Stumped: Site No Longer Showing Up for Important Keywords

[mikedelseo]

URL is: www.radianceofpalmbeach.comGreetings All:I have been working on our company's website for months, and I am finally at wit's end. The site was very out-of-date and had unfortunately been built upon some bad links before my arrival. My partner and I have redone the site with SEO best practices in mind: we created new content for the pages, and have been working diligently on correctly organizing the site. Despite everything we have done, our site has plummeted since September in terms of organic search. Here are some of my suspects:

• • Panda/Penguin: a lot of the content of the old site had been copied. We did our best to make our content helpful and original, but I'm not sure we did enough. Also, many backlinks were suspect. I disavowed all that I didn't like Dec. 8. I have seen minor improvement, but not much.

• Name Change: Around late October, coinciding with one of the algorithm changes, the doctor insisted we change our name from New Radiance Med Spa to New Radiance Cosmetic Center. We noticed overnight tumbling, but it literally happened at the same time many were complaining about Penguin.

• Pages too far removed from root directory?: We tried to silo the site by category to make it specific, but I'm not sure if we went too far from the root directory. For example, our botox page is: http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/injectables/neuromodulators/botox-cosmetic/ -- Should it just be ./botox ? Everything is only one link away, so we didn't foresee a problem.

• • No alternate forms of navigation: Our navigation is solely drop-down.

• Content Issues: Since the site launch, my boss has changed the organization of the site around. I don't think this should be a problem, but I honestly don't know.

• Technical Issues: We use a Wordpress site, and the designer has been pretty good about making the site clean and without errors, but perhaps there is something I am overlooking?

• ??: Despite these issues, I feel like our site should be considered better than many of our competitors who nonetheless perform much better than we do on important keyword searches. Type in "liposuction palm beach" or "botox palm beach" and we don't even come on page 1, whereas we used to dominate.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as, like I said, we are stumped. I feel like I have looked up every possible problem, and with the above list, we feel frozen as to which direction to turn.Thanks in advance,Michael

[Ray-pp]

Hi Mikedelseo,

Sorry to hear about the drop in rankings, these situations are definitely frustrating.

You were very thorough with your question, but I didn't see any info around the 301 redirects from the old site to the new site. Did you ensure that all of the old, high ranking content was 301'ed to the new URLs? Those 301s are extremely important to preserve rankings.

I'll take a deeper look if so, but lmk that first.

Also, if you've changed the business name/listing, make sure to update all the local listings as needed. Moz Local will help you with that: https://moz.com/local/

[DirkC]

Hi,

I did a quick crawl of your site with Screamingfrog - basic site structure seems to be ok - most of the pages are within 1/2 clicks from the homepage. The url's are pretty long - but that is not necessarily a sign that they are far from the root.

I noticed that you are using a lot of (very) heayv images on the site and that these images are pushing the content to the bottom, invisible without scrolling. Example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/fattransfertobutt2.jpg -> 1.150 KB for one image. This has an impact on the loadtime of your pages - see: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150110_FW_KEY/1/details/ . Some of the images are put on the non-www version, so needing an additional redirect.

If I look at your page titles, H1, meta descriptions - it seems that they are very specific, but not really answering the questions a potential user of this site may have. Example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/non-invasive-treatments/skin-rejuvenation/matrix-ir-laser-treatment/ => page title: Matrix IR Laser Treatment - New Radiance Palm Beach H1: Matrix IR - Metadescription: Matrix is an amazing wrinkle reduction procedure that uses ...etc -> few people will be looking for Matrix, so probably you need to do some keyword research and see what are the keywords which by your target audience.

Language used on the different pages is very commercial and not very informative.While most of the images are quite good in terms of quality, the images of staff are not sharp, and certainly do not look professional (example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/about-new-radiance/neil-c-goodman/- the profile picture looks like a scan from a picture taken in the 80ties)

Dirk