Jessica,

If you are referring to the Moz Keyword Explorer tool not showing any ranking keywords when you are on the "Ranking Keywords" page exploring https://www.el-well.com/helping-your-parents-declutter-their-home/, then you just need to be patient. When you are on that page, you can read at the top right, "Keyword Data Updated Every Two Weeks" which means that you probably have more rankings than the tool currently shows because it's not showing real time data.

I did use that tool just now to explore your root domain and I see that Moz shows that your site is ranking in the top 50 for 85 phrases.

For example, you are ranking #4 for "self playing games for old people" and #13 for "putting on socks" and #18 for "staying fit for adults".

Also, I analyzed your site in ahrefs.com and semrush.com and found that their indexes show that you are ranking for 318 and 220 phrases respectively, in the top 100 in Google.

If you continue adding content to your site, optimizing that content, adding internal links to each piece of content, and building links in general to your site, you'll continue to improve existing rankings and gain more rankings for more keywords.

For example, on https://www.el-well.com/help-putting-on-socks/, change the alt text of the image from "Physiotherapist sitting down using a sock aid" to "Physiotherapist sitting down using a sock aid to help put on socks". It may help your rankings for "help put on socks" which is at #15 right now and "help putting on socks" and other similar variations.

Any combination of any of those words used in the title tag would be keywords that that page could potentially rank for in the SERPs.

So all of the following are some of the keywords in that title tag that you are optimizing for:

• linear shower drain
• shower drain
• 40" shower drain
• 40" long linear shower drain
• etc.

Patrick wrote a list of reasons why Screaming Frog might not be crawling certain pages here: https://moz.com/community/q/screamingfrog-won-t-crawl-my-site#reply_300029.

Hopefully that list can help you figure out your site's specific issue.

Use Screaming Frog to crawl your site. It is free to download the software and you can use the free version to crawl up to 500 URLs.

After it crawls your site you can click on the Sitemaps tab and generate an XML sitemap file to use.

It is best practice to separate all words with dashes but it's not going to make or break your rankings.

The search engines are smart enough now to decipher that underarmourfire-basketballshoe is really "under armour fire basketball shoes". Just type in the former into Google and you'll see that Google asks if you meant the latter.

Also, you can find hundreds of examples of "messy" URLs that rank top ten proving that that one factor alone isn't going to make or break your success.

If it's a simple fix for a programmer to make it so your URL's use dashes between all words then I'd say fix the problem. But if it's a big deal that would take a lot of time/resources, the argument could easily be made to pass on this issue for the time being to knock out other more important items.

Your login pages will not affect your website's rankings one bit. You don't need to worry about optimizing your two login pages at all and it's okay that they have duplicate titles and content.

As an example, look at Hubspot's login page here, https://app.hubspot.com/login. Their title tag is "Hubspot Login" which makes sense. They don't have a meta description tag. The page has no H1. It is a thin content page.

You're going to see similar results for almost any login page you look at. https://moz.com/login has similar "issues" as well.

Just ignore the tool's recommendations for this type of page.

Well essentially there were 3 major changes that happened at the same time (in Google's eyes): the url change, overhauling your content, and getting rid of the site-wide link from your navigation.

I know you said that the navigation link drop happened a month ago, but you have to remember that no change on your website affects your rankings for good or bad until Google comes back and crawls your page(s) and sees the change.

Some of your main pages probably were crawled within a few days of the navigation change but the majority of pages weren't re-crawled for a few weeks after that change. I can still find some of your pages that haven't been crawled since before the navigation change.

Now, I don't think that the content change is what's hurting you because you added more useful content. Although maybe you have over optimized it a bit for "travel medical insurance" since that exact phrase shows up 48 times.

URL changes with proper 301 redirect implementation can drop your rankings temporarily but my experience has always been to gain back the temporary loss soonish afterwards.

If it were my site, I'd do the following:

• Immediately put back the link pointing to that page in the navigation with the same anchor text it had before
• Wait about two to three weeks after that to see if any ranking recovery has happened
• If no change, I'd drop that exact match phrase several times from the article (then wait for it to be recrawled to assess if it helped or not)
• Then if no change still, I'd test changing the content back to the old page keeping the new URL
• Then if no change still, I'd change the redirect back

My hope is that you'll recover the rankings after just putting the navigation link back.

Good luck

Some clarifying questions:

• For the ranking drop, are you talking about the phrase "travel medical insurance"
• How many content changes did you make? From looking at the wayback machine, it appears that you added a lot of content. But the most recent date the wayback machine shows is from March 14th, 2019 so I need clarification on what changes you made in addition to changing the URL.
• Did you change the title tag?
• Did you make a change to your navigation? The wayback version shows you had a sitewide navigation link pointing to the Travel Medical page under the "Plans" drop down but I don't see that on the current site. Was that change just made along with the 301 redirect?
• Did you get rid of any other internal links to this page around this time?

Right now I am seeing that Google has recrawled the new page and has recognized the 301 redirect because when you do a "site:https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/" search, Google lists the new URL in the results and the cached version's most recent date is 2/24/20 at 21:21:18 GMT.

I wouldn't change the redirect back just yet. But I need answers to the above questions before giving you my final opinion.

Yes, I would noindex them if Wix gives you the option.

There is no need for concern. It's not going to forever taint your site. I've had many pages over the years with no content or with lorem ipsum content get indexed before I was ready to launch. You don't get a penalty, the page just won't rank for anything while it looks that way because it's a crappy page.

You could literally do nothing except add the content that you want to the homepage and when Google crawls your site again they'll put the new content in their cache and everything will be fine.

But you might as well go to Settings > Reading inside wordpress and check the box next to "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" and hit Save. This will add name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' /> to all your pages and will cause Google to deindex your homepage the next time they come crawling.

Just make sure to uncheck that box when you're ready to launch your website.

It appears that hashtags in Wix work just like tags in Wordpress do.

It's best practice to robots noindex tag pages if you are going to use them at all.

I agree with EGOL, if you have the choice, use subfolders instead of subdomains.

I know sometimes, there are development reasons why a company decides to move forward with subdomains. And those can rank just fine too. It's just best to let decision makers know that the SEO department is voting for subfolders.

Also, although I would also be curious to know if a subdomain inherits DA from the main domain, it probably doesn't need to be a part of the decision making process for choosing between subdomain and subfolder.  As EGOL said, "ranking ability and DA are different things", so the DA passed through or not passed through to a subdomain will not be the reason for ranking well or not in Google.

They swear the meta descriptions were unchanged, what about the title tags?

Search engines still read the whole title tag no matter how long it is. The 50-60 character recommendation comes up because that is what people will see in the SERPs.

I'm all for testing different lengths of title tags to see which version gets me the best rankings for the most phrases that are mapped to that URL along with the highest conversion rate.

I've even tested and kept title tags with 80-100 characters because they performed better for me than shorter ones.

Don't be scared to test title tags. You can always change them back and get your rankings back if the test made things worse. One example: I made a change last year to a title tag that dropped the rankings from #3 to not in the top #100 for the main phrase and so I changed it back. As soon as Google recrawled the page, my rankings came back.

DA is not a ranking factor but it is a nice metric made by Moz to help us get an idea how we're doing compared to our competitors in terms of quantity and quality of links. So having a higher DA doesn't automatically mean you should rank higher than your competitors.

Also, since the EMD (exact match domain) update back in 2012, sites can't rank better just because of the keyword in the domain name if their site authority and optimization isn't great.

My main suggestion for you would be to acquire more backlinks with "dental emergency" as the anchor text (making sure they are linking to the correct page on your site, of course). Obviously, don't over do this and build hundreds of links with exact match keywords in the anchor text but don't be shy about it either.

As an example, one of the owner's of my company has a personal site and I asked him to change the anchor text of the link in his footer to our company's homepage from "Nozzle" to "Keyword phrase - Nozzle".  After Google recrawled that page, our rankings jumped up 10 spots. To be fair, I'm aware that jumping 10 spots while on page 3 is different than trying to go from #4 to #1 though. My point is to not be afraid to use exact match anchor text sometimes.

Also make sure that your page that is ranking #4 also has internal links from other pages of your website pointing to it with the keyword in the anchor text.

Test out things like moving that phrase to the front of your title tag and even trying to get it in there twice if at all possible. These will be tests and can be changed back if your rankings drop, so don't be scared to test. Pay attention to your CTR as well inside of Google Search Console to make sure you don't drop in CTR because of the changes too. Also, test out adding that phrase more times in the content of the page.

Good luck!

After looking over your site's situation, I have a few comments and suggestions.

Many times I see that not following a keyword map precisely, is part of the problem. What I mean is that you should have a keyword map that lists all your URL's and assigns keywords to each URL. You want to be very clear which page you are trying to rank for each phrase. The map then guides all of your optimization efforts including: title tags, page content, alt text, internal link anchor text, backlink anchor text (although don't over do it), etc.

Your site is doing mostly just fine following a keyword map but it could do better when it comes to the divorce phrases.

Current homepage optimization:

• title tag's first main keyword focus is "Orlando Divorce Attorney"
• title tag's second main keyword focus is "Family Law Attorney"
• breadcrumbs on all 30 navigation pages use "Orlando Family Lawyer" as the anchor text to point back to the homepage
• logo alt text is "Orlando Family Lawyer" (keep in mind the logo links back to the homepage from every page is the first link in the code of every page linking to your homepage even above the main navigation)
• "family law" shows up 15 times in the content
• "orlando family lawyer/law" shows up 3 times in the content
• "orlando divorce attorney" shows up 12 times in the content
• alt text for both images in the main content area is "orlando divorce attorney"

Current Divorce page optimization (https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/

• title tag's first main phrase is "orlando divorce attorney"
• title tag: doesn't contain second main phrase. But does add modifier words "experienced" and "dependable"
• breadcrumbs from 5 divorce subcategory pages use "orlando divorce lawyer" as anchor text
• "orlando divorce attorney" shows up 5 times in the content
• "orlando divorce lawyer" shows up 4 times in the content
• anchor text in main navigation is the word "divorce" across the whole site

Suggested changes based off of the above bullet point lists:

• Homepage title tag changed to something that focuses more on the "family law/lawyer/attorney" phrases like: "Distinguished Family Law Attorney - Orlando Family Lawyer - Sean Smallwood" (You can continually test different title tags over time to find the best one that helps you rank high and gets the best click through rate)
• change alt text of one image to "orlando family law attorney" and the other to "orlando family lawyer"
• make sure to include "attorneys" and "lawyers" at least once in the content and any other modifier words that go along with "family lawyer" terms that this page should rank for
• Divorce page title tag change to "Orlando Divorce Attorney - Experienced & Dependable Divorce Lawyer in Orlando, Florida"
• Don't make the word "Divorce" in the navigation clickable but in the drop down menu add a link to the Divorce page with the anchor text "Divorce Attorney" or "Divorce Lawyer" (whichever one you want to rank the most for
• From within the content of the homepage, link the phrase "divorce attorney" to the divorce page

Other suggestions:

• go through all of your blog posts and make sure any existing links link to the proper page based off of the anchor text and the keyword map.

• Example: https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/average-cost-of-divorce/ links to homepage with anchor text "the average cost of a divorce case" which is what this post is optimized for, not the homepage. So I'd remove that link and link some "divorce attorney" phrase from this page to the Divorce page.

• add more internal links from within your blog posts using the right anchor text to the Divorce page and other pages your working on

• deindex your blog tag pages and archive pages (this is easy to do in wordpress)

Obviously track your rankings for all your keywords and to monitor what effect these changes have to the divorce phrases and the family law phrases at the very least.

Finally, these suggestions all assume you want the Divorce page to ultimately rank for divorce phrases and not the homepage. If after making these changes, the Divorce page doesn't rank as high as the homepage did and the homepage no longer ranks, it'll probably be because the homepage has more backlinks, and therefore, authority. In this case, I'd actually consider optimizing your homepage for the divorce phrases and pushing that to page one while still link building to the divorce page and then down the road trying again to get the divorce page ranking. That's all assuming that your divorce page will have a higher conversion rate from site visitor to call-in/form fill out. But if your homepage converts the same or better, maybe you just push that page because it's already top of page 2. But keep in mind that it could hurt your family law phrases if you push the divorce phrases too much on the homepage.

There is no penalty for using the same keyword twice in a URL, especially if it's part of your domain name.

There are many examples of sites that have a sub folder that contain the same keyword as their domain name that have no problem ranking including your competition:

• runningwarehouse.com/mens-running-shoes.html ranks #2 for 'running shoes'
• seo.com/seo ranks #5 for 'professional seo'
• overthetopseo.com/professional-seo-services-what-to-expect/ ranks #2  for 'professional seo' (in fact only 3 url's that rank for that phrase don't repeat the term 'seo' in their url.)
• contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing ranks #1 for 'content marketing'
• etc.

**Ranking the correct page: **

Whenever you have an issue with the wrong page ranking better than the one you want, you just need to work on tweaking your onsite optimization for those pages. (And you may have to continue building more links to the page you want to rank.)

Here is a list of things that I'd make some test changes to: (Keep in mind that you can always revert things back if a test makes rankings go down.)

• Test different title tags on the two pages making one less optimized for the keyword and the other more optimized.
• Add more copy to the page you want to rank.
• Do an internal link audit. You want to make sure that anytime you are linking from one page to another with a specific keyword as the anchor text, that it links to the page that you want to rank for that phrase.

After you make a change, you need to wait until Google re-caches that page and sees the update (which can take a few days or more sometimes) and then check your rankings after that to see if there was any movement or not.

Boyd

I always start with creating a location page for each city your business is located.

If you only have one city location then think about what is the most useful page for visitors to land on when searching for what you do. If it's your homepage, then promote that, but if it is the information you'd put in a location page, then promote that instead.

Honestly I tend to always create a location page no matter what and then push to rank both the homepage and the location page see which one Google likes best.

Boyd