One of my man pages is not ranking and does not seem to exist.
-
One of my main pages is not ranking and does not seem to exist. I have gone through every tool on webmaster and yoast. I cannot find an error, but every metric I know of says my page should be on the first page of my target search term. Moz graded it as an A, but It is not ranked on any page. Can someone please help?? my target search is "Jekyll Island Wedding Photographer" my home page shows up on page 2 but this page http://saintsimonsphotography.com/jekyll-island-wedding-photographer/ is my page that does not seem to exist.
I have never had this problem with any of my other businesses. Jekyll island is the next island over and I need this term to rank.
Thank you for any help.
-
Yep. Spot on advice from John. I always like to keep in mind how your page content would sound if you read it out loud. If you're not sure, do exactly that, preferably to a friend and get them to tell you when it sounds like you're labouring the point.
Always, ALWAYS make the user experience your primary focus. If you can clearly explain to the user what it is you're offering - without repeating yourself endlessly- then the search engines will be smart enough to pick this up. Now there's no harm in using your keyphrase (and synonyms) a couple of times throughout your content but only when it's needed for clarity.
I understand how Yoast's SEO plugin can give you green light fever, but as is often the case, less is more.
-
Hi there, I'd recommend looking into using Scripted for this if you're not a strong writer. You can get awesome content for quite cheap.
-
Thank you for the reply. I was wondering if I needed to do just that. I have always tried to get all my bullets green on Yoast and had written that way. Writing is not my strong area at all and has always been a challenge. I will try and implement your points and really appreciate the feedback.
Thanks!!
-
Hey John -
Thanks for coming here and asking your question. From my looks at your site as well, I don't see anything glaring that would keep that page from ranking.
Unfortunately, sometimes Google picks a random page to rank (on small sites like yours this is often the strongest on the site, which is the homepage) and seems unwilling to want to change that ranking page. A few thoughts for you on how to get the correct page ranking:
- Rewrite your content on this page. It is stuffed with keywords (your main keyword appears 10 times, "Jekyll Island" appears 30) and doesn't read naturally. You're writing for 2007-era search crawlers, not 2017-era users.
- Your site is way over-optimized. When I look at your About or Portfolio pages, why are these optimized for specific [wedding photographer] keywords? This doesn't make any sense for users.
- Build links to the page you want to rank. Get some local citations (from Better Business Bureaus, wedding venues, etc) to this page and I bet you'll pop in your rankings.
- Mention different venues where you have shot weddings in that area. This will help give semantic relevance to your page.
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
-
More pages on website better for SEO?
Hi all, Is creating more pages better for SEO? Of course the pages being valuable content. Is this because you want the user to spend as much time as possible on your site. A lot of my competitors websites seem to have more pages than mine and their domain authorities are higher, for example the services we provide are all on one page and for my competitors each services as its own page. Kind Regards, Aqib
Local Website Optimization | | SMCCoachHire0 -
Pages ranking outside of sales area
Hi there Moz Community, I work with a client (a car dealership), that mostly serves an area within 50-100 miles at most from their location. A previous SEO company had built a bunch of comparison pages on their website (i.e. 2016 Acura ILX vs. Mercedes-Benz C300). These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc. However, they pull in traffic from all over the country and other countries as well. Because they really don't have much of an opportunity to sell someone a car across the country that a customer could easily buy at their local dealership, anyone from outside their primary marketing area typically bounces. So, it drags down their overall site metrics plus all of the metrics for these pages. I imagine searchers from outside their primary sales area are seeing their location and saying "whoah that's far and not what I'm looking for." I tried localizing the pages by putting their city name in the title tags, meta descriptions, and content, but that doesn't seem to really be getting rid of this traffic from areas too far away to sell a car to. My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively. So, short of trying to localize the content on the page or just deleting these pages all together, I'm not quite sure where to go from here. Do you think that having these high bouncing pages will hurt them? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Make_Model1 -
Can you recommend any widgets or additions for a local landing page?
Our company has locations in several different cities, and we're in the process of creating landing pages for each city that feature relevant information. We use Drupal, fwiw. In the past, we've talked about trying to include a local weather widget, a news widget, or something similar as a way to help improve our local rankings for each area. Have you used anything like that? What did you find to be effective? Can you recommend anything similar? Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | ScottImageWorks0 -
What is the effect of CloudFlare CDN on page load speeds, hosting IP location and the ultimate SEO effect?
Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe? I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal? I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN? In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it? I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans). I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
Local Website Optimization | | uworlds
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankings I do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above? Many thanks!
Mark0 -
Closed Location Pages - 301 to open locations?
I work with several thousand local businesses and have a listing page for each on my site. Recently a large chunk of these locations closed, and a number of these pages rank well for localized keywords. I'm trying to figure out the best course of action.
Local Website Optimization | | Andrew_Mac
What I've done so far is make a note on each of the closed location pages that says something to the effect of "This location is currently closed. Here are some nearby options" and provide links to the location pages of 3 open places nearby. The closed location pages are continuing to rank well, but conversion rates from visitors landing on these pages has dropped. What I'm considering doing is 301ing these pages to the nearest open location page. I'm hoping this will preserve the ranking of the page for keywords for which the nearby location is still relevant, while not hurting user experience by serving up a closed location. I'm also thinking of, as a second step, creating new pages (with slightly altered URLs) for the closed listings. They won't rank as well obviously, but if someone searches for the address or even the street of the closed location, my hope is that I could still capture some of that traffic and hope to convert it through someone clicking through to an open location from there. I spoke with someone about this second step and he thought it sounded spammy. My thinking is, combined with the 301, I'm telling Google that the page it is currently ranking well no longer has the importance it once did and that the page I'm 301ing to does, but that the content on the page I'm creating for the closed location still has enough value to justify the newly created page. I'd really appreciate thoughts from the community on this. Thanks!0 -
What is the Best Keyword Placement within a URL for Inner Location Pages?
I'm working on a website with 100s of locations. There is a location search page (Find Widget Dealer), a page for each state (Tennessee Widget Dealers) and finally a page for each individual location which has localized unique content and contact info (Nashville Widget Dealer). My question is is related to how I should structure my URL and the keywords within the URL. Keywords in my examples being the location and the product (i.e. widget). Here is a quick overview of each of the 3 tiered pages, with the Nashville page being the most optimized: Find Widget Dealer - Dealer Page only includes a location search bar and bullet list links to states Tennessee Widget Dealers - Page includes brief unique content for the the state and basic listing info for each location along with links to the local page) Nashville Widget Dealer - Page includes a good amount of unique content for this specific location (Most optimized page) That said, here are the 3 URL structure options I am considering: http://website.com/widget-dealers/tennesee/nashville http://website.com/dealers/tennesee-widget-dealers/nashville http://website.com/dealers/tennesee/nashville-widget-dealer Any help is appreciated! Thank you
Local Website Optimization | | the-coopersmith0 -
Different page for each service at each location? Where does it end!
If we have 15 different locations and 10 different services, do we need to make keyword targeted landing pages for each combination? Is that actually the best method or is there some alternative? For example, if we are a law office specializing in slip and falls and car accidents, do we need a page for EACH location for each service (ie. Miami Car Accident Lawyer, Miami Slip and Fall Lawyer, Orlando Slip and Fall Lawyer, Orlando Car Accident Lawyer) etc. to maximize our ranking potential in each location? Is there a better way or are we left with this until Google gets "smarter"?
Local Website Optimization | | RickyShockley0 -
Bing ranking a weak local branch office site of our 200-unit franchise higher than the brand page - throughout the USA!?
We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com. I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname. The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml. The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central. Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools. No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site. DA 51/100, PA 59/100. A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com. The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile. DA 18/100, PA 21/100. The link profile has low diversity and generally weak. They have no social media activity. They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory. **The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing. **Even where it makes no sense at all. We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization. What should we do? What have I missed?
Local Website Optimization | | scottclark0