Google ranking for the term "locum tenens"
-
Hello-
My company is having a very difficult time performing well for the term "locum tenens". This term literally defines our industry and target market (temporary physician staffing, essentially) and is by far the most searched term in our industry (30k / month, give or take). For us, “locum tenens” is like “ice cream” is to Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, there are other keywords we're concerned with, but this is by far the most important single term.
We've moved up to page 3 a few times since launching our redesigned site in April, but seem to continuously settle on page 5 (we've been on page 5 for many weeks now).
While I didn’t expect us to be on page 1 at this point, I having a hard time understanding why we’re not on at least 2 or 3, in light of the sites ahead of us. We have a ton of decent, optimized content and we’ve tried not to be too spammy (every page does have locum tenens on it many times, but it describes our service – it’s hard not to use it many times).
We are working on developing backlinks and are avoiding any spammy backlink schemes (I get calls every day from companies saying they can give me 400 backlinks a month, which I have a hard time believing is a good long term strategy). It just sort of seems like our site is cursed for some reason that I can't understand.
We are working with a competent SEO firm, and still have not made much progress for this term. So, I’m hoping maybe the community here might have some helpful advice.
Our site is www.bartonassociates.com.
Any insight you guys may have would be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks in advance and have a great day.
Jason
-
Thanks for all of the advice everyone - very helpful, really appreciate it. We're looking into this stuff now.
Jason
-
I totally agree with you on that, sorry my terminology was incorrect. Long few days
-
Well that would be keyword stuffing.
When writing about some subjects normaly, you get a very hign ratio (not 80%).
Keyword stuffing is another thing, if you had a title tag "viagra viagra viagra" that would be keyword stuffing. its un-natrual.
if you have un-natrual text, you would be more then likely violating other more complex rules. but if thee a high density comes from natruall writting you will be fine.
This is probably the best study on it, a bit heavy
http://www.miislita.com/fractals/keyword-density-optimization.html -
Hi Alan, thanks for the feedback and much respected
What would you say to a client who has a keyword density of 80%?
Look forward to your thoughts.
-
I have too disagree with one point, keyword density. Its a myth
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development -
Your site has a lot of technical issues,
You have 553 un-necessary redirects, each one leaks page rank. I had a look at a sample of them and they are all a case of your links pointing to aUrl and being 301 redirect to aUrl/ , not the trailing slash, you need to link directly to aUrl/
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-unnecessary-redirects
You have 208 broken links, they seem like the mostly image links, SE see these as a violation
You have many descriptions missing 138
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-description-is-missing
You have canonical issues leading to a split in page rank
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats
You have some irrelevant link text, again leaking link juice though relevancy
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-link-text-is-not-relevant
You have large amounts of script in your pages
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-a-large-amount-of-script-code
there are more issues also.If a fisherman has holes in his net, he has to do a lot more fishing than a man that does not.
If you have violations in your site, you need a lot more links that some one who does notSEO is not all marketing, your site needs to be crawl frendly.
sorry for being so blunt, but there you are.
-
Hi there Jason
Look at building those back links. This is an important aspect and you can find loads of articles and posts in the SEOMOZ Blog to verify this and where you should start.
I had a look at your website and these are my thoughts:
- No Website Name in Website Title(Home Page). Your keywords are your title. I would look at adding the company name to the title of website(Meta Title). having keywords in my opinion is a bit spammy and not ranking potentially for branded terms like your business name is a major downfall.
- I would also suggest adding those keywords in a well written meta description. i see that this is missing and a downfall for you.
- Check your keyword density for those terms. Dont go over 6% on one given page.
- You seem to optimizing all the pages for those terms. So how would the search engines know which page is the right page? Dont duplicate or make pages / titles seem the same.
Hope that this helps.
-
According to the mozBar you only have backlinks from 29 different domains. Perhaps adding more domains to your backlink profile would help? It looks like everyone on page one either has many more links than you, or more domains linking to them. Once you match them I would imagine you would see improvement in your rank.
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
-
Optimization for "Search by Photos" feature
Howdy, fellow mozzers, Does anyone know what affects a given company photos show up in the "Search by Photos" section? I can't find any decent info.. Here is the link to SEL, describing the feature (not even google themselves seem to have an announcement about it). https://searchengineland.com/google-showing-mobile-search-by-photos-option-in-selected-local-verticals-323237 Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Google has penalized me for a keyword,and removed from google some one know for how long time is the penalty
i have by some links from fiverr i was ranking 9 for this keyword with 1200 of searches after fiverr it has disappeared from google more then 10 days i guess this is a penalty someone know how long a penalty like this is how many days to months ? i don't get any messages in webmaster tools this is the gig https://www.fiverr.com/carissa30/do-20-unique-domains-high-tf-and-cf-flow-backlinks-high-da?source=Order+page+gig+link&funnel=a7b5fa4f-8c0a-4c3e-98a3-74112b658c7f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexmuller870 -
Not ranking at all for generic term which is also our brand name
Hello, I am working with a client in the indoor / outdoor wicker furniture area. They have "wicker" in their domain. However using the moz keyword ranking tool they do not appear at all in 51+ results. There was a time that we were appearing on page 1 but then dropped off. Anyone have any ideas on what could be causing us not to rank at all for that generic term? Our google places listing does come up for when people are local to the store and search, but the website does not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creatingdigital1 -
Nofollow "print" URLs?
Hi there, Apols for the basic question but is it considered good practice to nofollow one of one's own URLs? Basically our 'print page' command produces an identical URL in the same window but with .../?print=1 at the end. As far as I've been reading, the nofollow html attribute is, broadly speaking, only for links to external websites you don't want to vouch for or internal links to login/register pages that together with noindex, you're asking Google not to waste crawl budget on. (The print page is already noindexed so we're good there) Can anyone confirm the above from their own experience? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daft.ie0 -
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
Dates in the URLs for a "hot" content website (tipping service)
Hi, I'm planning to build a website that will present games previews for different sports. I think that the date should be included in the URL as the content will be valuable until the kick off f the game. So first i want to know if this is the right approach and second the URL structure i have imagined is /tips/sport/competition/year/month/day Ex : /tips/football/premier_league/2013/11/05 Is this a good structure ? Guillaume.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betadvisor0 -
"Category" word in URLs of blog is it SEO Friendly URL ??
Hello respected community members, I saw many times that "Category" word comes in URL of blog. So my que is that is this negative for SEO or Positive. & if we don't wanna to come CATEGORY in URL how can we remove while URL Optimization ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourabhrana390 -
"site" operator and pages
Hi folks, We are having trouble in indexing, We have certain pages which are not coming in results when I am using the site operator in Google. for e.g. : sitename.com/widgets/red They are not showing any link results in Google webmaster tools too. But the pages which only linked through them are displaying in results when I am using site operator. for e.g: sitename.com/widgets/red/large We are redirecting some of the search which are close or exact match to the respective pages for e.g: sitename.com/search/red --> sitename.com/widgets/red We are fluctuating on rankings too in google serps form top ppositions to no where, for sitename.com/widgets/red and most of the times when google shows sitename.com/search/red instead of itename.com/widgets/red. Can you please put a light on this issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semshah1430