Not ranking

[SharonEKG]

Hi,
so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes.

we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy.

any suggestions? any idea?

[SharonEKG]

Thank you! yes the clarifies a lot, one question though, any suggestions as for high quality directories and content sharing websites? i know medium for content sharing but nothing about directories and looking into competitors didnt look like they are registered on any directories.

[donsilvernail]

Hello Sharon,

I can tell you from experience as a digital media/marketing/SEO company in NJ, it is hard to rank and stand out. But you guys offer SEO, you should be able to exploit your strengths to rise above your competition. Understand in New Jersey, 8 months is not enough time to rank without putting in considerable amounts of effort to build links. My suggestions would be to focus on your local market. Build your google reviews. As your start generating a client base. Start doing off site marketing and community building.

It make take you a couple years but you will get there.

Thanks,

Don

[SeobyKP]

Are you on google my business with a verified area/address? Yelp? Have good inbound links with anchor texts? Those are just additional suggestions from the above responder.

[NickW816]

Just took at look a the site and ran a Link Analysis in the Moz Link Explorer.

Technical Analysis: Https= Good, Site Speed is good (under 2 seconds according to Pingdom), 44 pages on the website (not bad for a local business), and 0 broken links found throughout the website according to BrokenLinkCheck.com

On-Site: Meta Titles & Description could use some help. Try editing the Meta Titles especially on pages you would like to rank on Google, the homepage and service pages especially. If you are trying to rank for "New Jersey" searches, ie "SEO New Jersey", mention New Jersey more in the copy, H2s on occasion, etc. I don't see the homepage or service pages mentioning it once, except for the "NJ" abbreviation in your footer address and it being on the back-end of your Home Page Meta Title.

**Off-Site: **The website has a pretty bare link profile as you mentioned, and unfortunately blogging every week is not going to compensate for not having inbound links, unless you are doing some hardcore outreach to get your posts linked to. I would put a focus on this, even if you start with simple high-quality directory or content sharing websites. Use the Moz Link Explorer to see what sites are linking to your competitors, then strategize on how to acquire some similar links.

Hope this helps and best of success to you!