How do I figure out what's wrong with my site?

[gohawks7790]

I'm fairly new to SEO and can't pinpoint what's wrong with my site...I feel so lost. I am working on revamping www.RiverValleyGroup.com and can't figure out why it's not ranking for keywords. These keywords include 'Louisville homes', 'Homes for sale in Louisville KY', etc. Any suggestions?

I write new blog posts everyday so I feel there's no shortage of fresh content. I'm signed up with Moz Analytics and Google analytics

[mosquitohawk]

I checked Moz's Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs which are both good sources of backlink data.

Structured data is a nice thing to have but wouldn't necessarily hurt your ranking.  It can help Google more easily make sense of your content and also help you stand out a bit more in the SERPs if Google chooses to show a rich snippet result for you.

Getting rid of bad backlinks can be a manual task of reaching out and contacting webmasters and there are some tools that can make that process a little less time consuming.  However, I didn't review your links for quality, just noting there were a lot of links from a small number of domains.  The top one looked like the personal site of the company owner or broker.

[gohawks7790]

Marty-

Thank you for the quick response....super helpful!

I didn't know I had thousands of backlinks...how do you check something like that? Also if they are bad backlinks how do I go about getting rid of them?

I was just looking at my Webmaster Tools account with Google and it was saying it couldn't detect any structured data on my site...could this be hurting me SEO-wise? Thanks!

[EGOL]

Two people gave you a huge amount of information here...

http://moz.com/community/q/seo-frustration-is-my-website-too-busy

You never replied.

[mosquitohawk]

Greetings James!  Welcome to the fun-filled and often onerous world of SEO.

Just taking a quick look at your site, you seem to have a lot of content pages, etc. but very little in the way of trust flowing to your site.  For example, I can see you have thousands of backlinks but they're only spread out over forty or so unique domains.

As real estate is often local, you'd do well to try and rank in the local pack results for real estate related searches, however I notice a Google+ page that looks like your's but it doesn't have the same address as your website.  You want that to match up and then also start building credibility to your Google+ page through positive reviews, etc. from users.

Real estate is a super-competitive niche and your best bet  is to (at least until you have more trust) target more of the long tail of search.  Those are just a few tips to get you started but anytime you're doing a competitive niche in a big city / region, it's not going to be a quick and easy task.  Keep at it though; you'll get there!