Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Without knowing the exact URL and which pages were redirected it is difficult to predict why your rankings have dropped. I've made a laundry list of areas that may be causing the issue.

1. Onsite Factors have Changed

If the content on the website has change significantly then your website may be less relevant to the keywords you are targeting. That could cause an instant drop. I would also check the onsite factors such as Title tags and URL structure.

2. Speed

I personally use WordPress so I know it's quite speedy, however, if your new site has a slower load time that can sometimes lead to a drop in rankings. Did you move to a new host after the redesign? If the new host is slower that could also be causing the problem.

3. Internal Linking Structure

Did your old website has a significant amount of internal links that were passing juice? If the new design doesn't feature internal links that could be the cause.

4. Double check the 301 redirects

I'd ensure that the SEO firm you are working with has actually completed the redirects. It may also be worth while to check your domain authority to ensure that you have actually redirected all of the pages that were passing value. If your domain authority has dropped, that may be an indication that not all of the important pages have been redirected properly.

5. Submit your new sitemap

It may be as simple as Google has not yet had an opportunity to index all of the new pages properly. I'd ensure you do a sitemap submission through the webmasters interface just to make sure.

Once again I don't have enough info to provide you with an exact solution, however, these are common ranking issues and may be worth investigating.

Hi Osaka73,

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Local SEO!

As Laura said, it would certainly be easier to diagnose your issue if you were comfortable sharing your business's name and website URL.

Speaking in general terms, here are a few areas to review/consider.

• Review your Google My Business Account: Ensure you've created, verified and optimized your Google My Business account. Find and remove duplicates if they exist.
• Citation Consistency: Review the top citation sources for your industry and ensure a high level of NAP consistency across all sources.
• Citation Sources: Ensure you've submitted your business to the major citation sources for your country and industry.
• Address Optimization: Assuming you have a single location, include the business's address on each page of the website marked up in Schema.org.
• Contact Page Optimization: Optimize the contact page by including the business's address marked up in Schema.org, and embedding a Google Map (with your business's address embedded in the map).
• Onsite Optimization: Include the city, state in landing page title tag

Assuming the above items have been accounted for, other areas that can cause ranking issues include:

• No service keywords in URL
• No service keywords in business name
• Lack of location/service anchor text in external links
• Lack of links from relevant industry sources
• Lack of links from relevant geographic sources
• Business location outside of business category centroid

A few excellent resources to review include:

• Moz's Local Learning Centre
• Local Search Ranking Factors
• WhiteSpark's list of top citation sources
• The Local SEO Generator 

Hi Bob,

I took a moment to review your website. I can see multiple onsite optimization items that may be limiting your website's ability to rank in Google's local search results.

My recommendation is to start with one of Moz's resources on local SEO. David Mihm and the team and done an excellent job of categorizing information in the newly developed Local Learning Centre. They are much more detailed than I can be in providing a response.

Alternatively, you can use the Local SEO Generator to build a Local SEO Guide. Full disclosure, it is a tool I developed.

Here are some of the key issues I uncovered with your website:

Your website hasn't been optimized for the all important "local hooks". These are location specific pieces of information that, when crawled by Google, help to verify your business's location. This includes:

• Adding the City AND State to your website's title tag
• Adding Schema.org markup to your address in the website's footer
• Optimize the contact page by including the business's address marked up in Schema.org, and embedding a Google Map (with your business's address embedded in the map).

With that being said, web design is one of the most competitive niches in the world. In most cases, rankings come down to the authority of a website's backlink profile. Even in local SEO links are extremely important. If your competitors outrank you, their websites likely have more authoritative backlink profiles.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the other items to review include:

• Citation Consistency: Review the top citation sources for your industry and ensure a high level of NAP consistency across all sources.
• Citation Sources: Ensure you've submitted your business to the major citation sources for your country and industry.

I hope that gives you a starting point.

Hi Harry,

If I'm understanding your question, both the 301 and the rel=canonical would technically be correct.

However, if I were in your position and had two old URLs, let's call them:

• www.example.com/tennis-shoes
• www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2

And, I was changing my URL structure to:

• www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes
• www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2

I would implement a 301 redirect for the two old pages to the new page (the one that doesn't have the rel=canonical applied). Assuming of course you don't have website restrictions that would make the update problematic. Then add the rel=canonical tag to the duplicate page as you did before.

Moz has some really great resources as well that you can check out:

• https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
• https://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Ryan's answer is the correct one. One thing I'd like to add is that there are also handy plugins available within firefox that allows you to search using depersonalized results.

I believe this one should work.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/depersonalization

Osaka73,

Thanks for sharing, it’s certainly helpful in understanding the challenge you’re facing.

Before I jump into my recommendations, I thought I’d take a moment to address your concern about including keywords in your domain. I’ve never experienced an issue with including keywords in a domain name. In fact, in almost every case I’ve experienced a boost in the website’s ranking for related terms and phrases. Matt gently nudges people away from techniques that can be manipulated, however, I still believe there is value in using it selectively as part of an SEO strategy.

As for the ranking difficulties you’re experiencing, I think they can be broken down into two areas.

Local Content

The content on the location pages is somewhat thin and in some cases close to being duplicate content. It’s understandable as you’re attempting to share the same message but market it to multiple locations.

I would focus my efforts on creating unique content for these pages. A few years back Phil Rozek wrote an excellent article on creating unique local content that is worth reviewing. You may also want to check out the recent article Mike Ramsey wrote on developing a local content strategy.

This, above anything else, will have the biggest impact on your local page rankings.

Local/Niche Links

Secondly, I believe the other obstacle you’re currently facing is in regards to your backlinks. I ran an OSE report for a few of your internal pages and for the most part they do not have any links.

In reality, your campaign isn’t truly a Local SEO campaign, it’s an organic SEO campaign. And, your internal pages just don’t have enough authority to outrank the home pages of some of your competitors. Not to mention, it’s also likely why you’re seeing black hat link spam outrank your website.

I’d recommend you focus on building links to your city and state pages, using anchor text when appropriate (just proceed with caution and don’t overdue the anchor text). This should help to increase the authority and rankings of your pages.

Search Engine Watch has a nice article on tips for building local links.

Best of luck with your website.

It's both, Bob. Including the address in your footer and on your contact page marked up in Schema.org are important steps in the process.

In my opinion, Schema doesn't have as much of an impact as say creating and verifying a Google My Business account or acquiring authoritative local backlinks, however, it's a foundational item that I always implement. Plus, it's relatively easy to do.

Once the basic onsite optimization elements are in place, my next step is to evaluate a business's citations and the website's backlink profile. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, a ranking issue is caused by one of these two things. Messy citations or a lack of authority relative to your competitors.

There is a laundry list of information I could share, feel free to let me know if you're like specific recommendations in one area or another.

This type of SEO drives me crazy and it's one of the aspects of SEO that makes me want to pull my hair out. Typically you see "SEO" companies that participant in awful, obviously black hat SEO and they rank quickly and for a long time. A white hat SEO tries to build quality links but it's near impossible to dislodge these websites when faced with the overwhelming value provided from these spammy websites.

I'd be happy to take a look at the website's backlink profile as well (PM Me). I recently came up against a massive link pyramid that I had to compete against and I know how frustrating it can be.

I would start by filling out the "Other Profiles" area on your Google Plus account. I'd also link my facebook, twitter and linkedin accounts so that you can share your updates between all of your social networks.

I see what you mean. Relative to your competitors your website has a lot of link authority. So, that’s likely not the issue.

Since your website is optimized correctly, for the most part, I would put it in one of two categories. Either you have a citation problem or you have an anchor text problem.

I would start by doing an audit of your business’s citations. Lean Marketing has a nice guide for performing a citation audit. You can also use tools such as Whitespark or BrightLocal if you have the funds to shell out for software. The objective is to find incorrect references to your business's NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) and to correct them if possible. Consistency in your citation sources is key.

Next, I would review your website’s anchor text relative to your competitors. Anchor text has become a scary topic since manual and algorithmic penalties hit the news, however, I’ve found that acquiring a few links with your keywords in the anchor text can have a big impact on your website’s rankings. Just proceed with caution. Never build oodles of links with exact match anchor text, diversification is key.

If neither of these work, I would consider hiring a local SEO consultant to go through your accounts with a fine tooth comb. There may be other issues related to your Google My Business account, citations, business address, or location.

Hi Maximillian21,

I am going to echo much of what Patrick has already shared, I believe he provided excellent resources for you to follow. However, I wanted to address the three points in your second message.

1. I think any SEO consultant can attest to the fact that a large part of our job is education. If your client believes building a bunch of links is the only solution to building better rankings I would suggest taking a moment to educate him/her. Believe me when I say this will save you the headache down the road if the singular link building strategy doesn't have the desired result.

2. Earning links in any niche is difficult, especially today. As a service provider, it's a challenge to tie your services directly to the quantity of links you acquire. It's also, in my opinion, not the best long term strategy for you or the client. Link building is fickle. In some cases, a few directory submissions can have a positive impact on your rankings. In other case, even the most authoritative links seemingly do very little.

As Patrick alluded to, by layering other services, such as content marketing and social, you provide additional exposure for the business, traffic to the website and value in the services you provide. It's a challenge to be sure, however, I would be hesitant to initiate an SEO campaign that is focused purely on rankings, without at least considering content and social.

In this day and age, most people on the Q & A forum will recommend a holistic approach to an SEO campaign.

3. I believe your original list and the additional details provided by Patrick will serve you well.

A few additional questions I would include:

• What differentiates your business from your competitors (you may find a few gold nuggets you can use in content)
• Do you have resources, media, graphics, etc (can you quickly build resources from existing content).
• What are your customer's main pain points (can you build something to solve this problem).
• Do you have any partnerships, sponsorships or memberships that could provide a backlink (this tends to be low hanging fruit)?
• Where do your customers hang out online? (are there popular forums where you could distribute your content).

These are just a few additional ideas. Best of luck with your project.

Osaka73,

I feel like we're making progress!

I ran a quick Keyword Difficulty report for "dueling pianos" and from it an OSE report of the top ranking websites.

The top ranking business websites (excluding Wikipedia and image search) are:

• http://www.howlatthemoon.com/the-show/
• http://www.petesduelingpianobar.com/
• http://www.2grandentertainment.com/
• http://www.pointstreetpianos.com/

Interesting to note, your website has higher Domain Authority, MozRank and MozTrust by comparison. Whenever I see this, and to be honest it happens a lot, my gut reaction is that your website has a relevance issue. That is to say, Google isn't associating your website with the keyword you're attempting to rank for. Or at the very least, the algo believes your competitors are more relevant.

You may be scratching your head saying, well we get an "A" grade using the On-Page Grader (you do, by the way, I checked) however, the grader only takes into consideration onsite factors. It doesn't account for offsite factors and some secret sauce items related to your content.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I still believe your path to SERP domination revolves around your content and the development of your backlink profile.

For example, here's a what search engines seeing when they crawl your website.  Not much in terms of content for the spiders to latch onto. I would start by giving Googlebot what it wants, and what it wants its long form, authoritative content.

Next, the other challenge is in your backlink profile, specifically your anchor text and the relevance of your link sources. I reviewed an OSE backlink report and only two of your keywords include "dueling pianos" in the anchor text. Contrast this with some of your competitors and who have it in their business name, and, therefore, a majority of their anchor text.

These days anchor text can be scary; even the concept of link building has received a tarnished reputation, but I would bet my bottom dollar that the ranking issues you're experiencing are due to these two items.

Hi,

If you were to include the landing page on your existing URL like this...

• https://www.yourwebsite.com/category/new-product

It will receive ranking benefits from the website's existing authority whereas the new URL is starting from scratch. Building authority takes time, and you are likely better served, as Patrick mentioned, to include the page on your existing URL.

With that being said, a few reasons I can think of for splitting the product onto its own URL are

• if it truly didn't fit into your website's existing architecture
• if you want to brand it as a stand alone product
• if you want the ranking benefits of an exact match domain

Cheers,

If you have a one page website you may want to ensure it doesn't have a canonical URL issue. It your website doesn't 301 redirect to either to www or non www version it could be indexing your home page separately as two unique pages.

Hi Cocoonfxmedia,

Thanks for sharing the websites.

Yes, it appears you're dealing with a website that's walking a very fine line (arcimedia.co.uk) at the moment. One look at its backlink profile and you can see how over optimized the website's anchor text truly is.

Unfortunately, this isn't uncommon, especially in the digital marketing/web design niche. This proves that Google's algorithm isn't perfect at identifying spammy backlink profiles. It may also be the case that their website has a few authoritative links point to it or another website that 301 redirects to it.

The only real solution is to continue to fight the good fight. I wouldn't be surprised to see this website pop out of the search results at some point in the future due to an algo update or manual penalty. It's a hard pill to swallow, but I would continue to focus on your local SEO efforts (building quality citations, local links, engaging local content, acquiring reviews, etc). It isn't worth jeopardizing the long-term potential of a website, in my opinion, to receive short term rankings.

Best of luck,

You got it!

For starters it is never "safe" to purchase links, be it high PR links, or spammy links. Purchasing links can lead to serious penalties and worse the devastating Google ban.

Secondly, and someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't believe .edu links pass any more value than a .com, .org, .net, ect. So this appears to be a simple advertising ploy. They are most definitely not going to be posting your links to the Harvard University website and 100 others for $30.

This type of question is asked all the time, what is the best way to build links quickly and effectively. My answer is to not focus on what seems like an "easy" solution, instead spend some time researching what your competitors are up to, the hubs in your industry, and relevant sources such as forms and blogs; typically you can find some great linking opportunities that won't cost your a penny, and will provide much more value to your website.

C

P.S. Open Site Explorer is great for that.

Hi James,

In a video from Matt Cutts in 2013, he stated that you will experience a small loss in PageRank, of an equal proportion to the loss experienced by a hyperlink. The consensus seems to be that it will pass between 90-99% of the PageRank.

My suggestion is not to stress about it. If you've implemented a 301 redirect from the "www" version to the "non www" version you should be just fine.

Just my two cents.