Where are we going wrong?
-
I've been going over all the top ranking factors, running my site through Moz analytics and page graders, just researching the heck out of this, and I'm trying to figure out where we're going wrong.
The site is www.imageworkscreative.com - and we're being outranked by newer sites. We need to rank for terms like web design va, custom web design, web design firm, etc. We publish blog updates on average once a week, and promote those via social media and a few syndication services.
We were using a link builder who wasn't following our instructions regarding competitor backlinks ... pretty sure her work ended up hurting more than it helped.
I'd like to hire a consultant or high-quality link builder to help get things going, for us and for our clients. Any recommendations would be much appreciated, as well as any advice for us in terms of overall issues that need to be resolved.
Thanks!
-
Few things.
Reason why your title is below meta description? Seems awkward. Put keyword into H1 preferably.
Put more content onto homepage if that is the page you are trying to rank. I aim for 800+ words.
Your link profile foundation is really good. You have a very easy site to work with and can see some pretty good rankings. Main issue is you lack links with the anchor text you are trying to rank. Thats an easy fix for the most part. 51 DA? Wish my clients would have similar clean sites to work with. Would make my life sooooo much easier.
Your content looks like its farmed. Grabbing it from a content farm? Try to create higher quality content and send social signals to it. Also, its best to put blogs + excerpt + date stamp on homepage.
Lastly, you are getting 70/100 in terms of desktop page speed. Have to optimize images, minify JS/css/html. and move JS to footer. I assume your site is hosted in the US? Response time is a little slow so you might consider using a CDN.
I see that you are located in SD, I am in LA. If you want to chat, PM me.
-
Have you checked www.imageworkscreative.com on Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any important site messages?
You have a lot of links to your homepage with the exact same anchor text - I notice it's in the footers of your client's websites, which isn't a good idea when it's done to excess. 'custom web design' is one of the phrases and that's a term you mention, so it's possible you've fallen foul of the Penguin update, especially if you had a sudden drop in traffic/rankings.
I haven't used it myself, but this Google Penalty Checker has been recommended by some of my favourite SEOs who work/contribute here at Moz: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/
If you have suffered a penalty there are plenty of online guides on recovering, let me know if you need pointing in the right direction.
-
Hey Jess,
First of all, I want to say AWESOME website. It looks really great and really has inspired me to update ours to something similar. lol
A lot of websites have been hit in the recent weeks due to the Penguin 2.1 update, especially if they have hired someone in the past to just "build links" for them. Have you noticed this drop in rankings in the last couple months; or, has it just always been like this?
Ahrefs.com is good place to start when checking your links. Just from looking at some of these myself, I notice you have links from a bunch of different sites like germany.paristech.com, phillippines.paristech.com, france.paristech.com, and some other sites in foreign languages. These are examples of links that are most likely hurting you more than helping you.
I would recommend starting by doing a link assessment, removal of bad links, and submit to the Google disavow tool. Once you do that, I would begin focusing on the SEO piece more and begin to build quality links through great content and social media.
Shameless Plug: We have some packages to assist with the link cleanup and SEO. Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other questions. ben@todayslocalmedia.com
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
-
Wrong URLs indexed, Failing To Rank Anywhere
I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank. It was published in Nov/Dec last year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.) I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned. Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL! I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up…. Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do? I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Why is wrong domain being indexed?
We have 2 domains: revolve.com and fwrd.com (unrelated to each other, but hosted on the same server). If you do a site search for revolve.com but enter a designer brand that is only carried on FWRD (not on Revolve), the domain "revolve.com" pops up in the SERP, which is redirected to FWRD.com. Ex. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Awww.revolve.com isabel marant Why is Google indexing the revolve.com pages, which don't actually exist? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Any ideas, what i'm doing wrong?
Hi, I have done alot of work over the past few weeks to fix errors but I seem to be slding down the rankings again! I have attached a screenshot of the competitive link analysis. The 2nd competitor along is pushing past me and I just can't see why. What steps should I take and what is the priority? Thanks, T23 auAMrVT.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tekton230 -
Google is ranking the wrong page for the targeted keyword
I have two examples below where we want it to rank for the targeted page but google picked another page to rank instead. This is happening a lot on this site I just recently started to work on. Example 1 Googles Choice for key word Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/cl/50/Tires-and-Wheels What we want Google to choice for Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/49/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Other pages about Motorcycle tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/d/12/Motorcycle-Tires We even used the rel="canonical" for this url to point to our target page. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/50/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Example 2 ATV Tires We want this page to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/81/165/ATV-Tires however google has decided to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/43/81/165/723/ATV-Tires-All that is acutally one folder under where we want it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
What is wrong with my once highly ranked site?
Hello, I'm really desperate for some help. I believe I've been hit by Panda as traffic started diminishing late March for my 6 year old website. I've never had a sharp drop, only gradual. I've lost a load traffic since then. I did change shopping carts in June since I had a a canonical issue from my old cart that couldn't be corrected. The old cart also did not allow me to have unique product titles and the urls were garbled with letters, numbers, etc... I know Panda did not like that. I've made several changes (cleaned up broken links, added more content to my site, added Disallow: /search/ and Disallow: /search to my robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content from my search box.) My most prized keywords (tutu and tutus) are on page 15 or so of Google now, when they used to be on page 1 or 2 at the worst. Other good ones are slipping too. I do need to hire an SEO to optimize my titles eventually as I believe my they are still a bit stuffed but before I do that, I am just trying to get the other stuff done first. My main questions are this... Do any of you see something else that looks bad to you in the eyes of Google? I'd love the cold, hard truth as I'm pretty desperate for my site to recover, if at all possible. Thank you in advance! Here is my site: http://alturl.com/mvmux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tutugirl0 -
Rankings going down down down
Hi guys, I know this is a little open ended, but any advice/ideas would be greatly appreciated. I launched a new site about 3 months ago (www.transfersandshuttles.co.za). I have had unique, useful articles written for it, and the site does provide a useful service. I have done a little link building and continue to do so. The site was making decent progress moving up the rankings for a few weeks, but now it just seems to get worse and worse.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
I'm not looking for an entire site audit or strategy here, just if anything jumps out at you that seems very poor for seo, please let me know. Thanks so much,
Marc0 -
Is there something wrong with my rank?
So I have blog with 5 posts. I don't know why but 1 of my posts rank higher than my main page...and it's not even trying to rank for the keyword. I'm not saying it's a bad thing because the post has some amazon on it but my main site is supposed to rank higher. Something wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6786486312640 -
Wrong Page Indexing in SERPS - Suggestions?
Hey Moz'ers! I have a quick question. Our company (Savvy Panda) is working on ranking for the keyword: "Milwaukee SEO". On our website, we have a page for "Milwaukee SEO" in our services section that's optimized for the keyword and we've been doing link building to this. However, when you search for "Milwaukee SEO" a different page is being displayed in the SERP's. The page that's showing up in the SERP's is a category view of our blog of articles with the tag "Milwaukee SEO". **Is there a way to alert google that the page showing up in the SERP's is not the most relevant and request a new URL to be indexed for that spot? ** I saw a webinar awhile back that showed something like that using google webmaster sitelinks denote tool. I would hate to denote that URL and then loose any kind of indexing for the keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SavvyPanda
Ideas, suggestions?0