thank you in advance.
-
Yes, high quality links will be what easily makes and breaks any SEO attempt. You're onto something when you say local chamber links, getting links from places like that is usually doable and should be something that you explore.
-
I hear you on the backlink profiles, and what is funny is that the top ranking sites, other than Yelp, FindLaw, Avvo, Thumbtack, and others, have little or no backlinks.
Using MajesticSEO, one of my local competitors has 8 backlinks from two domains with a trust flow of "0" and a citation flow of 13. Another has 4 backlinks from 3 domains with a trust flow of "12" and a citation flow of "18." The third has 28 backlinks from 15 domains with a trust flow of "0" and a citation flow of "29."
MajesticSEO shows my site with 1,835 backlinks from 137 domains with a trust flow of "18" and a citation flow of "27." Many of them were questionable, which is why I requested that the links be removed and then disavowed the remainder of low quality, spamming links.
I suppose the quality of the backlinks may be an issue here. I supposed a site with one backlink from a local chamber is probably of higher quality than 2000 backlinks of questionable quality.
Thanks for your response.
-
Local results usually get trumped by sites like Yelp, Lawyers.com and even Facebook. There are so many factors at play that it's hard to say what exactly would be affecting it. It does seem like you've done your work with on site SEO. If your competitors have better back link profiles that's still the number one factor in Google's rankings.
Hope that helps
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
-
Is page speed important to improve SEO ranking?
I saw on a SEO Agency's site (https://burstdgtl.com/search-engine-optimization/) that page speed apparently affects Google ranking. Is this true? And if it is, how do I improve it, do I need an agency?
On-Page Optimization | | jasparcj0 -
Hreflang Errors 404 vs "Page Not Found"
For a websites that differ between catalogs (PDPs) what hreflang error causes the least harm? Obviously the best solution is to only have hreflang for shared products, but this takes more work to implement. So when no identical product exists... 1. Hreflang points to 404 or 410 error. 2. Hreflang points to 200 status "Page Not Found" page. This obviously has the additional issue of needing to point back to 100+ urls. I want to avoid having Google decide to ignore all hreflang due to errors as many correct urls will exist. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | rigelcable0 -
Ranking over someone else who has your branded domain name
Hello! I have a client who has been in business for a long time, but was very late to the game online. As a result, the branded domain for his business (for explanation purposes I'll call it "Houston Tan"*) was already taken when he decided he needed a website, however it was not being used. He approached the company that owned "houstontan.com" and they refused to sell it to him. Not only that, they turned around and opened a company and developed the website using his trademarked company name as one word instead of two, "HoustonTan." It was brought to court and the judge determined that since they created a new name by combining the two words, there was nothing that he could do. Still having to create a website for his company, he chose the domain "HoustonSunTan.com." Not sure who was advising him on that one. So now he has a domain name with only a partial match to his company name. As you would imagine, when you search Houston Tan, HoustonTan.com is number 1, 2 & 3, and HoustonSunTan.com is #4. My question is, do you think it is even possible for his company to overtake the top spot of Google? Or have you ever come across a situation like this and if so what worked for you? FYI: Even though it says Houston, the company is a global company in over 500 cities (with one 800 number unfortunately), so local SEO strategies wouldn't necessarily apply. *Names are made up to protect both parties 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | American.Made0 -
Strange ranking occurrences in Google (NL)
Mozzers, I got a question for all of you. Recently (about 3 months ago) I launched a renewed website for a costumer of mine. Since then rankings have been improving and some decreasing a little but overall it went quite allright. _Still, we now have some issues with some new pages and I really don't know what to do any more. _ The Case:
On-Page Optimization | | JarnoNijzing
For starters lets say the company sells vacuum cleaners. We now make pages for specific product ranges e.g. Miele Diamond vacuum cleaners which in turn tells something about this product range and has links to different pages of that series, for instance the Miele Black Diamond Silent Vacuum Cleaner. Why did we do this? We already ranked for specific product pages but also wanted to rank for more general terms and thus product ranges. What happened? We now rank perfectly well for the product pages itself but for some reason the Miele Diamond Vacuum Cleaners page doesn't rank at all or not as it should. Why is this strange? Because we applied the exact same tactic for some other product ranges on the same website and it worked like a charm (part of the reason why we started to do this for all product-ranges). I could really use some help here. If you want I can message you the pagelink in PM but I won't post it here for several reasons. The Vacuum Cleaners in this example or not the real products though but used as an exemplar. I really do hope to hear from you with some advice or request for more information. Regards
Jarno0 -
Ranking report problem
Hello, I have two things that I'm a little concerned. Ranking report is not working because all these keywords were on google first page but the report is showing the calendar sign Crawl results, I just went from 5000 warnings and errors to 4 in two weeks. It seems a little crazy
On-Page Optimization | | angelowei0 -
I have home tab in 2 menu's which calls the same hompage article. How do I get over this
I am getting duplicate content for this article. I need 'home' tab on two menus.
On-Page Optimization | | rajendraksh0 -
A / B Split testing
If you have developed a server-side A / B split testing tool. How do you avoid that Google will think you are doing cloaking. When a user enters www.xxxxx.com/xxxxxx/ he gets either version 1 or version 2 back from the server on the same url. If the user does not accept session cookies he will always get version 1.
On-Page Optimization | | Stener0 -
Why is this page ranking highest?
I've just used Open Site Explorer to compare some sites whose (unpaid) Google ranking I aspire to. They all have higher authority than my site, but the top ranking site out of the 3 I've looked at has the lowest Page Authority, hardly and links (when the others have hundreds), lowest page rank and lowest page trust. In fact, when you look at the top ranking page (ranks #1), it does not even have the search term in it as a complete phrase. One thing I do notice is that it does have 100,000s of linking root domains from one linking root domain. So how can it rank number one on Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Beemer0