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Google does look at h tags to understand the structure of the content on the page better, Googler John Mueller confirmed this several years ago. Therefore it’s good practice to have your H1 as a main page or title of the piece then main subheadings as H2, any further sub-headings needed to divide content under these H3-H6. A lot don’t go to this depth and focus on H1 and multiple H2s achieving good results. When I have taken it further I don’t believe it has made a significant impact on rankings compared to when I haven’t. 
Hope this helps

Thanks for the update Christy

It’s a shame as it gave a real incentive to people when it used to work properly. I’m hoping the Moz staff see this and give feedback or can look to get it fixed. Earning points and getting on the first page takes some doing and held some recognition over the years, so it would be good to see it working again

Oh on a side note sorry if this is in the wrong category wasn’t an obvious choice unless I missed it

Not as active as I would have liked recently but still visit and login, answering a question now and again, yet I can see my profile is still listed as unranked. until recently I was somewhere around 45-49 and have been for many years - the criteria appears to be what it has for the last ten years or so. I see people with lower moz points outranking members with far more points. I can even see one with 0 points now appearing in the top 50 so my question is - is the moz community rankings broken or have I missed something? I know once before I pointed it out and it had to be fixed...input from all welcome

The key is competitor analysis I would say in your case to work out what content the others are doing successfully. In reality, I have worked in similar (managed apartments that could be rented for work or holiday in well-known cities) and done posts around attractions that have earned links ultimately increasing the site's authority and rankings. I did an outreach campaign asking the places for some input and images that we could use then I wrote the post and sent it to them. These were posts such as top attractions in x.

I think the best way to answer this would be go look at the landscape - e.g. I used London Bike Tour and you will see what titles are ranking and then click the links to get an idea of the page contents intent - what I saw was mainly tours you can book listed. Page titles are important but so is the page content - even if you get to page 1 briefly if the searches intent isn’t served by your content you are likely to see poor engagement metrics and you won’t stay there long.

If you take Burgundy specifically the results landscape is slightly different with more pages ranking with specific routes rather than tours available from providers. For your page title in theory it would be possible however I would personally go more down the route of Burgundy Bike Tour - A Cyclists Guide To Burgundy. Again it is hard to judge without seeing your page and domain but it appears competitive, so it’s hard to judge your chances by page title alone. However in my opinion it would be wise to have it laid out more like this with specific term at the front and then additional related text after leaving room to capture related longer tail searches and encouraging engagement. If I were looking for a biking tour of Burgundy with the intent of finding routes I would be encouraged to click on one that says guide...

Have a look at Brian Deans Skyscraper technique - backlinko.com. in general if you put relevant content (such as decent long form blog posts) out in front of a relevant audience such as on social media you will find you automatically start to pick links up. Engage with influencers and interact with their stuff - you will find they often reciprlocate. Another technique that can be quite successful is asking others to guest post on your site or include their tips in an expert round up - that way you are often getting links without directly asking for a link. Great thing is if they don’t link other fans often will and either way you are adding more quality content to your site.

I tend to see bigger jumps prior to page 1 and then once on page one it can be slow moving sometimes gaining and losing a few places as it moves up. In the earlier stages you can see several movements in a month often weekly (hence Google Search Console having 7 day filters)  but again I tend to find slower on page one. It’s quite common to see ranking jump 3-4 pages or even more  on the way to page one. During the first 3 month or so you often see most movement slowing down in the months after as it settles to its potential on page one - again depending on what engagement and links keep coming in. I wouldn’t say there is a definitive pattern across all the sites and niches I work however the general improvement I have spoken about here is I have found common. I have seen others say it takes blog pieces over 12 months to reach their full organic potential.

Have you explored what the current landscape for both types of term is? I would start there so you get an idea if any with title tags of similar intent rank for the types of terms you are asking paying close attention to keyword order and the page content. For instance, when I looked at page 1 for a "[major city] bike tour" one of the top results had the page title containing "explore" however in terms of keyword order it was later in the page title and the on-page elements such as the URL and H1 were focused on the more specific term [major city] bike tour. I think you also need to take into account what the page content is - for instance, this one with "explore" in the title still had the intent of listing the best bike tours to book rather than route or landmarks again making the intent more relevant. I think you are right to think in this instance you would struggle to outrank pages that are listing specific bike tours you can book when I had a glance at the landscape.

I think it all depends on your domain and what your post is about as to how quickly it can start ranking well. To get any reasonable ranking for a reasonable search term with some volume I would expect it to still take 3+ months to gain any real traction/rankings in terms of getting towards the top of page 1. This is obviously impacted by the competition of the terms your blog is trying to rank for and also other elements such as your domain authority and so on.

Hmm, I am a big advocate of quality content and a good user experience with decent on-page SEO having a positive impact on rankings. However the majority of high ranking sites all have links - after all, they are a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google (obviously a very broad statement and not all links are equal or help). If your site is that good and lots of people visit it you would expect to earn links whether you actively go after them or not. In order to help yourself why would you not try to earn links, I would say, even if a low competition term.

In relation to your original post will it take longer to rank? There are lots of factors that can impact this but I would say it will definitely take you longer to rank and your rank would likely be lower. At a very basic level if you take two local business sites and one site does nothing other than have a great site and no links, yet the other has an equally good site but it has set up it's Google My Business and made sure it has links from relevant local directories plus maybe some local media/interest sites - Which do you think Google would trust more and rank higher? I have had some great sites that have come to me as clients - well optimised with nothing major needing changing to optimise the site but their rankings have all improved significantly in a short period of a few months through a structured outreach campaign earning links and ultimately increasing the DA. One final thought - even zero backlink experiments that have been successful have ended up naturally earning links and increasing their DA - to an extent worthy content in front of the right audience, such as social media, earns exposure/links.

Hope this makes sense...

Hi - In my experience doing a rebuild/redesign improving the content and then redirecting sees fluctuations with some rankings dropping initially but overall there being a pretty quick positive response to an improved site with rankings peaking for redirected pages between 3 and 6 months. With quite a few terms that ended up page 1 average position 1-3 i have seen the most fluctuation in rankings during the first 3 months - assuming Google is deciding where you should sit testing a higher position and seeing if you belong there. Hope this information helps a little

Hi Tawny,

It looks like the system is working again - my ranking is back.

Thank you

Matt

Hi Roman - yeah I was wondering if it was an issue that Moz and/or the community were aware of. I am still getting Moz points but my rank isn't appearing. I have been active on here in the Q&A since 2010 and never had issues before, to be honest

Thanks

Matt

Hi Alick - thats the same criteria it has always been and I fit that criteria but it isn't working...

I have logged in multiple times over the last week and I have 2032 moz points - something has changed or is off with the system.

Thanks for trying - hoping one of the Moz team might have the answer...

I have been busy and away from MOZ for a while, but over the years I have been an active member of the community. I have over 2000 Moz points and usually if you haven't been on in the specified time period you become unranked, however this usually updates in 24 hours of logging back in. I have been active again since Sunday and I am still unranked yet I have gained several more points answering a couple of questions. My question is - have I missed something and the system has changed (not according to the top users table) or is the system broken?

I think your problem is you have google all confused - your site still default loads http://www.makemoneyadultcontent.com/ if you enter it in your browser address bar. When you search in Google it now shows the https version - however you haven't redirected http version to https - links pointing at your site will also be still going to http which has all the links and authority pointing at it to rank but Google isn't recognising this and passing authority for ranking to the new https version it now indexes. Have you checked this article out - you need to get some 301 redirects in place to start. I also noticed your styling isn't working properly on https. Not sure what your site is on but if it's WordPress you can fix that with a plugin usually.

I hope this helps

hi - you will want to make sure all your canonicals are updated to https as these are now the master copy of the page. Check out this migration article from http to https guide from search engine land - https://www.google.co.uk/amp/searchengineland.com/http-https-seos-guide-securing-website-246940/amp

Hope this helps

It should do Ricky - let me know how it goes!

Hi

You may find this useful as a potential solution different to that above -

Install one of these contact form plugins on your site if you don't already use one of them:

• Gravity Forms
• Formidable
• Ninja Forms
• Contact Form 7

Then install this - http://helpforwp.com/downloads/campaign-tracker/ - it will provide referrer information - showing how the visitor arrived at your site as required.

There is a cost involved but this isn't massive and hopefully you should be able to install this and set it up yourself relatively easily.

Hope this helps

Matt

Have you tried http://www.link-assistant.com/website-auditor/ as it checks for broken links and can be scheduled to run automatically. You can sit it on your own server or something like AWS. We ran it on a free instance of AWS for quite a while before upgrading and never had issues. We upgraded as we run quite a bit of software on there - still isn't huge costs involved.

Hope this helps!

Matt

I tend to use the Panguin Tool and look for sudden drops in traffic at update times - http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - it maps your sites google analytics against updates.

Hope this helps

Hi

If nothing has changed other than the domain transfer, so your site is still the same on the same server with the same structure and no other changes have occured such as a sudden loss of links then there is a good chance this could be down to the Moz index update itself. You mentioned your DA was higher in February, however since then there has been updates, you can check more here for updates - https://moz.com/products/api/updates. I have seen others have a similar issue in the past noticing a sudden drop in DA since an update and this is due to the Moz index reducing the amount of URLs in it - it is currently at 139 billion whereas it was at 141 billion on March 2nd and 145 billion at the end of January. If the index is using less links this can lead to it using less links to calculate your domain authority and big drops can be seen in some cases.

In terms of your migration to Wordpress make sure that you 301 redirect the old html URLs to their new location/URL on WordPress.

Although very in-depth you may find some of the information in the post an interesting read - https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Caro

Just before I directly answer your question can I ask whether you have done a backlink audit on their site? If not I would strongly advice it in order to make sure they don't have any penalties or links you don't want associating with your site. I like to work this way, yes it does take longer but you are going into it with your eyes wide open and avoiding any issues down the line, which will inevitably take up even more time trying to rectify. I would recommend further reading on the following:

Link Audit - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit

Link Removals & Risk Mitigation - https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

As the others have already said I would look to redirect individual URLs to similar corresponding URLs on your site in order to get the best from this. As we know 301 redirects pass authority from the original URL to the new one.

However I would also take this one step further and look at the Google Analytics and Google Search Console Search Analytics Report for the other companies site if you have access to it and I would look at the most popular pages in terms of organic traffic. I would also look to analyse current rankings for that site and see if it is out ranking any of the corresponding content on your site. If so I would look to use it to improve my own content and then still do the 301 redirect. I have done this in the past and when moving across a popular blog from one site to yours I would look and see what are the most popular posts in terms of organic traffic as mentioned above but also other factors such as social interaction (I find https://socialcrawlytics.com/ ) and referrals. Then if my current site that I am redirecting too doesn't have some content that is on the same subject and very close in nature and popular I would look to migrate the content itself to a new post with the same content and then 301 redirect the original to that new piece.

Too many times you see people rushing this and just blanket redirecting things, however they forget that 1. you need to redirect to similar content to get the most benefit as a redirect is essentially telling the search engines the content has moved to a new location and 2 you won't always get close matches so why not take that content and publish it on yours if it is already working rather than trying to fit it somewhere it doesn't (basically don't force a square peg in a round hole).

Obviously I don't know how strong the site you want to redirect is but taking time over this now will pay dividends.

Hope this helps!

Matt

As Donald says you can rewrite content for each location and give it a location specific flavor.

One thing I would also recommend when working on something like this is spend the time trying to get some user generated content such a reviews and testimonials. This will give it a more unique local feel.

If each location has similar products but not exactly the same could you slightly vary product focus and weight of content accordingly.

I don't know you setup or budget but you could even look to get different writers for different locations. You may even look to get different business owners/franchise managers to have input on the content for their site. In some situations you may even have some keen to write some content that you can proof/edit.

Hope this helps

Hi Richard

Google has recently issued guidelines in relation to posts in return for products. They advise that bloggers should no follow links to the company that has given them a free product in return for a post and they should also disclose any such relationship. Here is a good write up on this - https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/03/11/google-issues-guidelines-on-bloggers-and-links-for-freebies/

Again no follow links are definitely not worthless as you must remember they can be a great source of referral traffic, If you get placed on a blog that has a lot of traffic and a highly engaged audience you can gain a lot of exposure from this in the form of referral traffic, social shares and even other links in some cases. Don't purely think of links value in terms of whether they can directly pass authority and help rankings.

If I were working on your project here are some tactics that I would follow:

I would look at identifying influencers in your niche and start to form a relationship with them. Then I would look to get them to write some relevant content on your site, with the aim of giving it exposure to their audience. This is a tactic that I have always found pays off, as it builds traffic and exposure for your site. Ultimately this will lead to lots of opportunities apart from having some good content created for your site that people will see.

I would also look at what your competition are up to that are ranking top for the keys terms you are after. What is there link profile like? What is the content that is ranking like? And what are the social likes and shares to their site and ranking content. This leads nicely into the skyscrapper technique - http://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique. I would also then look at going a step further with your analysis and evaluate this content very deeply as Rand speaks about in his excellent White Board Friday last week - https://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

When you ask whether blogger outreach is dead I don't believe it is - it all just depends the angle you approach it from. I would look to create my own content that can be placed on their sites rather than the quick win of a free product for review. I would still look to get some product reviews but for the reason I mention above. Again I would also look to entice influencers, which quite often are bloggers, to place content on your site to build the authority of your site.

My final note as why I mentioned above, forgetting blogger outreach I would be creating link worthy content and I would be spending a significant amount of time (at least as long as it took to create if not more) to get it placed in different communities on social networks and other sites remembering this is for exposure and not for links. If you create great content that people want then they will share it and they will link to it - it just takes time and commitment (this is why I highlighted the skyscrapper technique above).

Hope this helps!

Matt

No problem Kerry - just wanted to check you managed to do it and it fixed things?

Matt

Here you go - https://springmerchant.com/bigcommerce/how-to-add-home-page-banner-your-mobile-templates/

I believe this should help

Hi Kerry

I have had a look and it appears that you do have one link on each page that is causing this - the link with the anchor text permierdoorco.com which I believe is in the address block in the footer of each page - it isn't properly declared but has a href on it which is premierdoorco.com rather than http://www.premierdoorco.com/

Here is the copied element from your source code -

premierdoorco.com

just login and make the change to the link and all should be fixed.

Hope this helps

I would definitely say that your site is over-optimised and that you are having issues as you have built a lot of landing pages for locations which are very similar just with postcodes and location names being the main difference.I know you have tried to write unique content and specific location information but it still feels very similar and over-optimised purely written as an aggressive way to rank in all these London locations. I would say your site could be classed as being full of doorway pages for all the locations and this is definitely something Google doesn't like and falls fowl of their guidelines thus hurting your ranking ability. You also don't appear to have physical locations in these places so they are more of a service area. As you aren't ranking at the moment I would personally cut everything back focus on ranking for your actual physical location then you may want to choose service areas and build some pages around these, but you don't want to overdo this and you definitely don't want a cookie cutter approach. Look to build pages that really are unique. You also need to look at building the main service areas you cover into your main navigation not at the bottom of your page.

Here is an article on Search Engine Land which addresses this very well and gives you lots of points to consider in order to help you get your site sorted and hopefully ranking - http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Have you also looked at how others have ranked for the main terms you mention above? Competition that is successful is always a good place to look

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi

If you are trying to build a funnel with a specific page that must be visited before reaching the destination page please see the attached screenshot of how to do this.

Just turn on funnels when you build a goal add your page x URL and make it required.

Here is more on this from Google - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1116091?hl=en

specifically - "When you create a destination goal, you also have the option to create funnel for that goal. A funnel is a sequence of pages that you anticipate users seeing before they reach the goal. Report data for the funnel appears in the funnel_Visualization_ report."

Hope this helps!

Matt

XB9yITK.jpg

Hi

For quick one off ranking check on just a few terms I tend to use one of the following:

http://fatjoe.co/fat-rank/ -  has a free extension for Chrome - came across this along time ago on Twitter and think it's great.

https://serps.com/tools/rank_checker

As for a platform I tend to use Moz for tracking rankings weekly.

Hope this helps!

Best

Matt

Hi

Are you using an international domain such as .com or are you using a country specific domain as this is one obvious way Google can determine your location other than in Search Console. If you are using an international domain Google looks at several factors to determine your location including IP Address, any address listings on your site, Google My Business and even links to your site.

Have a look here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Azael

I would say you need to get an overall strategy of how to increase the authority of your site, which will involve lots including earning high quality links (don't just go an start grabbing any links you can get a strategy and go for earning quality related links). In order to understand Page Authority I would have a look at this https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority. I would also ask what you current on-page strategy is and how or if you have optimised on-page factors - for instance are you starting with targeting long-tail searches? These are less competitive and you would be surprised how a new site can gain ground with targeting this type of keyword.

I would start at the beginning with https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo and then make sure all your on-page is optimised and in place. Then start with working on a strategy on how you can start to drive traffic to your pages - are you active on social media? This sort of traffic can lead to links.

You can test if your pages are powerful or not by running them through Opensite Explorer - https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/  to see what page authority is assigned to them. This will give you a good indicator. Don't forget in terms of relevant links you should consider doing some competitor research - run their site through OpenSite Explorer and see if there are any relevant quality links that could apply to your site. I often see people over looking things such as links from suppliers sites if they sell products for instance - often a quick win. Also are there any industry sites that you could potentially start to build or already have a relationship with - if so do it and start to try and get pieces published on there. This isn't purely with the idea of links it is about gaining referral traffic and building your own authority which only leads to positive things for your site.

I know this is broad advice but I think from your question you need to start at the beginning and work from there. I would also ask what you are currently targeting - national or local rankings? If you are targeting local rankings you want to start optimising for your local area and start gaining relevant local citations and so on  - Moz Local SEO - https://moz.com/learn/local - local is a good place to start if it fits with what you do. I specifically mention local citations as they are often easier to gain as you are likely to have existing relationships in the community in which you are based - be sure to take advantage of these...

Hope this helps!

Best

Matt

Hi Laura

You may want to check out http://www.analyticsseo.com/ - I have worked with this previously and it can produce the sort of reports you are talking about - kicking them out to powerpoint etc - http://www.analyticsseo.com/seo-reports/

You can create custom reports, connected to analytics and choose the format and then schedule the system to automatically run the report at a scheduled interval and email it to you.

Hope this helps

Hi Stephen

Since signing up have you seen this - https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-uk

You may also find this useful - http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/definitive-local-search-citations/#uk

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Mike

On the watermark question I would personally remove the watermark as I believe you will find that whether watermarks impact your ranking or not putting people of clicking and interacting with your images is a negative.

I would also do it from a quality point of view and I would draw your attention to Google's Guidelines on Image Publishing

"Similarly, some people add copyright text, watermarks, or other information to their images. This kind of information won't impact your image's performance in search results, and does help photographers claim credit for their work and deter unknown usage. However, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, users may click it less often in search results."

I imagine you have already had a look at this and I would recommend you go with your findings on this.

Here are Google's guidelines to Image Publishing - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016

I would also remove the watermark from you images in terms of wanting people to use images and then doing a reverse image search to find sites that use them. I would then request attribution if you haven't already been given it - great way to get exposure.

I would also try to simplify your folder structure as 9 levels deep is very deep and likely to make Googles crawl of your images less efficient. I don't understand the reasoning of an individual image per folder - something more like images segmented by subject or even month like default WordPress would make more sense.

Do you have an image sitemap in place? If not here is some more info from Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en

Hope this helps

Matt

Hi

I find the quickest way to do this is to Google your UA number.

You will also find this site quite handy for this - http://www.namesense.com/

Hope this helps

Matt

I think Moosa and Andy both make great points which I agree with. I would definitely give it more time and it would be easier to give input with your domain. In terms of the content you have added in the form of new pages are these targeting new keywords or ones you were already ranking for? The reason I say this is because I have seen people cause themselves issues by creating new pages targeting terms that current pages were ranking for and this lead to keyword cannibalization. Jon Earnshaw gave a brilliant talk on this at Brighton SEO earlier this year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASsxh8ZwseQ

I just thought I would mention it on the off chance

Best

Matt

Hi Rob

The difference is one of your results is paid impressions and the other is organic impressions. So you are seeing two reports for separate things - keyword planner will give you an idea of the overall potential.

Essentially your site appeared in the organic results 4500 times (remember this is the number of times a page from your site appeared in the results for that term and was seen by the user/searcher not the total amount of times it was searched).

Paid ads appeared 14253 times.

Hope this makes sense

Matt

Hi Robert

When did you start to see the ranking drop and was it for all your terms?

Thanks

Hi Robert,

It is hard to help you with this without having more details on your site itself. There are many things that could cause a ranking drop. Have you run your links through Opensite explorer to gauge their spam score? What sort of anchor text do these links have? What changes did you make around the time of noticing the ranking drop? How long has it been going on?

Sorry to answer your question with more questions but there are so many factors that can cause a ranking drop, so establishing more detail will help the community help you further.

Best

Matt

Hi Laura,

I believe http://www.seopowersuite.com/rank-tracker/ will provide the data you are looking for - you can track keyword rankings on different search engines in different countries and see what page is ranking. This should be easy to monitor your different ccTLDs.

Hope this helps

Matt

I know it probably isn't what you want to here but if you have lifted images from Google Images without checking the copyright status I would shoot it again - I don't think a copyright disclaimer will protect you. This is the last thing you want to cause you an issue - people like Getty Images are always on the look out for sites unauthorized use of their images. This can lead to hefty fines - I have seen sites fall foul of this...

Hi Marina,

I have come across issues with redirect plugins on WordPress when trying to deal with http and https. They can have bugs which can cause redirect loops or other issues causing your page not to load. When you say your design is messed up do you also get a warning about the page containing insecure elements or similar? This often happens when moving a site to https - you may find this plugin helpful for dealing with this issue - https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ - then you can choose to have your site fully https if desired.

In terms of the redirect what server are you on? If you are on an apache server you can easily take care of this redirect by logging into via FTP and then editing the .htaccess file.

The following code will allow you to redirect the whole site to https if you fix the layout with the above:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [R,L]

replacing your www.domain.com with your domain.

I personally would go down this route and have your whole site on https once you have dealt with design/content issues - but in order to help with your decision take a look at this great post from Cyrus Shepard - https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

*Note many sites have now moved to https - look at Moz for example.

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Vlad,

What I meant was you needed to declare it like this

and not the way you did it . The best tip I could give you is make sure you encase each type of schema inas this allows you to easily nest the different types of schema on a page. I can see that this is the case with your other site after having a quick glance.

Hope this helps

Hi Ravi,

Only certain product pages will show rich snippets, so the ones you are looking at may not show but others most likely will as your product markup is coming back as valid in structured data testing tool. I have seen it mentioned that Google only stores a certain amount of data needed for rich snippets on a websites products pages - somewhere estimated to be between 10-50%.

Hope this helps!

This is the correct code and will validate if you copy and paste it into the structured data testing tool -

ASG Seamless Gutters Inc

• About us
• Testimonials
• Email Us

70 Leete St., Springfield, MA 01108 (413) 455-0800 info@asggutter.com <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mon,Tu,Wed,Thu,Fri, Sat 7:00-19:00">Monday - Saturday 7:00a-7:00pm</time>

The postaladdress schema wasn't declared properly so wasn't being read and you needed to close this set of postaladdress schema with a prior to opening hours which are part of the HomeAndConstructionBusiness schema.

Hope this helps

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