Google ranking for the term "locum tenens"
-
Hello-
My company is having a very difficult time performing well for the term "locum tenens". This term literally defines our industry and target market (temporary physician staffing, essentially) and is by far the most searched term in our industry (30k / month, give or take). For us, “locum tenens” is like “ice cream” is to Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, there are other keywords we're concerned with, but this is by far the most important single term.
We've moved up to page 3 a few times since launching our redesigned site in April, but seem to continuously settle on page 5 (we've been on page 5 for many weeks now).
While I didn’t expect us to be on page 1 at this point, I having a hard time understanding why we’re not on at least 2 or 3, in light of the sites ahead of us. We have a ton of decent, optimized content and we’ve tried not to be too spammy (every page does have locum tenens on it many times, but it describes our service – it’s hard not to use it many times).
We are working on developing backlinks and are avoiding any spammy backlink schemes (I get calls every day from companies saying they can give me 400 backlinks a month, which I have a hard time believing is a good long term strategy). It just sort of seems like our site is cursed for some reason that I can't understand.
We are working with a competent SEO firm, and still have not made much progress for this term. So, I’m hoping maybe the community here might have some helpful advice.
Our site is www.bartonassociates.com.
Any insight you guys may have would be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks in advance and have a great day.
Jason
-
Thanks for all of the advice everyone - very helpful, really appreciate it. We're looking into this stuff now.
Jason
-
I totally agree with you on that, sorry my terminology was incorrect. Long few days
-
Well that would be keyword stuffing.
When writing about some subjects normaly, you get a very hign ratio (not 80%).
Keyword stuffing is another thing, if you had a title tag "viagra viagra viagra" that would be keyword stuffing. its un-natrual.
if you have un-natrual text, you would be more then likely violating other more complex rules. but if thee a high density comes from natruall writting you will be fine.
This is probably the best study on it, a bit heavy
http://www.miislita.com/fractals/keyword-density-optimization.html -
Hi Alan, thanks for the feedback and much respected
What would you say to a client who has a keyword density of 80%?
Look forward to your thoughts.
-
I have too disagree with one point, keyword density. Its a myth
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development -
Your site has a lot of technical issues,
You have 553 un-necessary redirects, each one leaks page rank. I had a look at a sample of them and they are all a case of your links pointing to aUrl and being 301 redirect to aUrl/ , not the trailing slash, you need to link directly to aUrl/
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-unnecessary-redirects
You have 208 broken links, they seem like the mostly image links, SE see these as a violation
You have many descriptions missing 138
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-description-is-missing
You have canonical issues leading to a split in page rank
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats
You have some irrelevant link text, again leaking link juice though relevancy
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-link-text-is-not-relevant
You have large amounts of script in your pages
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-a-large-amount-of-script-code
there are more issues also.If a fisherman has holes in his net, he has to do a lot more fishing than a man that does not.
If you have violations in your site, you need a lot more links that some one who does notSEO is not all marketing, your site needs to be crawl frendly.
sorry for being so blunt, but there you are.
-
Hi there Jason
Look at building those back links. This is an important aspect and you can find loads of articles and posts in the SEOMOZ Blog to verify this and where you should start.
I had a look at your website and these are my thoughts:
- No Website Name in Website Title(Home Page). Your keywords are your title. I would look at adding the company name to the title of website(Meta Title). having keywords in my opinion is a bit spammy and not ranking potentially for branded terms like your business name is a major downfall.
- I would also suggest adding those keywords in a well written meta description. i see that this is missing and a downfall for you.
- Check your keyword density for those terms. Dont go over 6% on one given page.
- You seem to optimizing all the pages for those terms. So how would the search engines know which page is the right page? Dont duplicate or make pages / titles seem the same.
Hope that this helps.
-
According to the mozBar you only have backlinks from 29 different domains. Perhaps adding more domains to your backlink profile would help? It looks like everyone on page one either has many more links than you, or more domains linking to them. Once you match them I would imagine you would see improvement in your rank.
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
-
Will two navigation components (one removed by Javascript) impact Google rankings?
We are trying to eliminate tedium when developing complexly designed responsive navigations for mobile, desktop and tablet. The changes between breakpoints in our designs are too complex to be handled with css, so we are literally grabbing individual elements with javascript and moving them around. What we'd like to do instead is have two different navigations on the page, and toggle which one is on the DOM based on breakpoint. These navigations will have the same links but different markup. Will having two navigation components on the page at page load negatively impact our Google SEO rankings or potential to rank, even if we are removing one or the other from the DOM with JavaScript?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Google displaying a content box above the listing link for top ranking listing in SERPs
Hi, In the attached Google SERP example the first listing below the paid search ads has a large box with a snippet of content from the relevant page then followed by the standard link. Does anyone know how you get Google to display a box like this in their SERPs? I checked the code on the page and there doesn't appear to be anything special about it such as any schema markup. It uses standard list code. Does this only appear for particular types of content or sites, such as medical content in this case? Is the content more likely to appear for lists? Does it only appear for high authority sites that Google has selected? We have a similar medical information based site and it would be great to try to get Google to display a similar box of content for some of our pages. Thanks. Damien ZmPJVSl.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | james.harris0 -
Use "If-Modified-Since HTTP header"
I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index. It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
When you add 10.000 pages that have no real intention to rank in the SERP, should you: "follow,noindex" or disallow the whole directory through robots? What is your opinion?
I just want a second opinion 🙂 The customer don't want to loose any internal linkvalue by vaporizing link value though a big amount of internal links. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
SEO considerations around an "Ad Wall"
I'm not sure what the correct terminology would be for this but I'm calling it an ad wall. Essentially an ad overlay when someone enters a website. I see this most commonly on certain news websites. For example when you click on a link to an article on ign or forbes.com you get an ad that you have to close or skip to read the article. What are the SEO considerations if implementing something like this? I'm wondering if there are any similar to a pay wall in the sense that you want to let crawlers in to see your content and rank it but users get an ad or redirected to an ad and then back to the article page. This link currently does it for me for example http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2012/05/22/spacex-launches-with-15-dreams-onboard/ I set my user agent to google bot and go right through to the article but if it is set to the browser default I get to an ad page I have to skip first. Is this the infamous "white hat cloaking"? Are the other ways to implement the same idea (a modal window that opens via javascript for example) that are more or less risky? I'm mainly interested in doing this based on referrer: people who type a URL directly don't see it but clicking on a link they do see it, for example.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
How are pages ranked when using Google's "site:" operator?
Hi, If you perform a Google search like site:seomoz.org, how are the pages displayed sorted/ranked? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0