SEO Troubleshooting? Not ranking in Top 50 for "easy" keyword
-
Hi there,
First of all, thank you in advance to whoever steps in to help me with this issue!
So, I have a new site (launched December 2016) in the investing space and have been able to get page 1 rankings on some of my pages.
One of my best ranking pages is for the phrase "what is xiv". The Keyword Explorer has this phrase at a 21 difficulty. My page for this keyword is https://www.projectoption.com/what-is-xiv/. The post reached the first page almost immediately after being published, though I know I shouldn't expect this for other keywords of similar difficulty.
Here is my problem: I just wrote a comprehensive guide (8,000+ words) on a different keyword phrase: "vertical spreads." The Keyword Explorer has this phrase at a 25 difficulty. My page for this topic: https://www.projectoption.com/vertical-spreads-explained/.
However, the page is nowhere to be found in organic Google rankings (not in top 50), and the page has been live for a few weeks now.
I've done my best at optimizing the post, but something leads me to believe there are some issues that are beyond my SEO knowledge. For example, maybe the post is too long, and Google can't figure out what the page is about.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your time!
-Chris
-
David,
This seems like the most logical explanation and makes complete sense. Thank you!
I can confirm that I haven't linked to this page from my other website pages as I haven't quite figured out where the link fits best. However, I'll figure that out now and see how it goes in the next few weeks.
Thanks so much for your help, and nice last name!
-Chris
-
"create some backlinks using the keywords" sounds super dodgy!!
You shouldn't be the one creating links to your site.
You have really good content and I don't think you'll have much trouble getting links to your site with a bit of outreach and relationship building with other quality sites in your niche.
Don't ruin your awesome content by link building like it's 2010.
Cheers,
David
-
Hi Chris,
I quickly ran your site through Screaming Frog and found that this new page is not linking from your site anywhere - it's what's known as an "orphan page".
By not linking from the site, it is not receiving any "authority" from your domain and you will have a hard time getting it to rank for anything.
The first thing I would do is to make sure it's linking from your site and check how it's going in a few weeks.
Cheers,
David
-
Thanks so much for doing this.
To clarify, the keyword I'm having an issue ranking for is "vertical spread"
I used the "what is xiv" keyword to compare difficulties. The point is that I'm ranking very well for "what is xiv" but I'm not ranking at all for "vertical spread" when the difficulty is similar.
Page I'm trying to rank: https://www.projectoption.com/vertical-spreads-explained/
Targeted Keyword: Vertical Spread
-
-
Thank you for the reply.
To answer your questions:
1 & 3) Yes. The first thing I do after publishing new content is submitting the page to Google and index request.
- I have not yet received backlinks to this page. I understand that this is key to achieving the highest rankings, but it is a work in progress. Still, I would expect to at least reach the 2nd or 3rd page for this keyword without having any backlinks (since the pages/sites in those positions do not have many links and/or the content is not great).
-
By the way, you have no backlinks so, you should to start to build someones if you dont want to lose your rank
-
In fact I made an audit to your site
https://www.projectoption.com/
and guess what ?
you are in the position 03 for Google USA for the keyword "what is xiv"
you are in the position 80 for Google USA for the keyword "xiv trading strategy"
you are in the position 25 for Google USA for the keyword "how the vix works"So maybe your should check your search console and see what happen.
-
Even if you have an easy keyword that does not mean that everything is done
- did you submit your site to google?
- did you create some backlinks using the keywords ?
- did you check your search console to check if there is an error on your site?
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
-
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Homepage "personalisation" - different content for different users
Hi Mozians, My firm is looking to present different content to different users depending on whether they are new, return visitors, return customers etc... I am concerned how this would work in practice as far as Google is concrened- how would react to the fact that the bot would see different content to some users. It has the slight whiff of cloacking about it to me, but I also get that in this case it would be a UX thing that would genuinely be of benefit to users, and clearly wouldn't be intended to manipulate search rankings at all. Is there a way of acheiving this "personalisation" in such a way that Google understands thay you are doint it? I am thinking about some kind of markup that "declares" the different versions of the page. Basically I want to be as transparent about it as possible so as to avoid un-intended consequences. Many thanks indeed!
Technical SEO | | unirmk0 -
"Links to your site" in google webmaster tools not showing any data
Hello All I have a very strange query regarding the "Links to your site" section in webmaster's account my account does not show the Link data after so many days (more then 30 days) of verification. Can you please help me out how can I get my data in the webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | barnesdorf
Please note I have verified the account using Google Analytic verification process. (does this affect?) I have seen this issue in my two websites which I have verified by Google Analytics. Please help me out.0 -
Website redesign: impact on SEO rankings?
Hi We're redesigning a website for a client whose SEO rankings are fairly strong, and are driving a good volume of enquiries through their website. We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results. The content will be similar on many pages, with the major updates being from 2013 products to the 2014 suite. Layouts and images will, of course be updated, and we're going to do our best to keep the inbound links going to the correct place - any advice here would be much appreciated, too. We'd be really grateful for any suggestions for how to avoid a ranking disaster, and any major pitfalls we should look out for. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kal-SEO0 -
Best use of robots.txt for "garbage" links from Joomla!
I recently started out on Seomoz and is trying to make some cleanup according to the campaign report i received. One of my biggest gripes is the point of "Dublicate Page Content". Right now im having over 200 pages with dublicate page content. Now.. This is triggerede because Seomoz have snagged up auto generated links from my site. My site has a "send to freind" feature, and every time someone wants to send a article or a product to a friend via email a pop-up appears. Now it seems like the pop-up pages has been snagged by the seomoz spider,however these pages is something i would never want to index in Google. So i just want to get rid of them. Now to my question I guess the best solution is to make a general rule via robots.txt, so that these pages is not indexed and considered by google at all. But, how do i do this? what should my syntax be? A lof of the links looks like this, but has different id numbers according to the product that is being send: http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167 I guess i need a rule that grabs the following and makes google ignore links that contains this: view=send_friend
Technical SEO | | teleman0 -
Far away from top 50, am i doing it wrong or does it come down to linkbuilding?
Im currently far away from top 50 of a very crucial search term i google. Its my frontpage and the search term is aimed towards the city i live in Im having a hard time determing if its just a matter of linkbuilding. My concrern is if google have some kind of punishment on my frontpage or if the page. It could be a combination of SEO optimization that is not good enough and too little external links for the time being. The page has been live for a small month. Im in Denmark so there is no "sandbox" 🙂 my frontpage can be visited here:
Technical SEO | | Havalina
http://www.nikolajgrundtvig.dk Its in Danish, but you should have a idea of the structure and the amount of text on the page 🙂 Im a photographer btw 🙂 Best reguards!0 -
Where can I find a good definition of "link juice"?
I have heard the term link juice being used in many different contexts. Where can I find a good definition for it?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
Hello there, We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers? I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well? Thoughts/Ideas?
Technical SEO | | Tektronix0