Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?

[Dutko2385]

Matt, I took some of Dirk's words to heart so all last night I took out the pictures that were on my homepage, but them the website looked very dull.  I then added content, but then my website looks even more dull because it didn't have pictures.  So, I decided to change my theme.  That is why it looks like my website is not indexed properly.  I will go through and check the amount of times the keyword and get rid of some.  I wasn't even trying to be spammy.  I literally wrote this content yesterday night and went to sleep.  I will change it for sure.  Question though, instead of have "car shipping" so many times could I edit some of the '"car shipping" words to "auto transport", "car transport", "auto shipping", and vehicle transport" instead of getting rid of the word "car shipping" for some of these?

As for the links: I didn't know I had garbage backlinks from foreign countries.  Not sure how that even happened.  I surely know I didn't do that.  I have not done any back linking from anything besides reliable directories (yahoo local, yelp, vimeo, and etc..  Then you mentioned the auctions websites for selling cars.  Not sure how those occurred either.  It looked like they took a picture of mine and then tried giving me credit.  It is stuff like this as to why I am looking for a link building strategy/company to do all of this for me.

Matt, thank you for taking the time to send me all of this.

[Dutko2385]

Dirk, I took some things of what you said and I immediately made changes.  I removed the pictures that the other SEO team put on my homepage.  I also changed the theme because the website looked extremely dull with the pictures and I did understand where you were coming from with the photo in the background and the content over it... it was sometimes hard to read.  Maybe you could check to see if it still it hard to load the homepage again.

I will absolutely start writing the blog about more car shipping stuff.  It is just hard because I don't want to write duplicate content.  There is only so much I can write about in my industry.  I figured because part of my industry is dealing with cars and such that writing about new cars and stuff would be ok.

I didn't see that many links when I went to Open Source on Moz and was searching for the backlink profile.  I have been doing that to many of my competitors to see where they have backlinks and steal their ideas.  Then obviously I need to hire a link building company who is going to give me the right backlinks and disavow the crappy ones I have.

The last objective you touched on was the robots.txt.  How would someone unblock javascript with my robots.txt?  I never knew it was like that, again my old SEO company did all of that stuff and I even paid for a totally revamped quote box and I think that is the reason for it being blocked.  Is there a way to unblock java?  If so, how the heck can you through Wordpress?  I tried looking for about an hour last night.  I have the Yoast Premium plug-in and I went under tools and found a file editor link that says "This tool allows you to quickly change important files for your SEO, like your robots.txt....." so I looks in there and all it had was:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /staging/

I didn't touch anything because I don't want to make matters worse.  I didn't see anything about javascript.

I am such a noob it isn't even funny.  I know some things, but many others and beyond my scope.  I was paying a company between $3,000 and $6,000 a month and basically all that he was doing was writing articles.  He harped on me to post on social media (which I am now) and to generate him new content.  He didn't even do any external linking like he was suppose to (also never told me to go get links when he wasn't able to), didn't notice that javascript is blocked with my robots.txt, and obviously didn't do much else.

[DirkC]

Hi,

We all had to start somewhere. There is a lot of useful content on Moz (check the beginners guide for starters) & there is off course the q&a. For the budget you mentioned you should be able to get some decent SEO company helping you out.

On the robots.txt - it is in the root of your website: www.carshippingcarriers.com/robots.txtYour javascript is located in  the /wp-includes/ folder - however in the 2nd line of your robots file you put

Disallow: /wp-includes/

I would take-out this line.

New design looks clean & content is better to read and is closer to the top. You moved your form to the bottom. Personally I would keep it on the top (there is sufficient place on the main image)

Page speed hasn't really improved mainly because of the images: the image http://www.carshippingcarriers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IMG_0528.jpg is high-res & much too big. Same for http://www.carshippingcarriers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_0538.jpg & your main image. Resize & use a tool like https://compressor.io/ (free) to compress them even further.

Check also Pagespeed insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.carshippingcarriers.com%2F&tab=desktop - score is not too bad - but you could enable caching for static resources & minify your css/js/html files (the tool does this for you - you can download the optimised js/css at the bottom of the page.

From usability perspective - the links on the green background are blue rendering difficult to read.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[Dutko2385]

Thank you very much for the info.  I did take your advice again and put my quote box back near the top of the page.  I like it at the top because at the end of the day that is what I want my people to do.  I need the leads! haha.

I did remove the Disallow: /wp-includes/

I hope that causes a good chain reaction.

I would like to enable caching and minify, but the person who created my quote box made it where i cannot have caching and minty or it screws up my quote box.  I have coding in my box where if people type out a city or zip it will show the correct spelling of the city and state and make my customers happy.  It also makes it easier on me so i have the correct spellings of the cities that people are needing car transported to and from.  With that code I am unable to use plug-ins that will cache and minify.  I tried it and i didn't it just screwed everything up.

I honestly cannot thank you enough for your answers to my questions.  Very kind of you!

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[MattAntonino]

Wow, you acted really fast - I didn't take into consideration that you'd already made such big changes to the site. Great work on it then.

I would definitely rewrite some of it. It can be challenging to talk about cars for the whole page without using it over & over but the more you can limit it, I think the better it will be in the end. Too much of a good thing at the moment (plus, the birthday card is just a great reference so whenever I get the chance, have to throw it in.)

I would definitely disavow those links, clean up the content, check your other pages for the same issue and see where you're at once all these things get indexed. Then try to earn a few strong links and see where you land. From there, we can potentially help diagnose again as necessary.

[Dutko2385]

Thanks for responding Matt!  Yes, I did make huge changes quickly.  I always want to jump onto an issue ASAP because each moment that my site isn't optimized or "perfect" I am losing potential customers.  Thank you for saying "great work".   It surely try to do a good job with the little knowledge I have.  haha.

I did go in and remove quite a few instances that said car shipping and I also changed quite a few to say either: auto transport, auto shipping, car transport and vehicle transport.

Never saw the birthday card un oil you posted that link, but it surely what my website looked like.  Sometimes when you're exhausted at 2am content doesn't always flow the greatest and errors are made.

As for the errors that still need to be corrected.  I will certain jump on them ASAP and I will talk with my new "technical SEO" company about the keyword density and content.  I know they are in "phase 1" going through and editing nearly every page to get the density in the right place and have the content cleaned up.  I think they have only done about 10 pages so far.  I just hired them not too long ago.  As for the disavow links... I will have to see how to see what links you're talking about and disavow them.  I know I will have to hire a company to start a link building strategy and when I do I will surely let them know of these low quality BS links and have them disavow them for me so don't screw it up and really get my website in trouble.

Honestly, thank you very much for your responses.  I appreciate it more than you know.

[EGOL]

Lots of great and generous answers from Dirk, Josh and Matt.

I really liked this sentence by Josh....

Because they are doing something you are not, obviously

and would simply like to add the converse....

Because you are doing something they are not, obviously ;p.

and on that basis, I think that Matt offers some really good points to investigate.

[Dutko2385]

Hey Matt, do you think you could do me a HUGE favor.  You said I have these low quality backlinks.  I am unable to see them or figure out how to generate a decent report to show those out-of-country backlinks.  Could you send me a report of these or potentially tell me how you saw them and where I could?

Thank you!

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