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
-
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?
About a year (or 2) ago, Matt Cutts said that Twitter and FB have no effect on website rank, in part because Google can't get to the content. Now that Google will be indexing Twitter (again), do we expect that links in twitter posts will be useful backlinks for improving SERP rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thriveworks-Counseling1 -
Does having all client websites on same server/same Google Analytics red flag Google?
If you have several clients, and they are all on the same server, and also under ONE Google Analytics account, will that negatively impact with Google? They all have different content and addresses, some have the same template, but with different images.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck1 -
Google local pointing to Google plus page not homepage
Today my clients homepage dropped off the search results page (was #1 for months, in the top for years). I noticed in the places account everything is suddenly pointing at the Google plus page? The interior pages are still ranking. Any insight would be very helpful! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevenob0 -
Loosing Ranking
Hi, I'm working on a real estate website last 2 years. I've get top position on local and organic search result. But last 2 month I'm loosing ranking on some keywords on both local and organic search. I'm doing boomarking, guest posting related to real estate and social media promotion but getting no result that's way I'm looking seo person for my website. Thanks and waiting for your feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Dropped Out of Google and Bing
I am helping with a site that at one time I had on page 1 for Google/Bing. Site started to slip in rankings, then someone else did a makeover of the store and botched things by renaming pages, having errors in pages (multiple head/body), mismatch page names from sitemap, etc. Site slipped to page 4/5. I righted things, fixed duplication using canonicalization, made some other changes. Now site is gone completely from Google/Bing for desired keyword. No penalties. Site still shows if do search on domain name. Site is www.plussizeplum.com (plus size lingerie, sorry), keyword target is plus size lingerie. Anyone have any clues, tips, etc on why we fell off the face of the earth? Page Authority/Domain Authority are both comparable to most of the page 1/2 sites for same thing. Thanks for any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlcohen0 -
Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail. Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one. Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more. I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website? Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites? Do a combination of both? I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts. Any thoughts would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FidelityOne0 -
Site: on Google
Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0