No Google Ranking..yet
-
I have een working on my site for soem time. Trying to take the right steps to achieve good ranking in the long run and present the information we need to showcase to prospective clients. After several months I still see no ranking at all and I'm wondering if its becasue the front page is using a design similar to a one page website design?
If anyone can provide some insight I would appreciate it. Even the smallest nudge i nthe right direction.
We are also developing some new content for a blog and expanded written content for our services page.
-
These are all great tips. At this early point in the game, your focus on old-school networking and on-page optimization will have a disproportionate impact.
I would add that your site looks like so many other design portfolio sites in that:
- "Request a Proposal" is a high-commitment call-to-action
- For people who aren't ready for a proposal, there's no clear funnel for leads to move down
- Other than UTAH, there's nothing that identifies your ideal audience
You need to look at your design company as if it were a product. How would you package that product? What are the buying stages? How do you move people down the funnel?
Most design firms have the same issue. They put their portfolio online and expect that to make them stand out. But your really could benefit from product-izing your business.
I think some flagship content could really help with this. The idea is to create a single piece of content - video, info-graphic, long-form blog post, etc. - that is relatively hard to duplicate by competition. Something really useful or informative. Make it free, then focus marketing and link building efforts around it. Bruce Clay, Inc. did this a number of years ago with their SEO Code of Ethics. Moz does it with their Beginner's Guide to SEO. Search Engine Land does it with their Periodic Table of SEO.
You want to gather leads higher up in the funnel and build links along the way.
With well-developed, useful, and focused content like this, it will be more likely for folks to share your site on social media and easier to establish yourself as an authority in something. That will result in easier link building.
If you do it right, it'll also entice qualified prospects. For example, you could create a blog post+video/infographic about 10 Ways Small Businesses in Utah Can Stand Out Online. With a title like that, you will have identified your audience - small businesses in Utah - and their pain - how to stand out online.
You would then have a pretty good hunch that folks downloading that offer are your audience.
I know none of this is technical SEO help for you. But content has the biggest impact on SEO ... plus, I've seen great content beat technical SEO before.
-
Be sure to check in Webmaster Tools to make sure you don't have a manual penalty. I was doing a test on a temporary site to try and spot when Penguin did a data update, and I just copied text from other places to make "filler" content, and I got a manual penalty in just a couple of days because of that :-). So it doesn't have to be links that get you in trouble.
-
Hi Brett!
It's good to hear you're working on more content for the site, including a blog, The main thing that's hitting me about the site, is that while it's visually very nice, the content is duplicated between the home page and the various internal pages. I would recommend that you create different content for each page - it will be more interesting to visit your site and will be a show of greater effort and care on the company's part. There's excellent room for improvement here.
In addition to this, due to the competitive nature of your industry, Local SEO must be considered - but only if you you make in-person contact with your clients. If you do, then seeking rankings for your city rather than your state or nationally will be one way to start trying to break into somewhat less dense local results vs organic results. Here's a good place to start reading about the basics of Local SEO: https://moz.com/learn/local.
But if you don't make in-person contact with your clients, then local is not the right match for you and this means sticking with pursuing organic visibility, in which case it's likely to take months or years to dislodge well-established competitors in this highly competitive market both on a state and national level. You may need to investigate investing in PPC while you are working on other efforts like content development, link earning, social outreach, video marketing, etc.
Competitive analysis will be really helpful at this stage, helping you assess the strengths of competitors to see if you can match and surpass their efforts over time.
Lots of work ahead - wishing your company luck at this exciting time!
-
Hi Brett,
No, I think that's absolutely the way to go. It's difficult for me to propose you qualitative sources/links as I'm based in Belgium. Someone else will be in a better position to answer this question but I would search for:
- communities
- idea/discussion websites
- partners
- ...
I would focus on local sources.
I think the content on the blog will help you. Try to share it on social media for example. At the moment getting links will be difficult because there is no reason yet for people to link to your website (content).
-
We are looking more at local rankings than national. Thus the over use of the work Utah as the keywords we wish to rank in are things like utah web design, utah website design, utah joomla, salt lake web design etc.
Is that too focused/ narrow?
We are adding content to the services page.
What are qualitative sources / links? Can you give me an example even if its in another business area?
-
Thanks for the prompt response(s).
We do accept work outside of utah but I (our dedicated SEO partner is in Europe and unplugged for the next two months) am trying to focus our effort on the local market. My knowledge and experience are largely in design and Joomla/ Wordpress so I am flying a little blind here. Overwhelmed and trying to wear too many hats at the moment.
I'll have to dig even deeper apparently at local SEO, certifications and domain authority.
Thanks for the insights and feedback
-
You are certainly active in a competitive market. Getting a decent ranking on these kind of keywords is difficult. Execute a keyword research and research the difficulty to rank on them. The keyword difficulty tool is very interesting.
On the other hand there are a few things where you should work on:
- provide more useful content where other influencers can link too. I'm referring to your services and portfolio. The blog you are working on is also a step in the right direction. It might be interesting to have separate pages about the different services with loads of useful information. Also try to link out to other qualitative sources (helping your visitors).
- work on a steady and qualitative link profile. You only have 1 root domain linking to you at the moment. You should try to increase your overall domain authority. There are many articles on the Moz blog talking about this.
Just my cup of tea
Sander -
Hi there
I would focus on your on-site SEO, primarily around your title tags and overoptimization of those, especially with the word "Utah" - it doesn't need to be in almost every title tag and everywhere onsite. I'd imagine you take work from outside of Utah, right?
Beyond that, I would look into your local SEO and citation building to see if there are any opportunities there. Are there any web development directories or relevant certifications you know of that you guys can apply for? BBB?
Also, if you're going to be doing footer links (which that appears to be all you have in your backlink profile), make sure those are branded - not exact match. Those are there to reference your work, not for SEO.
This is a matter of building your Domain Authority, so focus on providing value based on intent and user experience that can result in mentions or relevant linking opportunities. There's not a lot of content on the site really; there's a huge opportunity for you!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Fetch as Google
I have odd scenario I don't know if anyone can help? I've done some serious speed optimisation on a website, amongst other things CDN and caching. However when I do a Search Console Fetch As Google It is still showing 1.7 seconds download time even though the cached content seems to be delivered in less than 200 ms. The site is using SSL which obviously creams off a bit of speed, but I still don't understand the huge discrepancy. Could it be that Google somehow is forcing the server to deliver fresh content despite settings to deliver cache? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Ranking Suggestions
Hi There, I am currently working on this site: completesteamclean.ca to rank as high as possible for "carpet cleaning windsor" on Google.ca and I can't seem to make any head way against the other websites ranking. I've optimized the page, created social media accounts for activity, even invested in Google Adwords and Facebook ads to try to boost my presence. Does anyone have any suggestions on any tactics/revisions I can make that may help boost my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Google not taking Meta...
Hello all, So I understand that Google may sometimes take content from the page as a snippet to display on SERPs rather than the meta description, but my problem goes a little beyond that. I have a section on my site which updates everyday so a lot of the content is dynamics (products for a shop, every morning unique stock is added or removed), and despite having a meta description, title and receiving an 'A' grade in the MOZ on page grader, these pages never show up in Google. After a little research I did a 'site:www.mysite.com/productpage' in Google and this indeed listed all my products, but interestingly for every single one Google had taken the copyright notice at the bottom of the page as the snippet instead of the meta or any H1, H2 or P text on the page... Does anyone have any idea why Google is doing this? It would explain a lot to me in terms of overall traffic, I'm just out of ideas... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
Dramatic Ranking Changes
Hi, My website is ranked on the 2nd page of Google for the /ncr. Last week suddenly it climbed up to the first page and I let my boss know about it with a quite enthusiasm and happiness 🙂 Then my boss didn't look at it on that day and next day our site was on the second page again and still is. Now I kind of lost reputation in the office, and people start questioning my comments. It wasn't a delusion but I would like to know what it was. No one does any SEO for this 10 years old site, and I've just started an SEO campaign about 1,5 months ago. And I really thought this is it, we are on the first page. But now we are back in to the 2nd page. Is waiting for couple days or weeks to Google to settle right approach for such cases? Or it was just a random bounce or coincidence? Never seen such thing, so I'm quite curious about your opinions or experience if you have.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nunobaronio0 -
Author rank
Can anyone tellme how to know my author rank. Is better to gain authority on my author rank +dariopropdental And if it is better to gain authority as author or as page +propdental And if a do a new post on my web every day should i place every link to the post on my profile and my page. Doenst it look spammy. Should all post have a link from my profile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
What time to expect until onpage change is reflected in google ranking?
Most pages on our site are crawled by google about once per week. We plan to implement a new navigation structure with much more interlinks among our pages. I would like to test it first just for a few pages to measure impact. How long may it take approximately until an onpage change related to link structure is reflected in google rankings? Any experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Single, high ranking pank disappears from Google?
Hi all, The question I have concerns a high ranking page on my site that has disappeared from Google. It was in the top 5 for the target keyword and it currently ranks 3 on Bing. I recently migrated my domain (one month ago), but it seems to have gone very well. No other pages have taken a hit like this. The 301 redirect is in place and working well. I've used the Moz Tools to see if anything is weird, but it all looks fine. Oh, and yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools - no messages and other related pages on my site are ranking on the second and third pages for the terms. Also, the site is consulting services - nothing dodgy. Any ideas? Why just this one page? What are my options? Thanks for any advice you may have. John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendlymachine0