Google ranking for the term "locum tenens"

[ba_seomoz]

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

[philipbuuck]

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.

[stefanok]

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:

1. 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.
2. I would also suggest adding those keywords in a well written meta description. i see that this is missing and a downfall for you.
3. Check your keyword density for those terms. Dont go over 6% on one given page.
4. 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.

[AlanMosley]

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 not

SEO is not all marketing, your site needs to be crawl frendly.

sorry for being so blunt, but there you are.

[AlanMosley]

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

[stefanok]

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.

[AlanMosley]

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

[stefanok]

I totally agree with you on that, sorry my terminology was incorrect. Long few days

[ba_seomoz]

Thanks for all of the advice everyone - very helpful, really appreciate it.  We're looking into this stuff now.

Jason