Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
-
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives.
The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam.
The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO.
Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate
I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks in advance!
-
You're probably not using google.ca. It ranks slightly lower on google.com.
-
Hi Keri,
See my response to Andy below. I agree that the keyword isn't essential, and not even that great, I'm just more curious as to why; actually ranking it for the term isn't as critical as my initial question made it sound
-
Hi Andy,
I fully agree with both of you. I should've prefaced the question by saying that this isn't a big issue on my end, just something I found very strange. Still hoping to diagnose it, just so I know how to deal with the problem if it comes up down the road with a more relevant intent-heavy keyword. Sounds like the consensus might be 'it's just too broad.'
-
Hi Josh,
Keri has asked the same question I was thinking about when reading this.
One thing to consider around this is that SEO isn't just about getting people to your site - it's about getting the right people. I personally would be looking for phrases like "charitable donations", "charity donations", "donate to charity", etc. Those people that are searching for those phrases have one clear action in mind, whereas "donate" could be anything, including people just looking for general information.
-Andy
-
I'm going to answer your question with another question. What kind of value does a referral for 'donate' give you? Is such a broad keyword one that is going to bring you in the right type of person, or are you better off building content regarding the terms that convert better or target more qualified searchers?
-
Personalization?
I have you at 5-6
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 google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
How to rank same page for multiple related keywords
We need some of our pages to rank for multiple related keywords. But we cannot optimise one page for multiple keywords which might end up ranking for none of them; at the same time we cannot optimise it for one keyword as we ignore other keywords. I think creating multiple landing pages for very related keywords will confuse users and search engines as well. How to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How come a page can rank in top 10 for medium difficult keyword, with poor link profile.
Hi Moz Community, The keyword that http://customsigncenter.com/ is ranking for is "custom sign", the keyword difficulty is 38 (according to Moz Keyword Explorer). Here are the link metrics for the page and domain: Page authority: 27 Domain authority: 18 Facebook shares: 50 Linking RDs to the page: 7 Linking RDs to the Root Domain: 8 From the SERP, a lot of its competitors have better link profile than this guy. How come the page http://customsigncenter.com/ can rank 6th for the keyword "custom sign". Are there any important "hidden factors" behind the scene? Thank you for any help and support. Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii1 -
After adding a ssl certificate to my site I encountered problems with duplicate pages and page titles
Hey everyone! After adding a ssl certificate to my site it seems that every page on my site has duplicated it's self. I think that is because it has combined the www.domainname.com and domainname.com. I would really hate to add a rel canonical to every page to solve this issue. I am sure there is another way but I am not sure how to do it. Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how did you solve it? Thanks and any and all ideas are very appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LovingatYourBest0 -
I want my website to rank on the first page for a very competitive keyword
I am a WordPress designer and can service national clients. I want to rank on the first page for the keyword WordPress designer. This is a highly competitive keyword MOZ gives it a 68% difficulty. I rank locally in nj for WordPress designer nj and a multitude of local WordPress based key words. I rank on page 10 of serps doing a private browsing session. Some of my national competitors rank on the first page with not many links in. How could i be so low on the serps for the base keyword WordPress Designer but for local WordPress designer nj be number 1 everytime? What should be my best plan of attack if i want to Rank much higher for this one specific keyword hopefully page 1. I think this one keyword could increase business greatly so it is a top priority for me. I appreciate all advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Page 1 Reached, Further Page Improvements and What Next ?
Moz, I have a particularly tricky competitive keyword that i have finally climbed our website to the 10th position of page 1, i am particularly pleased about this as all of the website and content is German which i have little understanding of and i have little support on this, I am pleased with the content and layout of the page and i am monitoring all Google Analytics values very closely, as well as the SERP positions, So as far as further progression with this page and hopefully climbing further up page 1, where do you think i should focus my efforts ? Page Speed optimization?, Building links to this page ?, blogging on this topic (with links) , Mobile responsive design (More difficult), further improvements to pages and content linked from this page ? Further improvements to the website in general?,further effort on tracking visitors and user experience monitoring (Like setting up Crazyegg or something?) Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated, Thanks all, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Optimized pages ranking lower than homepage with keywords
Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough. I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page. As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first. So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches. In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords. I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level? Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up? I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0