Site Not Ranking for Key Term

[flcity15]

Question for my fellow Mozers

I have a ranking question that I cannot put my finger on. I have a site (visitplano.com) where the client wants to rank for the keyword "Plano". I can't say if the site was previously ranking for this keyword, but I looked into the basic SEO practices and found that the keyword is incorporated in:

• Domain
• Title
• Content
• There is a lack of internal linking and anchor text within the content
• External links - 1,558
• DA - 46
• PA - 55

Currently, the website does not rank for the keyword "Plano". Could someone shed some light on why they aren't ranking or what I may be missing? I would greatly appreciate your help.

[PixelKicks]

Looking at the current links you have, there are some good quality sites already linking.

How long has the site existed for? A quick check on the domain in OpenSite Explorer reveals it has zero G+1's. It looks like you currently don't have a Google+ page, so the first thing I'd do is create that, then work on getting some more G+1's to your domain.

[WhiteboardCreations]

flcity15,

The answer could be as simple as "plano" may be wrapped up into so many other variations like "visit plano" "plano cvb" "plano city" "plano, texas" and so on. So, to Google or any other search engine, the keyword "plano" may not be properly segmented out as what you are specifically targeting. Looking in Open Site Explorer, your anchor text is hitting on "plano" for a link, but you have so many others also. This is good, but could be more effective with better links built to that site for that anchor text.

Also, your Home page tagging isn't really saying "Hey, rank me for Plano!". Your title could have another LSI mention and your meta description is extremely long. Work on getting that down to proper character length hitting you main keyword and some variations.

You already can determine who is ranking for "plano", so do a little research on where they are linking to. What content they are using, how they are tagging the site or the page ranking for the keywords and reverse engineer what they are doing to help your efforts.

Hope this was a good answer! Cheers, Patrick

[flcity15]

Thank you Patrick

The answer definitely help me understand and look at it differently. Greatly appreciate your response.