Good start to campaign but suddenly getting nowhere fast

[SamCUK]

As an amatuer SEO I was really please with the results when I optimised my pages and starting link building. I've managed to get myself to the bottom of page one for almost all my main keywords over a 6 month period. However since then I've been building links for the last couple of months and have seen very little movement in my SERPS positions at all! I expected it to be harder on page one but not this hard! According to SEO Moz campaign tools my on page results are all A so I dont think I can optimise any more. I'm beginning to think it's not links I need and I'm missing something like not enough social media mentions etc  however many of my competitors on page one don't appear to engage with social media much at all.

I'm at a loss really as to wether to just keep building links through guest posts, articles, forums, directories or try a different approach. i wonder if some of you more experienced SEO's could take a look and offer any ideas. My site is http://www.musicliveuk.com and I'm trying to rank for

Entertainment Agency

Entertainment Agencies

Wedding Band

Wedding Singer

Function Band

Cover Band

(I have optimised pages for each of these keywords in the footer)

I've also noticed that a lot of my competitors have links on lots of blogs that I can't seem to get links on. I would normally contact them and offer to guest post but I can find any contact details. I'm beginning to think my competitors have set these sites up as well for link building purposes. Is that ethical?

Please help!

[KaneJamison]

Those are pretty broad terms, but according to the Keyword Difficulty tool you're doing well on a couple of them. I'll take a look at a few for you, using the KD tool set on "United Kingdom" & Google:

wedding singer:

You're doing remarkably well on this keyword considering the relatively low Page Authority and # of links to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. You're probably only doing that well in the first place due to your on-page optimization efforts. If you want that one to perform better, it'll need more links.

cover bands:

I show you at #6. Links to the cover bands page will also help on this one, though this page isn't lacking as much as the wedding singer page.

entertainment agency:

I show you at #10. This one is trickier because your PA/DA is in the middle of the pack. I would bet that you're getting beat because the people ranking highest have "entertainment agency" in their name, which means that a high percentage of their links will feature "entertainment agency" in the anchor text. It's going to be difficult for you to duplicate that, but I'm guessing that more exact anchor-text links here will be the only way for you to compete on this term.

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While I'm looking at your site, please take a look at what GigMasters is doing in the US. They've dominated the market for hiring bands and entertainers for weddings and parties, and they have a very user-friendly site. If they move over to the UK, you're going to have a hard time competing because of how great their user interface is. If I were the owner of your site, I'd be thinking about how I could copy their format in the UK before they move in and do it. So, work on making it easier for people to find bands to hire. Currently it is difficult to navigate and find that content.

[KaneJamison]

Regarding this:

"I've also noticed that a lot of my competitors have links on lots of blogs that I can't seem to get links on. I would normally contact them and offer to guest post but I can find any contact details. I'm beginning to think my competitors have set these sites up as well for link building purposes. Is that ethical?"

Is it ethical? That's the opening question to a long and drawn out debate. It's certainly a bit spammy, depending on how crappy the content is on the blog. It's hard for me to tell you not to do that, because it's obviously working for them, but before you do, please try the "create awesome content and promote it" option first.

How about creating "the UK guide to hiring a wedding band" or something like that? Should be worth a good number of links from all of the bridal/wedding blogs in the UK if you make it a darn good piece of content. Or interview the bloggers at the 20 biggest bridal/wedding blogs and see what the most popular wedding music trends are or some BS like that. They'll often link back to your article after it's published because you asked them to contribute.

Please try that stuff before you start building crappy link networks.

[SamCUK]

Thanks for the detailed reply. What you're saying makes sense. I made a mistake in the early days of the site building links for all keywords to the home page and then realised I needed dedicated pages for each keyword which I'm guessing is why the home page has good page authority and the others lack. Since then I've built links to the other optimised pages but when I look on OSE at the url http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/cover-band for example it says linking root domains 1 and 202 links. All the links listed are pages from my site. Why aren't I seeing external links from my link building efforts?

I obviously need to improve the page authorities as I'm some way off having the same as the top results and I guess the only way to do this is through links?

Some interesting ideas about interviewing influential bloggers. I hadn't thought of that and it seems obvious now!

[edwardlewis]

I looked at the site for a couple of minutes, but there are a few more on page tweaks that could be done, have a look here: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.musicliveuk.com/WbGhsMXk

Also, your site is hosted in Germany, it would help if it was hosted in the UK.