Web Stie STUCK on page 2 for 2years

[sailor3570]

Our website is a dating site for adults (not porn) (http://www.swingersocial.com) It’s been STUCK in the middle of page 2 for 1 ½ years. Moving up or down 2 ranking, that’s it. The way we determine our location is by entering the most common phrases used by people who search for our type of site.  We surveyed 50+ people and the phrases they most frequently entered when using Google were “swingers websites”  “swingers sites” and “free swingers sites”. In addition to our competitors ranking above us, they show “movement” in their rankings up & or down. Some even dropped to page 2 but they recovered – we are not seeing the same movement or recovery.

Pages crawled on have remained virtually unchanged for months.  The last 1 ½ years we have hired SEO companies, and as a result a great deal of effort has been put into the site. We are not naïve and realize some were better than others.  We’ve invested a great deal of effort into content, key words, modifying tags, and throughout all of this we’ve seen no change.  We had a detailed audit suggesting improvements (no surprise), the report overall was positive stating “There are a few things to do to optimize the site but looking at the keywords, SwingerSocial.com should be able to rank high.”

We also implemented a blog area with over 70 blog posts. Our competitors on the other hand have only two blog posts and are continually ranking higher than us.  Additionally, our competitors do not have sites on Pinterest, G+, FB, or Twitter – we have a presence on some of these.

I do know that the number and quality of links are terrible.  I’m looking for a partner to help us make strategic changes to the site that will allow us to rank higher.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Definitely a frustrating problem!

After taking a look at your site, it might actually be overly optimized for the term "swinger." Specifically, it shows up on your homepage (in the various sections) in the text 122 times. This is an older, but still good WBF from Cyrus talking about over optimization and how it can hurt you.

A quick look at your backlink profile for your homepage shows not very links that are followed and aren't on low-quality and potentially spammy directories, as you mentioned. Building quality links back to your site will definitely help. Getting more content built will definitely let you build links a lot better.

When it comes to content and social media in the adult space, PornHub is really leading the innovation. They wrote a great article about what they do for our blog. Definitely when it comes to content, part of the problem with your site is that everyone is behind a log-in and thus, behind closed doors for Googlebot. I haven't seen anyone in the swinger space really own content and social; and that could definitely set your company apart.

Hope that gives you somewhere to start!