Grr . . . Just can't seem to get there
-
mrswitch.com.au is one site that we are consistantly struggling with . . . It has a page rank of 3 which beats most of the competitors, but when it comes to Google AU searches such as Sydney Electrician and Electrician Sydney etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep dropping.
We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis
Any ideas? - Could it be the custom CMS system?
-
Thanks for the help! - Perfect advice!
-
No probs Steve, glad I could help
-
Awesome, yeah that does help. Thanks
-
It's a micro format of HTML.
You can use it to, for want of a better word, 'tag' your address, so basically it is a way of saying to bots that hey, you know this string of characters that follows, it is an address... there is some conjecture as to its usefulness, but I believe it is best practice to use it, especially with local search focused projects.
More info here: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
And a nice tool here: http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator
I hope that helps
-
What's the score with hcards? I don't know much about it.
-
Also, when you say you backlink regularly, from where? Try to get backlinks from local sites to local pages... i.e. Sydney Electrician: get backlinks from local sydney directories, blogs & sites about Sydney, etc...
I haven't checked any of these for whether they're paid, nofollow, etc... but just as examples:
http://www.sydney-city-directory.com.au/
http://www.sydneycity.net/directory.htm
http://www.sydneybusinessdirectory.net/
http://www.expat-blog.com/en/directory/oceania/australia/sydney/
http://sydney-city.blogspot.com/
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/sydneylife/
And obviously mix that with relevant links to do with electricians... and preferably sites that are electrician and Sidney based combined if possible... easier said that done I expect.
The same for other trades and other towns.
-
I agree fully with what Ryan suggested above, if local is your target. Also consider using the hcard microformat on your address, as that can't hurt either.
-
Are you trying to get in the local listings? If that's the case just get the address on the page and start submitting through Google Local. If it's a chain submit the bulk listings and/or service areas. Pages like this: http://www.mrswitch.com.au/location are going to hurt you as the engines will see it as a keyword stuffing attempt to manipulate results around any Sydney suburb + "Electrician". I'd recommend getting rid of the location page in its current format and replace it with a few of your actual locations. Use your keywords sparingly, and use the tools Google provides, especially mapping and reviews.
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
-
Redirect 'keyword-url' to improve ranking?
I was wondering if a good url, with a keyword in it, can help you improve the position of that certain keyword by redirecting that url to your website. To make it clear: We run the website www.terello.nl, and have the possibility to let the url www.iphonereparatie.nl (translation: iphonerepair) redirect to our website. Would this help us to rank for the keyword 'iPhone reparatie'? I hope that I made myself clear this way:) Otherwise i'm more than happy to clearify myself!
Technical SEO | | Jan-Peter0 -
Can Anybody Understand This ?
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
These days I'm reading the paperwork from sergey brin and larry which is the first paper of Google.
And I dont get the Ranking part which is: "Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence. First, consider the simplest case -- a single word query. In order to rank a document with a single word query, Google looks at that document's hit list for that word. Google considers each hit to be one of several different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font, ...), each of which has its own type-weight. The type-weights make up a vector indexed by type. Google counts the number of hits of each type in the hit list. Then every count is converted into a count-weight. Count-weights increase linearly with counts at first but quickly taper off so that more than a certain count will not help. We take the dot product of the vector of count-weights with the vector of type-weights to compute an IR score for the document. Finally, the IR score is combined with PageRank to give a final rank to the document. For a multi-word search, the situation is more complicated. Now multiple hit lists must be scanned through at once so that hits occurring close together in a document are weighted higher than hits occurring far apart. The hits from the multiple hit lists are matched up so that nearby hits are matched together. For every matched set of hits, a proximity is computed. The proximity is based on how far apart the hits are in the document (or anchor) but is classified into 10 different value "bins" ranging from a phrase match to "not even close". Counts are computed not only for every type of hit but for every type and proximity. Every type and proximity pair has a type-prox-weight. The counts are converted into count-weights and we take the dot product of the count-weights and the type-prox-weights to compute an IR score. All of these numbers and matrices can all be displayed with the search results using a special debug mode. These displays have been very helpful in developing the ranking system. "0 -
How To Get Rid Of Duplicate Title Tages
Hey everyone, I have a couple of pages that have duplicate title tags, and that's because I have couple of pages that are pretty much the same. I took the lower ranking of the two pages and deleted it. Is that all I have to do? Or do I need to setup a redirect or anything else? Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Sitelinks just not showing :-(
Buonjourno from Wetherby UK 4 degrees C not snowing yet. Ok here goes... when you Google "Kingspan panels" there are no sitelinks in the SERPS ie a listing like this http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/with-sitelinks.jpg My first line of investigatrion was to look at the XML sitemap here: http://www.kingspanpanels.co.uk/CMSPages/GoogleSiteMap.aspx with a view to make sure its updated and Google Fetch it via webmaster tools. So my question is please..."What can you do to ensure sitelinks appear in the SERpS" Grazie Tanto 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Trying to get on Google page one for keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego". What can I do?
I'm trying to help a friend who is an attorney get on page one for the keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego." So far I've changed his title and description tags since they weren't optimized before. (SERP shows old title tag, however I submitted a XML sitemap through Webmaster tools to get the new title tags updated.) He also had a few duplicate pages, but I took care of that with some 301 redirects. I also added a h1 tag, alt image tag, and more content. I also spent a few hours building links for him. He currently has a page authority of 52 and domain authority of 44 with a decent amount of links pointing to his site. I'm wondering why he's stuck on page 4, when his competitors that have less impressive numbers seem to show up on page 1. I did look at his link profile using OSE and I'm worried that his old SEO guy got him spam links. His website is www.nasserilegal.com, however the page I was focusing on was www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html Any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
When I look in OpenSiteExplorer, it says that it hasn't followed any of my internal links... WTF?
When I look at my site in open site explorer, it says it has followed 1 internal link.. I know that opensiteexplorer has updated, because my domain rank has changed since the last time i looked. I figured it just hadn't fully crawled and indexed my links, but considering I have had an account here for over a month, and the site is over 7 months old, I doubt that is the case. My site is www.ontracparts.com can anybody help me here?? Thanks, Tyler
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
I have found this on a site that i have seen many times where can i get one from
Hi i have seen this great map system that i have seen on many sites which i think makes a site look great but i have tried looking for the past few weeks but cannot find where i can get one from. http://www.hypnoslimmer.co.uk/consultant.html does anyone know how these sites do it and where you can get the product from. I use joomla for all my sites Any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Getting rid of low quality
If I wanted to get rid of a batch of low quality pages from the index, Is the best practise to let them 404 and remove them from sitemap files? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterM220