SEO Troubleshooting? Not ranking in Top 50 for "easy" keyword
-
Hi there,
First of all, thank you in advance to whoever steps in to help me with this issue!
So, I have a new site (launched December 2016) in the investing space and have been able to get page 1 rankings on some of my pages.
One of my best ranking pages is for the phrase "what is xiv". The Keyword Explorer has this phrase at a 21 difficulty. My page for this keyword is https://www.projectoption.com/what-is-xiv/. The post reached the first page almost immediately after being published, though I know I shouldn't expect this for other keywords of similar difficulty.
Here is my problem: I just wrote a comprehensive guide (8,000+ words) on a different keyword phrase: "vertical spreads." The Keyword Explorer has this phrase at a 25 difficulty. My page for this topic: https://www.projectoption.com/vertical-spreads-explained/.
However, the page is nowhere to be found in organic Google rankings (not in top 50), and the page has been live for a few weeks now.
I've done my best at optimizing the post, but something leads me to believe there are some issues that are beyond my SEO knowledge. For example, maybe the post is too long, and Google can't figure out what the page is about.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your time!
-Chris
-
David,
This seems like the most logical explanation and makes complete sense. Thank you!
I can confirm that I haven't linked to this page from my other website pages as I haven't quite figured out where the link fits best. However, I'll figure that out now and see how it goes in the next few weeks.
Thanks so much for your help, and nice last name!
-Chris
-
"create some backlinks using the keywords" sounds super dodgy!!
You shouldn't be the one creating links to your site.
You have really good content and I don't think you'll have much trouble getting links to your site with a bit of outreach and relationship building with other quality sites in your niche.
Don't ruin your awesome content by link building like it's 2010.
Cheers,
David
-
Hi Chris,
I quickly ran your site through Screaming Frog and found that this new page is not linking from your site anywhere - it's what's known as an "orphan page".
By not linking from the site, it is not receiving any "authority" from your domain and you will have a hard time getting it to rank for anything.
The first thing I would do is to make sure it's linking from your site and check how it's going in a few weeks.
Cheers,
David
-
Thanks so much for doing this.
To clarify, the keyword I'm having an issue ranking for is "vertical spread"
I used the "what is xiv" keyword to compare difficulties. The point is that I'm ranking very well for "what is xiv" but I'm not ranking at all for "vertical spread" when the difficulty is similar.
Page I'm trying to rank: https://www.projectoption.com/vertical-spreads-explained/
Targeted Keyword: Vertical Spread
-
-
Thank you for the reply.
To answer your questions:
1 & 3) Yes. The first thing I do after publishing new content is submitting the page to Google and index request.
- I have not yet received backlinks to this page. I understand that this is key to achieving the highest rankings, but it is a work in progress. Still, I would expect to at least reach the 2nd or 3rd page for this keyword without having any backlinks (since the pages/sites in those positions do not have many links and/or the content is not great).
-
By the way, you have no backlinks so, you should to start to build someones if you dont want to lose your rank
-
In fact I made an audit to your site
https://www.projectoption.com/
and guess what ?
you are in the position 03 for Google USA for the keyword "what is xiv"
you are in the position 80 for Google USA for the keyword "xiv trading strategy"
you are in the position 25 for Google USA for the keyword "how the vix works"So maybe your should check your search console and see what happen.
-
Even if you have an easy keyword that does not mean that everything is done
- did you submit your site to google?
- did you create some backlinks using the keywords ?
- did you check your search console to check if there is an error on your site?
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
-
"non-WWW" vs "WWW" in Google SERPS and Lost Back Link Connection
A Screaming Frog report indicates that Google is indexing a client's site for both: www and non-www URLs. To me this means that Google is seeing both URLs as different even though the page content is identical. The client has not set up a preferred URL in GWMTs. Google says to do a 301 redirect from the non-preferred domain to the preferred version but I believe there is a way to do this in HTTP Access and an easier solution than canonical.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en GWMTs also shows that over the past few months this client has lost more than half of their backlinks. (But there are no penalties and the client swears they haven't done anything to be blacklisted in this regard. I'm curious as to whether Google figured out that the entire site was in their index under both "www" and "non-www" and therefore discounted half of the links. Has anyone seen evidence of Google discounting links (both external and internal) due to duplicate content? Thanks for your feedback. Rosemary0 -
Ranking Drop
hey guys, I know there is always someone here asking this questions, but I have done my fair share of investigation and have not come up with a cause. my ranking dropped from page one to page 2 or 3 last sunday in time span of 4 hours. After that I read that google was updating panda with 4.1, but don't know why I got hit exactly. my competition is all clear and some have even gained rankings, and mine dropped even though my domain and page authority increased as well. any ideas would help. I already checked all the obvious ones (such as spam, links, content, etc)
Technical SEO | | s-s1 -
Do I need to verify my site on webmaster both with and without the "www." at the start?
As per title, is it necessary to verify a site on webmaster twice, with and without the "www"? I only ask as I'm about to submit a disavow request, and have just read this: NB: Make sure you verify both the http:website.com and http://www.website.com versions of your site and submit the links disavow file for each. Google has said that they view these as completely different sites so it’s important not to forget this step. (here) Is there anything in this? It strikes me as more than a bit odd that you need to submit a site twice.
Technical SEO | | mgane0 -
Good organic ranking/Poor local ranking
Hi, I am a local retailer with a physical store in a major US City. My website is very well ranked on major keywords related to my business from an organic result perspective (between 1st and 3rd spot). However, in terms of local results (google place), my website isn't even ranked (except for one specific long tail keyword). Anybody know why? Thank you so much for your help. This is driving me crazy:-)
Technical SEO | | larose370 -
Does "?" in my URL have a negative effect?
I am having a difficult time finding specific information about the effect, if any, having a ? within the URL structure. We have the descriptive keyword phrase followed by the ? location id as in this example: http://www.adventuresonly.com/adventure-locations/things-to-do-in-arizona?stateid=124 Any feedback on effect and a corrective process to improve if necessary would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RBBonds0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
URL Error "NODE"
Hey guys, So I crawled my site after fixing a few issues, but for some reason I'm getting this strange node error that goes www.url.com/node/35801 which I haven't seen before. It appears to originate from user submitted content and when I go to the page it's a YouTube video with no video playing just a black blank screen. Has anyone had this issue before. I think it can probably just be taken off the site, but if it's a programming error of some sort I'd just like to know what it is to avoid it in the future. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Is SEO moz ranking tool reliable?
Good afternoon from 21 degrees C hot and sunny wetherby UK with the aroma of wetherby whalers fish and chips wafting through the office window... I'm begiining to question the vailidity of SEO moz ranking tool. Specifically for this site www.davidclick.com it ranks the site zero for term "York wedding photographer" Here is the evidence: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/ranking-25-may-12copy.jpg I question it after checking this term on PC and networks ive never used before and i get the term ranking at 5th. Can anyone verify what SERP www.davicdclick.com ranks for "York wedding photographer" and indeed why SEO Moz ranking tool is scrorring in zero. Thanks in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0