Local Site stuck on page 2 for years. Can’t penetrate page 1! Help!

Seanthewood123 · Feb 8, 2020, 11:40 PM

Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette.

I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/

If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1.

When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening.

We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results.

To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page.

Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!

seogamess01 · Feb 12, 2020, 7:30 PM

I'd say for most of my clients without looking is the sites coming in lack huge amounts of relevance...

If you do a search you may not have the keywords you're going after inside the URL, Title, URL-Slug, Headers etc... but honestly the first 3 are where it's at, you can screw up your anchor text with nothing but generics and do well. I would of course hit around your main keywords if you've not done that.

Also double check to see if your links are even indexed.

BlueprintMarketing · Feb 12, 2020, 2:27 AM

Hi Sean,

i’m glad I could be of help. Let me know if I can do anything else to be of help you can get a hold of me right here they got rid of PMs unfortunately so we have to use email or phone my info is in here.
https://moz.com/users/view/383525

Sincerely,

Tom

Seanthewood123 · Feb 12, 2020, 2:23 AM

Boyd

This is super helpful I really appreciate it. I’m going to do some testing with the items you mentioned and will let you know what happens. Thanks again and marking this as a good answer!

Seanthewood123 · Feb 12, 2020, 2:21 AM

Thomas

Thank you so much for this help! I really appreciate this info. I am new to the forums but will be trying to pm you to discuss some possible additional help. Please feel free to message me as well. Thanks!

Sean

BlueprintMarketing · Feb 10, 2020, 8:27 PM

Boyd Norwood

Brings up some excellent points as well.

you also need to remove the no follow on your internal URLs that should be followed like the contact us page

Each page that has the "nofollow" crossed out like this nofollow please remove it from your site

| https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/contact-us/ | nofollow |

if you do not want a page to be indexed use no-indexed don't use no-follow there are too many valuable pages being blocked from Google and no follows also prevents Google from crawling your site properly if implemented on internal pages everywhere.

hope this helps,

Tom

BlueprintMarketing · Feb 12, 2020, 2:21 AM

HI

I am normally in Winter Park FL however I am testing this from New Hampshire right now so please excuse that

https://www.marseelaw.com/ ranks number one because of their content and site speed in addition to having a cleaner backlink profile.

Your website

https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/

"Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1."

"When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening.

We have, however, been featured quite often in the three-pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results."

When you say you should be on page 1

For the regular SERPS, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news but your domain authority is 27 unfortunately many of the other companies that are ranking have much higher.

Your backlink profile shows that you have far more links than you have root domains which is normal but in your case you have way too many links from the same domains which do not count as they would if they were coming from a fresh domain.

https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/Backlinks 19KRef Domains 331 The person that's showing up number one in the regular SERPs is not doing as well in terms of quantity of links but the quality they're doing much higherhttps://www.marseelaw.com/Backlinks 6KRef Domains 284 most importantly they have anchor text for the keyword that you want to rank for from 17 domains

| "orlando divorce attorney" | 6 | 17 |

Content

Your content for your website has not been optimized even in the most basic terms. For the keywords, you're going after I am familiar with your area you know what Winter Park is We are 10 minutes away from you. I know Orlando and you're not using the words Orlando divorce attorney enough in your content or in your title tags.

You're going to have to really invest in re-coding your website so that you do not have so many errors increasing your site speed through higher-quality hosting as well as doing some development work on fixing your site. And a serious search engine optimization campaign that focuses on content and creating something that is unlike anything else.

** Your competition**

Page Url

<label id="url">https://www.marseelaw.com/</label>

Title

<label id="title">Orlando Divorce Attorney [Length:24]</label>

Meta Description

<label id="summary">Orlando divorce attorney, Steve W. Marsee, assists clients throughout Central Florida with sensitive and often complex marital and family law matters. [Length:150]</label>

Meta Keywords

<label id="keywords">Orlando Divorce Attorney</label>

Canonical

https://www.marseelaw.com/

Meta Robots

None

Images

Images on Page: 10
Images Without Alt Text: 0

Headings

| | H1 |
| 1 | Orlando Divorce Attorney |

| | H2 |
| 1 | Experienced Family Attorney – Steve W. Marsee |
| 2 | Our Orlando Family Law Firm Knows the Legal Processes |
| 3 | Our Orlando Divorce & Family Law Attorneys Can Help |
| 4 | Contact a skilled Orlando divorce attorney |

| | H3 |
| 0 | None |

Facebook Tags - OpenGraph

Test on Open Graph Object Debugger

**vs **Your site

Page Url

<label id="url">https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/</label>

Title

<label id="title">Orlando Divorce Attorney | Distinguished Family Law Attorney [Length:60]</label>

Meta Description

<label id="summary">Divorce is a painful experience but we can help. Orlando divorce attorney providing award-winning experience, strategy, and value since 2011 [Length:140]</label>

Meta Keywords

Canonical

https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/

Meta Robots

None

Images

Images on Page: 9
Images Without Alt Text: 0

Headings

| | H1 |
| 1 | Orlando Divorce Attorney |

| | H2 |
| 1 | Watch These Orlando Divorce Attorney Videos To Help Your Situation |
| 2 | Orlando Family Law Attorney Here For You |
| 3 | What If I Do Not Want To Fight And Only Want An Orlando Divorce Attorney To File An Uncontested Divorce For Me? |
| 4 | Experienced Family Law And Divorce Attorney – Sean Smallwood |
| 5 | Sean Smallwood, Esquire |
| 6 | Our Video Gallery |

| | H3 |
| 1 | Divorce |
| 2 | Family Law |

Facebook Tags - OpenGraph

Test on Open Graph Object Debugger

** Your opponent is beatable. The real difference is usability and site speed as well as content, to be honest.**

Site speed I strongly recommend using tools like https://newrelic.com/ to monitor site speed however I have checked your site speed for sure competitor that's number one using a number of other tools below. Dare boost is particularly interesting

** your competitor**

Your site

https://tools.pingdom.com/#5c0c3924fcc00000
https://www.dareboost.com/en/report/a_15e41c3c690b99846683f2b7e?reportIds=a_15e41c3c690b99846683f2b7e
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200210_T1_0350b8d949e88de49855f6882e5cc67a/
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/2HBKpqc7
https://requestmap.herokuapp.com/render/200210_T1_0350b8d949e88de49855f6882e5cc67a/
https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com/results/200210_G6_d854632d2de2fb89d099b099f7d19f3a ( images your web P images should be much smaller than alternative JPEG's and PNG's but in your case, they're not)
Tools like https://www.stackpath.com/ or https://www.fastly.com/ or https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/business/ come with the hosting companies I recommended you can also add them to your existing system. However, companies like servebolt come with CloudFlare enterprise or business Pantheon comes with Fastly, Pagely comes with CloudFront it's important to have an optimized content delivery network on your website a base version of Cloudflare does not cut it. you can add any of the tools above to your existing liquid Web hosting however I recommend something better like I have listed below.

you recently switched to Liquid Web, is not a bad web host but if you're looking to have a very fast word press site you can do much better.

https://builtwith.com/detailed/affordablefamilylawyer.com
https://securitytrails.com/domain/affordablefamilylawyer.com/dns
If you want to have the extremely's fast website hosting and security are extremely important with WordPress I recommend the companies below not because I'm getting paid to or anything like that but because I know each one of them is spectacular what they do
https://servebolt.com/
https://pagely.com/
https://pantheon.io/
https://pressidium.com/
https://kinsta.com/
https://imgur.com/VYQLtn4.png ( you can see a comparison of liquid Web verse some of the sites above Kinsta has gotten much faster since this)
https://imgur.com/dZzZt3F.png
https://imgur.com/Wa6Q2rW.png

** Your opponent is beatable. The real difference is usability and site speed as well as content, to be honest.**

Please let me know if I can be of any more help I know I just gave you a lot of data and if you want me to break down a little bit more of what I'm trying to say I'm happy to do so.

your competitor's site architecture is friendlier than yours as well

Sincerely,

Tom

dZzZt3F.png Wa6Q2rW.png VYQLtn4.png eM4cQr2.png E12B8bu.png

Nozzle · Feb 12, 2020, 2:23 AM

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.

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