Can't figure why ranking dropped after SEO improved.

[JanetJ]

I took a website that never had any keyword research performed, meta data filled in or anything strategic regarding getting ranked on the search engines. We rebuilt the website from an old Dreamweaver install using Wordpress, did keyword research, optimized one page per keyword term, filled in all the appropriate meta data and alt tags. The site has dropped in rankings and I've been working for the past 3 months to attempt to raise it up. Can you see what I am doing wrong? (This is the client site: http://www.atozqualityfencing.com).

[ColeLusby]

Did you 301 redirect all the old pages to the new pages (assuming URL structure was changed)?

What were they ranking for previously? And what page was ranking?

I may would advise having a more specific keyword for the home page considering it probably has a higher Domain Authority.

Thanks,

Cole

[Travis_Bailey]

All in all, I'm sure there's a lot of things that can be done on-page. Though the main thing I'm seeing is that the server is pretty slow. I've managed to get response times from five to nine seconds. That's way too long and more than likely the main thing holding back the site.

Then there are a lot of requests on the home page, ~120. When you're dealing with a slow server, a lot of requests makes for a bad situation. It looks like the Facebook widget makes up about half of them. If you could find a lighter weight replacement, that would help. Plus you could enable server side compression.

Take a look at tools.pingdom.com and Google Page Speed Insights for a little more insight.

Basically, it looks like there's a lot of foundation work that needs to be done. Once that's done, you'll probably see some improvement. Then you can fuss over the paint/siding.

[Chris661]

I also noticed there appears to be a W3TC debug file on the home page that is pretty big. Is it possible this plugin is misconfigured and causing issues?

[JanetJ]

Awesome catch, Chris!! I will look into this issue. Had no idea it was there!

[Chris661]

Under the performance tab and  general settings check to see if debug mode is checked. Not that I am expert on this plugin! It is very complex.

Best!