Single keyword not ranking in US only
-
I recently took on a client who had a 6 month old site, and had not done any seo or link building. All links so far have been natural, I can't see anything dodgy that would cause a problem.
It's fairly niche so just sorting out the page titles and a bit of on site stuff got them ranking on page 1 & 2 in the UK and US for most of their keywords.
However their main keyword which is just the name of the product (lets say xxx and xxxs ) does not appear anywhere in the US search, despite ranking #10 in the UK and all related terms ('what is xxx', 'how to use xxx', 'benfits of xxx' etc) having similar rank on both.
They didn't have any analytics installed before I took over so I can't see any historical changes in traffic from different keywords.
Any ideas why one single keyword would not show up at all just on Google US when everything else is ok?
-
There are a lot of ranking factors that influence the ranking for a certain keyword, right ? Given that thought, there has to be something beyond the Page Title / Meta data. Think about some of these things:
- Extermal In-bound links
- Internal Links
- Size of the site / Number of pages within your website
- Nature of content
- Images, Image filenames, Alt Tags etc
- Any social media related to that keyword ?
It's absolutely possible for a website to rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords but that does not mean if they are targeting another keyword, they optimize it, create a page and rank for it ?
Think about it, if Amazon.com wanted to rank for Car Insurance (Extreme examples, super competitive keyword and an equally strong domain). The site may have lots and lots of pages somehow related to Car Insurance (Books, DVDs etc) with Page Titles, On-page content and so on, but they still probably would not rank higher then the competition even though the competition may not have anywhere close to the link profile as Amazon.com
Does that make sense ?
In my opinion, it's a combination of content and internal/external links.
Maybe I am wrong and it's something else. Did you actually get any penalty ? Are/were any of your other keywords affected ? Keep in mind, your site is 6 months old. So it does not really have the age aspect as well as domain authority.
-
I should have clarified that link metric wise there is no reason why it wouldn't rank as well as all the other keywords. 2nd results page on google and onwards has many results with very very few links and very poor titles, yet our page doesnt even seem to be in the first 20 results pages at all.
So it seems like a penalty, but why with only natural links, and why on google US only or one keyword only?
-
Clearly, it sounds like there isn't enough domain authority / page authority or off-age that is needed to rank competitively for that term. The other terms that you are ranking for in the US and UK, might not have enough competition that you were able to trickle through the SERPS and get higher positions.
I would look at the link profiles of some of your top ranking competitors and see what they are doing in terms of links and help / suggest / propose to build some natural / authority links.
That off-page is going to help the entire site BTW.
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
-
Targeting/Optimising for US English in addition to British English (hreflang tags)
Hi, I wonder if anyone can help? We have an e-commerce website based in the UK. We sell to customers worldwide. After the UK, the US is our second biggest market. We are English language only (written in British English), we do not have any geo-targeted language versions of our website. However, we are successful in selling to customers around the world on a regular basis. We have developers working on a new site due to launch in Winter 2021. This will include a properly managed site migration from our .net to a .com domain and associated redirects etc. Management are keen to increase sales / conversions to the US before the new site launches. They have requested that we create a US optimised version of the site. Maintaining broadly the same content, but dynamically replacing keywords: Example (clothing is not really what we sell): Replacing references to “trainers” with “sneakers”
International SEO | | IronBeetle
Replacing references ‘jumpers with “sweaters”
Replacing UK phone number with a US phone number It seems the wrong time to implement a major overhaul of URL structure, considering the planned migration from .net to .com in the not too distant future. For example I’m not keen to move British English content on to https://www.example.com/en-gb Would this be a viable solution: 1. hreflang non-us visitors directed to the existing URL structure (including en-gb customers): https://www.example.com/
2. hreflang US Language version of the site: https://www.example.com/en-us/ As the UK is our biggest market It is really important that we don’t negatively affect sales. We have extremely good visibility in SERPS for a wide range of high value/well converting keywords. In terms of hreflang tags would something like this work? Do we need need to make reference to en-gb being on https://www.example.com/ ? This seems a bit of a ‘half-way-house’. I recognise that there are also issues around the URL structure, which is optimised for British English/international English keywords rather than US English e.g. https://www.example.com/clothing/trainers Vs. https://example.com/clothing/sneakers Any advice / insight / guidance would be welcome. Thanks.0 -
How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?
We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate? How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?
International SEO | | Substance-create0 -
International SEO - UK & US
Hi! I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution. My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this: www.example.co.uk/us In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited! Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue. Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks, Harrison
International SEO | | harrycox0 -
US site vs New Canadian site for Brand
Hi Everyone, My company decided to create a Canadian site for Canadian customers. How do I slowly transition the US site for ranking in Google.ca? I was thinking of using robots.txt to block Google.Ca from crawling the US site? Can anyone provide some advice oh how this should be managed? Thank you!
International SEO | | JMSCC0 -
Why Google is not indexing each country/language subfolder on the ranks?
Hi folks, We use Magento 2 for the multi-country shops (its a multistore). The URL: www.avarcas.com The first days Google indexed the proper url in each country: avarcas.com/uk avarcas.com/de ... Some days later, all the countries are just indexing / (the root). I correctly set the subfolders in Webmaster tools. What's happening? Thanks
International SEO | | administratorwibee0 -
Huge increase in US direct visits to a UK site, why?
Hi all, My UK website usually gets around 10,000 direct (Direct in Analytics) visits per month however for August this has shot up to 24,000! However the majority of these direct visits seem to be coming from the US and as a result the bounce rate is through the roof, 84%! Why would my UK based site suddenly be receiving huge amounts of US visits? Any ideas?
International SEO | | MarkHincks0 -
CDN and the Google ranking?
Does anyone have any experience on the change in the rankings (positive or negative) after a site implemented a content delivery network (CDN) like Akamai or Level 3?
International SEO | | IvanIrishRecruiter1 -
Moving British site to the US... who will have .com? US or UK?
We are the UK's first baby social commerce site launched in Nov 2011. We're doing quite well and are looking at expanding to the US. However I'm not sure what advice you'd give me in terms of internationalising the site. I see three options on how to deal with the URL structure? Make US site as .com as it will be my main source of revenue for the long run and redirect all British traffic to .co.uk Have .com for both UK and US but have the URL as either: us.babyhuddle.com or as babyhuddle.com/us/. Same thing for the UK Another option? Would love to hear the feedback from you guys. Thanks, Walid
International SEO | | walidalsaqqaf0