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
-
SEO URLs: 1\. URLs in my language (Greek, Greeklish or English)? 2\. Αt the end it is good to put -> .html? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I must put URLs in my language Greek, Greeklish or in English? And at the end of url it is good to put -> .html? For exampe www.test.com/test/test-test.html ? What is the best way to get great ranking? I am a new digital marketing manager and its my first time who works with a programmer who doesn't know. I need to know as soon as possible, because they want to be "on air" tomorrow! Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Marios
Technical SEO | | marioskal0 -
Where did the "Location" go, on Google SERP?
In order to emulate different locations, I've always done a Google query, then used the "Location" button under "Search Tools" at the top of the SERP to define my preferred location. It seems to have disappeared in the past few days? Anyone know where it went, or if it's gone forever? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | measurableROI0 -
My PR1 website with no manual action is not appearing in the google top 200 result, it used to be top 1
Hi All, My website has 5 years of history, it used to be top 3 for its keyword with an SEO firm I hired back then with PR3. After 2013, its ranking starts dropping to not appearing at all in the google search result. But my site is not banned. There are still some long tail google traffic. There is no manual action in the webmaster tool. Even today, it still has PR1 but it is still not appearing in the top 200 results of google. My onsite optimization for the main keyword is good. It's just not appearing in google results at all. I manually reviewed all the top 200 results, there are so many spammy blogs were listed but not my legit website homepage with unique content. I do regret hiring that SEO firm now. But there is no manual action to my site according to google so I don't know if I should disavow all the old backlinks. I started to do some quality SEO works myself now. My ranking is now at around 11~15 in Yahoo/Bing from 30~40. Do I see some light at the end of the tunnel? Does that mean my site may appear in google again? Thank you all for the reply.
Technical SEO | | ChelseaP0 -
My sites "pages indexed by Google" have gone up more than qten-fold.
Prior to doing a little work cleaning up broken links and keyword stuffing Google only indexed 23/333 pages. I realize it may not be because of the work but now we have around 300/333. My question is is this a big deal? cheers,
Technical SEO | | Billboard20120 -
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 -
I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?
hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page. Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content. this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following: "Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools." here is an example of the links: | | http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly | | so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this? Thanks again! Salo
Technical SEO | | Salocharly0 -
Can Search Engines Read "incorrect" urls?
I know that ideally a url should be something of the nature domain.com/topic, but if the url contains additional characters, for example, domain.com/topic?keyword, can the search engines still understand the complete words in the domain? Even though there are additional "incorrect" characters? Or do they stop "reading" once they find odd characters? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why is this url showing as "not crawled" on opensiteexplorer, but still showing up in Google's index?
The below url is showing up as "not crawled" on opensitexplorer.com, but when you google the title tag "Joel Roberts, Our Family Doctors - Doctor in Clearwater, FL" it is showing up in the Google index. Can you explain why this is happening? Thank you http://doctor.webmd.com/physician_finder/profile.aspx?sponsor=core&pid=14ef09dd-e216-4369-99d3-460aa3c4f1ce
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0