Stumped: Site No Longer Showing Up for Important Keywords
-
URL is: www.radianceofpalmbeach.comGreetings All:I have been working on our company's website for months, and I am finally at wit's end. The site was very out-of-date and had unfortunately been built upon some bad links before my arrival. My partner and I have redone the site with SEO best practices in mind: we created new content for the pages, and have been working diligently on correctly organizing the site. Despite everything we have done, our site has plummeted since September in terms of organic search. Here are some of my suspects:
-
- Panda/Penguin: a lot of the content of the old site had been copied. We did our best to make our content helpful and original, but I'm not sure we did enough. Also, many backlinks were suspect. I disavowed all that I didn't like Dec. 8. I have seen minor improvement, but not much.
-
Name Change: Around late October, coinciding with one of the algorithm changes, the doctor insisted we change our name from New Radiance Med Spa to New Radiance Cosmetic Center. We noticed overnight tumbling, but it literally happened at the same time many were complaining about Penguin.
-
Pages too far removed from root directory?: We tried to silo the site by category to make it specific, but I'm not sure if we went too far from the root directory. For example, our botox page is: http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/injectables/neuromodulators/botox-cosmetic/ -- Should it just be ./botox ? Everything is only one link away, so we didn't foresee a problem.
-
- No alternate forms of navigation: Our navigation is solely drop-down.
-
Content Issues: Since the site launch, my boss has changed the organization of the site around. I don't think this should be a problem, but I honestly don't know.
-
Technical Issues: We use a Wordpress site, and the designer has been pretty good about making the site clean and without errors, but perhaps there is something I am overlooking?
-
??: Despite these issues, I feel like our site should be considered better than many of our competitors who nonetheless perform much better than we do on important keyword searches. Type in "liposuction palm beach" or "botox palm beach" and we don't even come on page 1, whereas we used to dominate.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as, like I said, we are stumped. I feel like I have looked up every possible problem, and with the above list, we feel frozen as to which direction to turn.Thanks in advance,Michael
-
-
Hi,
I did a quick crawl of your site with Screamingfrog - basic site structure seems to be ok - most of the pages are within 1/2 clicks from the homepage. The url's are pretty long - but that is not necessarily a sign that they are far from the root.
I noticed that you are using a lot of (very) heayv images on the site and that these images are pushing the content to the bottom, invisible without scrolling. Example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/fattransfertobutt2.jpg -> 1.150 KB for one image. This has an impact on the loadtime of your pages - see: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150110_FW_KEY/1/details/ . Some of the images are put on the non-www version, so needing an additional redirect.
If I look at your page titles, H1, meta descriptions - it seems that they are very specific, but not really answering the questions a potential user of this site may have. Example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/non-invasive-treatments/skin-rejuvenation/matrix-ir-laser-treatment/ => page title: Matrix IR Laser Treatment - New Radiance Palm Beach H1: Matrix IR - Metadescription: Matrix is an amazing wrinkle reduction procedure that uses ...etc -> few people will be looking for Matrix, so probably you need to do some keyword research and see what are the keywords which by your target audience.
Language used on the different pages is very commercial and not very informative.While most of the images are quite good in terms of quality, the images of staff are not sharp, and certainly do not look professional (example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/about-new-radiance/neil-c-goodman/- the profile picture looks like a scan from a picture taken in the 80ties)
Dirk
-
Hi Mikedelseo,
Sorry to hear about the drop in rankings, these situations are definitely frustrating.
You were very thorough with your question, but I didn't see any info around the 301 redirects from the old site to the new site. Did you ensure that all of the old, high ranking content was 301'ed to the new URLs? Those 301s are extremely important to preserve rankings.
I'll take a deeper look if so, but lmk that first.
Also, if you've changed the business name/listing, make sure to update all the local listings as needed. Moz Local will help you with that: https://moz.com/local/
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
-
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
Problem with getting a site to rank at all
We pushed this Word Press site live about a month ago www.primedraftarchitecture.com. Since then we've been adding regular content, blog posts 3 times a week with social posts on facebook, twitter, G+ and LinkedIn. We also submitted via Moz Local about 3 weeks ago. Yext about two weeks ago and have been adding about 5 listings to small local directories a week. Webmaster tools shows that the site map is valid and the pages of the site are getting indexed and it shows links from 7 sites, mostly directories. I'm just not seeing the site ranking for anything. We're getting zero organic traffic. I though we did a good job not over optimizing the pages. I'm just stymied trying to figure out what's wrong. Usually we push a site live and see at least some low rankings after just a couple of weeks. Can anyone see anything that looks bad or where we've gone wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | DonaldS0 -
Duplicate content on events site
I have an event website and for every day the event occurs the event has a page. For example: The Oktoberfest in Germany the event takes 16 days. My site would have 16 (almost)identical pages about the Oktoberfest(same text, adres, photos, contact info). The only difference between the pages is the date mentioned on the page. I use rich snippets. How does google treat my pages and what is the best practice.
On-Page Optimization | | dragonflo0 -
Altering site structure
I work for a business that operates several sites that were developed a very long time ago. We've been making many different changes over the past 12-18 months to improve these sites in several different ways. One area that we've never discussed or attempted is general site structure. Its pretty obvious that when the business was started they had never heard of information architecture or usability design. To make matters worse, the internal linking strategy appears to have been link everything to everything. Well after being told that it couldn't be done - I'm getting our team to say we must focus on this, if for no other reason that to help consumers figure out how to navigate through our site. Today we essentially have a series of category / information pages. In some cases, we hang more detailed topical content related to a category /informational page in a hub and spoke manner. Although remember what I said about linking everything to everything. In reality there are a series of subtopics that should been designed for every category / informational area. Instead, what happened is in some cases the subtopic is integrated into the hub or category page, in other situations is hung off the page as a spoke page and in others the subtopic isn't even covered. The plan is to standardize - each category will have 'n' subtopics (~10-12, we're still working this out). From a navigational standpoint users will be able to easily navigate both across categories as well as subtopics within a category as well as between categories within adjacent/similar subtopics. This is essentially a grid if that makes sense. The question is this - we have some keywords that do well in SEO and many many more that do not and the trend has not been our friend. We're considering keeping the URLs of the pages associated with strong keywords the same within the nav structure, even though this might mean the URL for a spoke page will be inconsistent with the spoke page name from a different category. I don't see any real danger for pages that either are not associated with any ranking keywords or only very weak keywords. Maybe I'm wrong. What things should we consider in this change? We believe that this standardization should help consumers find the information they are looking for in a much more efficient manner, so page views/visit should go up. Additionally, this prepares us for category and subtopic comparison pages and other added functionality being added in a logical manner. We also think that as we add depth about a subtopic, it will be easier for us to acquire links to our site because the subtopics within a category will appeal to different websites. This is by no means a small project. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages. Do folks think this is a worthwhile endeavor? We've spent a lot of time cleaning up H1 tags, structure of our pages, anchor tags, page load order and speed, image caching, etc. Site structure, URL length and internal link structure are essentially what is left. Once these are done we intend to really get going on better and more organized content on our site. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Allstar1 -
On-page keyword usage
SEOMOZ gave me all zeros for keyword usage. Why? The site is www.grass2greens.com and the keywords are "Asheville Landscaping Edible." The site includes these words in the title page and throughout the body text. I am not really sure, but maybe one cause for these low keyword usage ratings might be redirects or some meta tag issues, but I am really not sure. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | dcaudio0 -
How is my on-site SEO looking like?
I know this is a broad question. My site's content has been written more than one year ago and haven't been changed so far. Our main goal is to make the application hosted in the site work better every day, so we don't worry much about writing content. The URL is http://www.onlinelogomaker.com
On-Page Optimization | | rpedri0 -
Does targeting more than one keyword or keyword phrase effect rankings?
Hi, We have a homepage where we are targeting three main keywords. 'Cheap books', 'buy books' and 'used books'. We are ranking well for cheap books and making progress on the more competitive buy and used. My question is how many keywords can you reasonably rank for on one page. We are targeting other keywords on other pages and having some success - but is three the maximum or is that too many?
On-Page Optimization | | Benj251 -
Keyword Cannibalization
How harmful can be a keyword cannibalization? And what is the solution to this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexsmenaru0