So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't

I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.

Thanks David for your time!

Thanks David - I PM'd you the info

I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes:

• Built a new wordpress website
• All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws
• Robots.txt is setup correctly
• .htaccess is setup correctly
• new domain
• multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites.
• Yext Local listings
• SSL, CDN, Speed optimized
• Has 19 pages indexed by Google
• Posting one blog a week for him

Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.

Yep, I agree with both of these posts. I looked at the site on your profile and if that's the site you are thinking about hiring a writer for, I really don't see the need to pay that much for something like that unless you KNEW for a fact that it was going to be UBER compelling. In my experience, compelling content for local businesses is usually written by someone who is a) an expert in that industry and b) has an extremely unique voice. So unless this individual checks both of these boxes, I wouldn't pay anywhere near that personally.

Google will do this as they see fit in an effort to connect users with the content they are looking for. They will even serve multiple page titles for the same page based on the user search. The factors that determine that are anchor text to the URL and click through rates for specific kws. Essentially Google will treat your SERPs like their own personal Adwords ad, where they will tinker with the ad copy to achieve their desired result.

Yes Bethany - it's data that Google organizes but you can accomplishment for someone else by using structured data like in the link Dmitril provided.

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

I'm with you, I like having the separate content. I'm sure if you do that you will link all of content so that someone looking for a particular piece of content can quickly navigate by title or something like that. I think doing that way you can target broad keywords for each of the eight topics and if they're in depth, I would imagine the long tail opportunities will be there as well.

To me this solution satisfies the human/user experience part as well as the search engines, your eight landing pages will get some love because of how narrow in scope they.

I agree completely...and yes I think when it's not possible to have individual pages, combining but doing so strategically and sparingly is key here. You want to maintain good keyword density for your most lucrative keywords.