I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website is doing on google ranking

[hichemboudali]

Hello,

I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website (flyhy.co) is doing on google ranking and I have no clue why even though I have been doing my homework regarding SEO. Just a bit of background, I have created a new website about 6 months ago for the paragliding community, the primary goal is to provide a platform for people to publish their ads (osclass), but also to provide some interesting reviews and tools to help paragliders chose their wing.

We have been putting a lot of effort to provide a nice user experience and tio build the tools mentioned above. Our main channel to connect with the community is Facebook, and we have been quite active there.

I have looked at many SEO articles and I made sure the website provides a good UX, the URLs are SEO friendly, good meta data, etc. Also have been using the google search console and analytics to monitor all of this.

But here is the thing, all these does not seem to change anything in our ranking for important keywords such as "paraglider for sale", "paragliding equipment", etc. We seem to only rank (looking at Google’s keyword tool) for very specific wing model names that people have mentioned in their ads.

I have ran out of ideas on how to improve our SEO !!!!!!

I know the website is only 6 months old, but by now we should get some results.

As an example, I will mention one our main website competitors: www.paraglidingequipment.org. OK the URL is pretty obvious and this website ranks in page #1 for "paragliding equipment" (but also for "paraglider for sale" and other paragliding related key phrases). OK there is the URL (paraglidingequipment.org), but I thought nowadays google bots are smarter than just that. The website is 1 year old (so not really much older than us, and was ranking high anyway even 6 months ago). The website looks like it was clearly made by one person and then quickly just left it running, so no content has been added (except for people putting their ads), there is almost no activity on the Facebook account.

I have run some test such as "pagespeed insights" and we both rank the same. On "seositecheckup.com", we are clearly better with more 10 points.

Is there anyone out there who can tell me what is going on? Have I missed a very important aspect of SEO? Is our website somehow compromising the robots crawling (although I can see about 80 pages have been already indexed in google search console)? I know content is king, but in paraglidingequipment.org the only content I see are ads, and we have ads and other interesting (ie reviews and tools) for paragliders.

To conclude, I am basically completely clueless of what to do to rank at least on the first couple of pages of google for the key phrases above. I need help.

Hichem.

PS: in Moz bar our score is non existing (PA=1,DA=10), on paraglidingequipment.org (PA=23,DA=15). So it looks that essentially we are not apparent on the web!

PSS: We have also tried to build some backlinks on few important paragliding community websites.

[hichemboudali]

Hi Massimiliano,

Thanks for your answer, we are actually working on increasing our back-links from authoritative websites. I did a SEO checkup of the site, it scores about 80% which is well above the average. So I think on that side we are OK. So far it looks like the problem might be in the back-links and may be weak content (2 things we are working on). But all that said, I still do not understand how we are completely not existing on google search whereas a website such as paraglidingequipment.org for example is ranking high even though they have 1 or 2 referring domains in total (and their content is no better than us). Mystery, Mystery .....

[max.favilli]

You have four referring domain in total. That's the point. I didn't went through your website much, so probably you are in need of onsite improvements too. But four (4) referring domain is not going to give you much juice.

[hichemboudali]

Hello Grahame,

Thank you for your answers. Hope more people will give their inputs. I will also try in other forums as you have suggested. But, I am still stuck with this whole SEO thing. I am not totally clueless as you say (thank you), but I am still astonished how bad we rank on Google (while others, with almost no effort gets on page #1). Something I am doing is certainly wrong, I just hope someone here will find this out.

[GrahameD]

HI

SEO and SERPs can very frustrating indeed. 5 minutes looking at your stats leads me to the conclusion that you need more external links. Moz is only reporting links from one site. You say you are clueless but you are not. You are relatively new to this aspect of business life and are trying to achieve progress on a low budget I suspect. Others on here may be able to spend a little more time and you could get help on other forums such as the Google Webmaster Tools forum. You should install GWT and Bing Webmaster tools.

Lastly, you should approach an SEO company for help. They will usually give a flavour of how they can help you alongside a quote - so you get help for free. They usually have semi-automated tools to help them do this.

Grahame