Can't see the woods for the trees
-
Ok, I'm going be really cheeky here, so apologies in advance!
We have this site www.simplychaise.co.uk and its not ranking anywhere in the top 50 for the term 'Chaise Longue'
Moz has picked up a few issue with duplicate titles and a couple of 404's which I will fix shortly, It dosen't have any backlinks but I'm stumped as to why it isn't ranking higher than what it is, I'm not expecting 1st position but outside of the top 50 is something else.
The site looks ok to me, but I think it might be a case of I've been looking at it so long that I can no longer see the wood for the trees. Could any kind hearted Mozer point me in the right direction here please, what am i missing? I'd greatly appreciate it, many thanks in advance for being so cheeky and well, useless!
Jon
-
It dosen't have any backlinks but I'm stumped as to why it isn't ranking higher than what it is, I'm not expecting 1st position but outside of the top 50 is something else.
No backlinks and a recent domain registration date are big answers to your question. This isn't an especially difficult SERP, but a person can't walk right in and expect to displace sites that were on the web and working to gain visibility ten, even twenty years before your first upload. That's the situation when you arrive late to the battle.
Just as a comparison. If I upload an article on a twenty-year old domain with a DA of about 78 and a keyword of similar difficulty, that article might not rank in the top 100 for months, and might not rise to the first page for a year or more. The people on the first page for your keyword are making money and will fight to hold it.
-
Hi Jon,
I recommend this often enough that it might be getting annoying to forum regulars, but one thing I'd suggest is to run a Full SERP report in the Keyword Difficulty Tool (part of Moz Pro) and check out the ranking factors for the top 10 sites sites for that term. It might give you a sense of where to go from here.
There's a video on that report here.
-
While your site looks very nice and clean, there are a handful of things that are hurting it:
- There's no header navigation on the initial page (the left-hand widget isn't "initial" in this sense).
- There's barely any text on the homepage.
- There doesn't seem to be an H1 on the page (certainly not at the top - even though it might seem that way, the slider content may not be getting picked up by Google as such).
- Effectively, your homepage is a long list of products. Take a look at Amazon and even smaller ecommerce sites. Your site, and specifically, homepage, is lacking content.
I'm sure with a genuine audit, you could get loads more information, but these are all things you may wish to consider looking into.
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
-
Can I replace categories with a static page
Hello there. I want to replace all of WordPress categories with static pages so that users see a well designed and constructed presentation of all the articles within each topic instead of just a long list of excerpts. I've already done this with 2 categories and although it is hard work I can't help feeling it is a much better thing for my users. However, I'm concerned that I am embarking on this project without being totally sure that it makes sense from an Seo point of view, or whether there are any downsides I haven't thought of? My idea is that the WordPress categories are set to noindex and nofollow. Search engines should find all of my static category pages and all of the content within each category will be spidered from there instead. Just to be sure you know what I mean here is a link to a normal category - https://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/category/consumer/ and here is my static page replacement for it - https://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/consumer-rights-appliances/ Both pages contain links to all articles within the category except the one generated by WordPress is just a long paginated list, and my replacement is a proper category page, which is hopefully far more useful . Can someone please confirm that there are no downsides to this strategy? 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Snowdune1 -
There is a copy of our website that is ranking. How can I let Google know our website is the authentic site?
I just found another copy of my old website and have no way to take it down. Unfortunately, it's ranking so he didn't place it as a nofollow. (My boss hired someone to redevelop our website before I came on board and never finished the project). So, could this be hurting us? I tried to look to see if we were being penalized and couldn't find that we were. Also, ever since we migrated to a new domain name, our ranking is tumbling. I've redirected properly and tested to make sure they're resolving correctly and they are. I have no idea what is going on. We've virtually lost all ranking. Any help would be much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | npuffer790 -
MOZ identifies duplicate titles - one has' www' in the title
MOZ has identified duplicate titles - one has' www' in the title. - we have a few pieces of content where the same thing is happening. Not sure how this has happened. Should we do something about this? Will it cause problems for ranking? | KETAMINE GUIDE FOR DRUG WORKERS - free | Harm reduction informationhttp://substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free | 13 | 2 |
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create
| KETAMINE GUIDE FOR DRUG WORKERS - free | Harm reduction informationhttp://www.substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free | 13 | 4 | 1 - 2 of 20 -
Does anyone know how I can see the original date of a link to my website?
Hello community, I'm trying to find the oldest links to my website/places that have referenced my company. By old, I'm looking for anything 2008 or older. I have access to a bunch of backlink tools, but they all log stuff based on when they discovered it, and we didn't begin using the tools until June 2013. I'm hoping there's some tool or some easy trick where I can quickly sort my links based on original date they linked to travelexinsurance.com. Thanks, Patrick
On-Page Optimization | | Patrick_G0 -
I want to improve our client's website structure, so he gets more traffic locally. What advice do you have ?
We want to "revamp" our client's website, by improving the overall looking (content, images, structure). Our client is a small retail business but wants to have more traffic. What advice can you give me ?
On-Page Optimization | | marketingmedia.ca0 -
Can soft 404's hurt my rankings?
This post mainly pertains to soft 404's but I recently dropped a few ranks in my main keyword which I have maintained prior to this my better rank for well over 2 years. I participate in NO BLACKHAT and obtain links naturally. I want to describe a few issues that happened prior to my ranking dropping and see what you guys think. I started to receive about a week prior to my ranks dropping DNS issues with GWT. It was weird because when I would use Goole Fetch on those pages they would return just fine so I was not sure what was happening there. I use Google page speed server which did in fact decrease my load time (YEAH!!) so that was cool. About 1 week prior to my rankings dropping I enabled godaddy's Website Accelerator as well thinking that could help even more. Because of this I thought maybe this had something to do with my DNS issues with Google so I decided to turn off my website accelerator with Godaddy and just leave my Google pagespeed service on. I figure I don't need 2 of them anyways IMO. Also at the same time I started to receive a ton (31,000+) html errors with duplicate metadescriptions and titles. I discovered I had an error with my code which was displaying 2 different sets of descriptions and titles for each of these pages. I since then have fixed the issue and waiting for Google to index those pages. Here is were I think I might have been hurting from the drop in rankings. Some months ago (maybe 2) I decided to redirect my 404's to my homepage. Yes I know this is not good now and I have created a proper 404 page which returns the 404 code. I recently started getting a ton of Soft 404 errors in GWT which is what brought my attention to this issue. My question is, could my action of redirecting my users to my homepage as a 404 which obviously was returning a 200 on a page that did not exist be possibly the culprit to my ranks dropping?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich1 -
Why Aren’t All My XML Sitemap Images Indexed in Webmaster Tools?
Hi, Here is our main sitemap http://www.vistastores.com/newsitemap/main_sitemap.xml We have submitted all category wise sitemap having Image Tags : For eg - Ac Category http://www.vistastores.com/newsitemap/window_ac_sitemap.xml contains iamge tag - image:imageimage:locimage:captionimage:title</image:title></image:caption></image:loc></image:image> All our 142 category pages includes these format. Still the sitemap report on 4-Apr-2013 says: Sitemaps content Web pages:
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit
Submitted 14,569
Indexed 11,219 Images:
Submitted 21,442
Indexed 11,762 You can see major difference in submitted v/s indexed. I have looked into Jay Simpson question - http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-idea-why-our-sitemap-images-aren-t-indexed to find this answer but didn't get Perfect & clear answer. I need urgent answer to fix this issue..... K0NDuw5s.jpg0 -
What's the best strategy for reducing the number of links on a blog post?
I'd like to optimize my blog better for search. The first reccomendation I got from my SEOMoz Pro Campaign Crawl was that I needed to reduce the number of links per page on my site. I have lots of links from navigational items in the sidebar that people do click on. I'd really like to keep some or all of the tags and categories I list. Comments are another issue. Most of our posts get about 10 comments. However, our best posts get 50-100 comments. Those comments create a lot of links. I was planning on attempting to reduce the number of links using javascript but I guess Google understands javascript now. I may still do this b/c our pages are huge and some progressive rendering would likely help the user experience. Can you use javascript (ajax or otherwise) to limit the number of links on your page in a way that helps your SEO efforts? Any specific suggestions for reducing links that come from comments and navigational items? How much will reducing the number of links on a given page help with SEO? Any simple way to estimate or quantify this without diving in? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | TaitLarson0