Rankings and keywords

[ClickIt]

I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months.  The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock!  We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes.

For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover.  It's like Google isn't even reading the home page.  The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3.  I have told this to the client.  Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page.  Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank?

Any suggestions would help!

Thank you.

[Marketing-Maven]

It's probably the same issue everyone is experiencing - check out the MozCast for 8/20.  It went up to 103 degrees suggesting a major shift with Google, though Google has not confirmed.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Kollin,

Watch out for overoptimization of keyphrases on the site.Use the on page grader tool by Moz to see how you can improve the keyword strength on the site. Analyze the top 10 competitiors using on page grader and OSE to see what is making them rank at the top.

Cheers,

SEO5

[ClickIt]

Do you see over optimization or are you just saying that as a general rule?

[SEO5Team]

IT has been used 23 times on the home page. You can try reducing the usage and see if that makes a difference.

[ClickIt]

I just looked and I don't see it used that often, what tool are you using?

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

This can be common with new sites. Google will test out it's rankings in the beginning to see how users respond etc - and then it may "settle" to a more normal ranking.

These small adjustments to on-page things like H1s (which is not a strong signal) etc are probably going to make very small differences. I would recommend looking at other factors such as back links, domain authority, local citations etc.

You can use the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool to gather lots of metrics around why certain sites rank where they do, and where you stand compared to those that are ranking.

Take a look though these link building strategies as well as GetListed for some help on the links and citations.

Hope that helps!

-Dan