What's with Google? All metrics in my favor, yet local competitors win.

[calindaniel]

Osaka73,

I feel like we're making progress!

I ran a quick Keyword Difficulty report for "dueling pianos" and from it an OSE report of the top ranking websites.

The top ranking business websites (excluding Wikipedia and image search) are:

• http://www.howlatthemoon.com/the-show/
• http://www.petesduelingpianobar.com/
• http://www.2grandentertainment.com/
• http://www.pointstreetpianos.com/

Interesting to note, your website has higher Domain Authority, MozRank and MozTrust by comparison. Whenever I see this, and to be honest it happens a lot, my gut reaction is that your website has a relevance issue. That is to say, Google isn't associating your website with the keyword you're attempting to rank for. Or at the very least, the algo believes your competitors are more relevant.

You may be scratching your head saying, well we get an "A" grade using the On-Page Grader (you do, by the way, I checked) however, the grader only takes into consideration onsite factors. It doesn't account for offsite factors and some secret sauce items related to your content.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I still believe your path to SERP domination revolves around your content and the development of your backlink profile.

For example, here's a what search engines seeing when they crawl your website.  Not much in terms of content for the spiders to latch onto. I would start by giving Googlebot what it wants, and what it wants its long form, authoritative content.

Next, the other challenge is in your backlink profile, specifically your anchor text and the relevance of your link sources. I reviewed an OSE backlink report and only two of your keywords include "dueling pianos" in the anchor text. Contrast this with some of your competitors and who have it in their business name, and, therefore, a majority of their anchor text.

These days anchor text can be scary; even the concept of link building has received a tarnished reputation, but I would bet my bottom dollar that the ranking issues you're experiencing are due to these two items.

[calindaniel]

Hi Bob,

I don't believe the location of your menu would cause ranking issues assuming, of course, that Google can crawl the links.

However, if you have reason to believe your rankings may have been impacted by the location of the menu I'd recommend testing it. That's the only way you can be certain.

[osaka73]

Great information!  Thanks!  I will act on this and make some progress.

I can't believe our h1 tag (all this time) has been seen as one word FingersDueling Pianos!