We have a website that has awesome metrics but will not rank - any thoughts?
-
Our website www.mikestaff.com (Detroit wedding services company..djs, photographers, videography) has fantastic competitive metrics, as in we beat the competition at every ranking factor, but we are still buried in the actual SERPs
We are trying to rank for similar/identical keywords as our competitors in almost each of the main categories of the site: specifically detroit wedding dj...photographer...videographer..etc. We also have a Chicago office that we are trying to rank the site for with specific chicago pages. The website makes you choose right at the beginning what market you are in - Detroit or Chicago.
We have A grades on all of our main keywords and the pages that we are trying to rank. But again we are buried on the second and third page of the SERPs in most of these keywords.
Help - Moz community :-)Any thoughts on what we might be missing?
-
Thank you Anders for your help! To answer some of your questions. We have not ran the new report with the number based system for page grades. I will do that and see where we are at for that keyword. We were previously graded A for Detroit wedding dj.
I don't believe we are doing as well as we could with internal linking. What kind of internal linking strategy would you take with this page? Suggestions?
External linking is pretty steady, although 90% of our high valued links, are going to the home page.
As far as the competition goes and their strategy, I am not seeing them do even half of the work that we are doing. The one problem we had, was the site was blacklisted about a year ago. Some seo hack was hired and ranked the site in 3-4 weeks, but then Google cops showed up and shut it down. It took a lot of money and effort to get a clean bill of health from Google, but it has been a slow climb back out. The site has been clean for a whole year now, it just seems like we should be dominating based on our metrics and efforts, but alas we sit on page 2-3 for some of these important keywords.
Any help is appreciated - Ryan
-
Thanks Martijn, we were using the page grades tool to optimize and had previously received an A for the keyword "detroit wedding dj", but I agree it is not that prevalent on the page, and not currently in the H1. Also as Anders pointed out we have more than one H1 one the page, which we could change as well.
Do you think the having the cookie based location popup hurts our SEO at all? As in you have to choose a location first before anything on the site?
-
Hi Ryan.
I agree with Martijn that relevancy is very important.
Also after just spending some time at the same page that Marijn referenced to: http://mikestaff.com/detroit-michigan-weddings/services/dj/ I see that you have four H1 on this page. You should only have one and I think it's important that it includes your targeted keywords.
Have you run a new on-page report since Moz updated and went away from letter grades to numerical scores?
You should also look at your internal linking, are you utilizing internal linking in a way that promotes your keywords.
How is your external link building going? Are you getting some high valued links?
What are those pages that rank highest in the SERP doing differently than you?
Hope some of this helps.
-
Hi Ryan,
By just looking at one keyword I think there is already a lot to gain in the content on your site. The relevancy of this page to your keyword: detroit wedding dj is quite low as the keyword is exactly matched only twice on the page and just somewhere in the body text: http://mikestaff.com/detroit-michigan-weddings/services/dj/. I hate saying that you need to use it more in the headings and the rest of the content but it probably will help. If the relevancy on the page itself isn't good enough then you might not win it although your metrics against most competitors will be much higher.
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
-
Blacklisted website no longer blacklisted, but will not appear on Google's search engine.
We have a client who before us, had a website that was blacklisted by Google. After we created their new website, we submitted an appeal through Google's Webmaster Tools, and it was approved. One year later, they are still unable to rank for anything on Google. The keyword we are attempting to rank for on their home page is "Day in the Life Legal Videos" which shouldn't be too difficult to rank for after a year. But their website cannot be found. What else can we do to repair this previously blacklisted website after we're already been approved by Google? After doing a link audit, we found only one link with a spam score of 7, but I highly doubt that is what is causing this website to no longer appear on Google. Here is the website in question: https://www.verdictvideos.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodneywarner0 -
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Coupon websites as affiliates
We recently started using shareasale.com for affiliate marketing and have received literally hundreds of applications from coupon websites wanting to become affiliates. Most we have not approved as the quality of the sites is poor. However, a few sites seem more legitimate. Could having these types of sites harm our seo in any way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey1 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
Bing Ranking Factors
I'm curious about the relationship (or lack of ) between Google rankings and Bing rankings. We took a huge hit last winter with Google and have since gotten back up to the top 3 and have been holding steady on all our most important terms. Most of our losses since regaining Google, have been with Bing. This week, we dropped 44 points on Bing and Yahoo! for our most important term. Are there known factors for Bing ranking? If so, can anyone please enlighten me? And does anyone think Bing rankings even matter these days?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfiedel1 -
Will this get penalized by google?
I had a thought recently, and perhaps it is a pretty bad thought, but i don't see the flaw in it, or how google would really detect it, so please correct me where I am wrong here. Say we ran some sort of marketing campeign and through that campeign we created about 100 extra pages on our domain. A lot of these pages are heavily shared on facebook, twitter, google+ etc. These pages also have several backlinks here and there. Now this campaign is over and so these pages no longer seem relevant to us. If we were to add 301 redirects to all these pages, to three different (and unrelated) internal pages (our primary targets) would this pass all the accumulated link juice on to those three target internal pages? Or would this behaviour get penalized by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0
