Rankings question
-
We have just taken on a client who is really struggling in the rankings, even for noncompetitive terms.
Here is the URL: www.freshsmiles.co.uk
they are targeting 'dentist york, dental implants york, teeth whitening york, orthdontist york'
The content on the site seems very good (we have been working on ensuring that the content is duplicated and of good quality) They have also been doing blogs http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/blog/
We've installed webmaster tools and there are no manual spam action warnings and I have checked the inbound links to the website and they don't seem spammy.
Any help would be much appreciated!
thanks in advance
Marcus
-
Hi Marcus
I'm going to just go through a bunch of items in no particular order;
- Internal links in footer - the anchor "private dental practice in york" linking to the homepage is a little over-optimized. As is linking to the marketing and web design companies with exact commercial anchors.
- The actual brand name is a little unclear. Is it "fresh Smiles" or "FreshSmile" or "fresh dental" or "fresh dental smile clinic"? It's super important to have this clear to make a strong brand presence. "Fresh dental smile" and "fresh smiles" don't return a normal "branded" search result with 8 or 10 sitelinks. See this screenshot for an example. This has to be 100% clear on-site and off-site, especially in local listings.
- The homepage title tag for example is a bit overdone. It should be the main keyword / service and the brand name. Also, "cosmetic dentist" appears in almost every page title tag. You want to avoid repetition, have the titles describe the page well, while fitting in the main keyword for that page. Follow Google's guidelines on titles.
- For back links, there's definitely some over optimization going on - see Open Site Explorer's anchor text report - and the use of anchors like "dentists in york" "dentist york" etc is a bit excessive. Get those anchors changed to brand names if possible. Believe it or not, there's just too many links in general, and many of them are keyword links. What I mean is - you're not ever naturally going to see 100's of back links for a dentist. Google knows this. So it sends a red flag to have too many low quality over optimized links. I would stress obtaining a few links but of super high quality.
- Social Media - the facebook feed for example is just a blast of "push" marketing - teeth services, photos and so forth. Very minimal activity in general. They should pick maybe one social network that aligns with where their customers are and use it as a communication medium - a place where patients can leave messages, the office can post fun and engaging things. See Social Media Examinar for plenty of social ideas - I recommend possibly using either Pinterest or Instagram as well. Twitter doesn't make much sense for a dentist. I am mentioning social media because in my opinion it helps SEO.
- Rel Publisher - even if they're not posting activity on Google Plus (same as the Google places page now) use Rel Publisher to connect their website to their G+ page. Check that its set up correctly with the rich snippet tester
- Site speed seems poor - here's a test result from webpagetest - note that many of the images (like this one) are taking almost 1 second each to load. You definitely want to try to get those to say 50-75k with some compression etc. Site speed is a small ranking factor as well as UX factor for visitors.
- The site has a lot of pages indexed for a dentist web site - over 1,000 as you can see here. What I would do is see if they are all getting traffic (check in analytics) - and HIGHLY consider killing off pages like this: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/teeth-straightening-in-york/ which are is a blog post format, designed to just target a keyword and even the image is broken now. There are a LOT of pages like that indexed. Here's another: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/we-also-offer-patients-facial-rejuvenation-treatments/ - this will all seem like thin content for sure, and affect rankings.
As you can see, a lot to work on! I don't think any one thing is going to fix the site, it's going to have to be a bunch of improvements.
EDITED TO ADD: I would just kill the tag archives. Remove them from navigation and delete them. Check to see if a few might be getting traffic (using my method here) and 301 redirect the few that might be and just remove the rest. I was trying to crawl the site, and it's already queued up to over 1,500 pages - most of them tag archives.
-
Hi Marcus,
When a ranking drop happens, there are typically 3 possible causes:
-
The business has been surpassed by more active competitors
-
There is a temporary shakeup going on, meaning that rankings will likely return in a short time
-
The business has been penalized, meaning that time goes by and the previous high rankings do not return
From your description, it sounds like it may be the last of these. You mention "once they had they transferred over" and I'm not quite sure to what this refers, but a key task here will be to see if the client can put a date on exactly when they lost rankings. If they can't maybe their analytics can help you. Then, perhaps you can tie this time period to a known Google penalty, as well as being sure that all of the bases are covered in my original list of Local SEO requirements.
Major penalties and troubleshooting fall outside my areas of knowledge, so I am going to request that one of our expert traditional SEOs might also come look at your question. They will likely be able to ask questions and see things that I can't.
-
-
Hi again Marcus,
In this case I used majesticseo to have a quick glance, you will be able to see these links even with the free version. Remember to start slowly with new links and change your anchor + do not link only to home, build a strong net all over your site. Wish you good luck, keep me posted!
Cheers from another really sunny morning in southern Spain.
-
Hi Claudio,
Thanks for that - I had a look at the inbound links to the site via Opensite explorer and it didn't pick up the ones you've mentioned, so I will investigate their link profile a bit further.
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for getting back to me, according to the client, the site enjoyed good rankings previously and it now seems to have dropped (once they had they transferred over). I'm thinking it must be an algorithmic penalty because the site doesnt rank in the first 8 pages for 'Dental implants York' despite the high quality on the page and that is optimised correctly. This is the same for most of their other treatment keywords.
Thanks
Marcus
-
Hi DentalDesign,
Can you provide further clarification as to what you mean by 'struggling for rankings'? Does this mean the client has lost rankings or is struggling to achieve the high rankings they would like to earn?
As a rule of thumb, high local rankings hinge on -
1. Physical location in city of search
2. A lack of violations of Google's guidelines
3. Consistency of NAP (name, address, phone) across all citations
4. A perfectly optimized website
5. Quality and authority of that site
6. Review acquisition
7. Traditional SEO factors
8. Activities of competitors
Local Search Ranking factors 2013 goes into awesome detail regarding the most important positive and negative ranking factors. It's an amazing resource: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
-
Hi Marcus,
Have a look to 1778 backlinks coming from asooy.com they look definitely spammy... probably others, also would advise you to move cautiously with new links 100´s links per day could show spammy also with a site that previously had no backlinks except those spammy ones and also about 3000 from bradford-webdesign.co.uk which don´t either look to much of "natural" sort of links...
Maybe disavow those ones and start slowly and naturally with new links, change your anchor, and work them from different domains.
Hope you good luck from southern sunny Spain!
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
-
Page optimisation score = 93, but rank on 2nd page?
So, one of my pages has an optimisation score of 93. The DA of the website is 74 and is lower than many of our competitors, but to rank 12th? Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions? All the images are under 100kb, but the page speed isn't great (not something I'm currently able to change). All alt tags are using variations of our keywords.
Local Website Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Content Strategy – Blog Channel Questions
We are currently blogging at a high volume to hit keywords for our 1,500 locations across the country. We are trying to make sure we rank well near each location and we have been using our blog to create content for that reason. With recent changes on Google, I am seeing that it is more about content topics than hitting all variations of your keywords and including state and city specific terms. We are now asking ourselves if the blog channel portion of our content strategy is incorrect. Below are some of the main questions we have and any input that is backed by experience would be helpful. 1. Can it hurt us to blog at a high volume (4 blogs per day) in an effort to include all of our keywords and attach them to state and city specific keywords (ie. "keyword one" with "keyword one city" and "keyword one different city")? 2. Is it more valuable to blog only a couple of times per month with deeper content, or more times per month with thinner connect but more keyword involvement? 3. Our customers are forced to use our type of product by the government. We are one of the vendors that provide this service. Because of this our customers may not care at all about anything we would blog about. Do we blog for them, or do we blog for the keyword and try and reach partners and others who would read the content and hope that it also ranks us high when our potential customers search? 4. Is there an advantage/disadvantage or does it matter if we have multiple blog authors? Big questions for sure, but if you have insight on any one of them, please provide and maybe we can answer them all with a group effort. Thanks to all of you who are taking the time to read this and contribute.
Local Website Optimization | | Smart_Start0 -
Site Not Rankings After a Few Months
I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes: Built a new wordpress website All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws Robots.txt is setup correctly .htaccess is setup correctly new domain multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites. Yext Local listings SSL, CDN, Speed optimized Has 19 pages indexed by Google Posting one blog a week for him Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.
Local Website Optimization | | BrianJGomez0 -
Ranking nationally but not locally
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client that has a strange situation. He's ranking for his target keyword on a national level but when searching locally, he's in the 100s (see attached). Any idea what could be going on here? He did have an old domain that got hacked that is redirecting to his current domain. Thanks, Tim lmSSXdT
Local Website Optimization | | TimKelsey0 -
Website ranking issues
Hi Moz, I have a question about one of our websites that has been ranking very poorly on it's current domain (fancydoorsedmonton.com) lately, but was ranked at #1 for the search term "Edmonton Doors" until last month. The main search terms we're targeting are "Edmonton Doors" and "Doors Edmonton". I made another post regarding the on-page SEO value and had some feedback from that, but there is another issue that seems more likely to cause an issue. There are 2 more domains set up to forward to their main domain: fancydoors.com was their old domain but was registered by someone else and had some questionable, X-rated content put on it. The domain has now been reacquired and redirected to their main domain. There isn't any more questionable content on there anymore. Would this domain's past affect it's current ranking? fancy-doors.com was another old domain of theirs now set up as a redirect. In the past they had another SEO provider work with this domain and did some bad SEO work for them with automated citations, etc. We changed the domain to fancydoorsedmonton.com to get away from that and also include Edmonton in the domain. If you have any ideas or feedback to provide based on this information it would definitely be a huge help to us. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Web3Marketing870 -
A question about similar services a multiple locations
Moz Friends, I hope you can help with this question. My company has 25 locations, and growing. Our rankings are strong in the Serps and Local Maps. With each location, we create a new page (with a unique URL) for that specific location (ex: Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling). We then write about 15 pages of unique content for that location, each page about one of the services we provide like: Depression Counseling, Couples Therapy, Anger Management, Eating Disorder Treatment, Life Coaching, Child Therapy, and the list goes on and on.... Hence, for each location, we create a pile of URLS like: Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling/couples-therapy, ..../knoxville-counseling/depression-therapy, .../knoxville-counseling/anger-management... We do this to rank for medium-long-tail searches like "Knoxville Marriage Therapy." As we grow, this results in us writing lots and lots of original content for each location. Original, but somewhat redundant. We would much rather write one AMAZING article on depression counseling, than 25 'okay' ones for each office we open. So, my question (if you're still reading) is our current approach the right one? Should we continue the grind and for each location create a unique page for each service offered out of that office? Or is there a better way, where we can create One anger management page that would suffice for each of our local offices? Has anyone addressed this topic in an article? I Haven't found one... I look forward to your feedback, and thanks in advance!!
Local Website Optimization | | Thriveworks-Counseling0 -
Accurate rankings data? software? tools?
Hello, While I am aware that Google rankings are subject to a number of variables, I still need to be able to provide the most accurate rankings data for my clients in their reports. Most recently, I have been using the Google Adwords Planner and modifying by location and/or device. Now, having found discrepancy in the MOZ rankings, I started trying to again find the most accurate tools or software. Could someone please suggest the most accurate tool, and also how the accurate rankings are achieved? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!! Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | lfrazer0 -
Question about schema.org
Hi guys, I have a website that has many local based pages. In other words we're featuring local businesses in many many cities. So my question is, will it help if i add schema markup to each page while each markup will be appropriate to the city each page belongs to? Will it help with ranking those local pages? Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | odmsoft1