Google domain search

[colbygedak]

Hello all,

I'm a newbie to SEO, so you'll have to bear with me. I just started a website LangleyHomeSaerch.com a few months ago and am having trouble ranking with google. When I search "Langley Home Search" with Yahoo or Bing, it comes up on the first page. However when I search it with google it doesn't seem to rank even in the first few hundred pages. The only way I can get a match from google is if I search "Langley HomeSearch" or "LangleyHomeSearch". I know due to google's newer algorithms that there is less importance put on domain name matches, but is this normal, or is there anything I can do to improve it?

Thx,

Colby

Langley, BC

[MichaelC-15022]

Hello from a fellow (well, ex) BC'er!

I think your issue is simply a lack of backlinks at this point.  Did you submit an XML sitemap to Google?  That will help a bit.  Also, be sure to register in all of the local business directories--check out this post on the Whitespark blog to see the Canadian business directories that matter to Google.

Your site looks very nice, by the way.  Very professional and it looks like the images are yours (I presume Amanda Parker is related to your business?)

FYI, the "boost" sites get for an exact or partial domain match to the query seem to take a long time in Google--up to a year, last time I built exact-match sites (that was a couple of years ago).  Yahoo and Bing was quicker.

Cheers (Kokanee, of course),

Michael.

[GregB123]

When I first went to your site I thought it was about Langley, VA (where the CIA is)

You should add "BC" and "Canada" to your title, description, and page text. Maybe Google is just confused about what city your site is about?

Also your first h1 tag is really messed up. It's a handful of links, images, and text. I think it should just be the important text. After that you have more h1 tags, and for some reason they are capitalized as H1. You should only have one h1 that is just text.

You also have a whole bunch of H2's (capitalized) that are just vague section names. One or two h2's that directly relate to your site's purpose would be much better.

All your html code should really be lower case letters (I think).

Have you done all the "local SEO" stuff to tell Google that your site is only about Langley BC?

[colbygedak]

Thx for the feedback. Would I have to ad BC to my domain name or just the title tags? I've submitted the website to google and it is all indexed, but I can't remember if inspecified that it was in Langley,BC. Is that done through webmaster tools?

[MichaelC-15022]

Definitely put your address and phone number in your footer, and use schema.org/LocalBusiness to mark up those bits as well.

[GregB123]

You do not need to change your domain name. Just add BC and Canada to the title tags, description, and a few more places in the page text.

[colbygedak]

Are there any good free online tools to analyze and help correct these issues? I have been using Moz SEO ,but my months free account is almost up.

[MichaelC-15022]

For the schema.org markup, you'll find Google's schema tester here.

I would use schema.org/LocalBusiness but you can see an example of how to do the markup on one of my sites.  Start at line 447 of the source where you see schema.org/Corporation, and use LocalBusiness instead of Corporation.  I think most of the other fields will be the same, but refer to the link to schema.org/LocalBusiness above to be sure.

In my example, I've used a CSS class schemaorghide that's got display:none in it, as while I want to include a bunch of these fields in the schema I show Google, I don't necessarily want to show all of them in the footer (and note that some of the fields are elements of multiple entities within Corporation, so I don't want to show my phone number twice, for instance).

Pay attention to all of the places you see itemscope or itemprop.  And it's all done where you see the comment: