We have a website that has awesome metrics but will not rank - any thoughts?

[GT-Biz-Design]

Our website www.mikestaff.com (Detroit wedding services company..djs, photographers, videography) has fantastic competitive metrics, as in we beat the competition at every ranking factor, but we are still buried in the actual SERPs

We are trying to rank for similar/identical keywords as our competitors in almost each of the main categories of the site: specifically detroit wedding dj...photographer...videographer..etc. We also have a Chicago office that we are trying to rank the site for with specific chicago pages. The website makes you choose right at the beginning what market you are in - Detroit or Chicago.

We have A grades on all of our main keywords and the pages that we are trying to rank. But again we are buried on the second and third page of the SERPs in most of these keywords.

Help - Moz community :-)Any thoughts on what we might be missing?

BceI0XR

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Ryan,

By just looking at one keyword I think there is already a lot to gain in the content on your site. The relevancy of this page to your keyword: detroit wedding dj is quite low as the keyword is exactly matched only twice on the page and just somewhere in the body text: http://mikestaff.com/detroit-michigan-weddings/services/dj/. I hate saying that you need to use it more in the headings and the rest of the content but it probably will help. If the relevancy on the page itself isn't good enough then you might not win it although your metrics against most competitors will be much higher.

[Anders_Alknes]

Hi Ryan.

I agree with Martijn that relevancy is very important.

Also after just spending some time at the same page that Marijn referenced to: http://mikestaff.com/detroit-michigan-weddings/services/dj/ I see that you have four H1 on this page. You should only have one and I think it's important that it includes your targeted keywords.

Have you run a new on-page report since Moz updated and went away from letter grades to numerical scores?

You should also look at your internal linking, are you utilizing internal linking in a way that promotes your keywords.

How is your external link building going? Are you getting some high valued links?

What are those pages that rank highest in the SERP doing differently than you?

Hope some of this helps.

[GT-Biz-Design]

Thanks Martijn, we were using the page grades tool to optimize and had previously received an A for the keyword "detroit wedding dj", but I agree it is not that prevalent on the page, and not currently in the H1. Also as Anders pointed out we have more than one H1 one the page, which we could change as well.

Do you think the having the cookie based location popup hurts our SEO at all? As in you have to choose a location first before anything on the site?

[GT-Biz-Design]

Thank you Anders for your help! To answer some of your questions. We have not ran the new report with the number based system for page grades. I will do that and see where we are at for that keyword. We were previously graded A for Detroit wedding dj.

I don't believe we are doing as well as we could with internal linking. What kind of internal linking strategy would you take with this page? Suggestions?

External linking is pretty steady, although 90% of our high valued links, are going to the home page.

As far as the competition goes and their strategy, I am not seeing them do even half of the work that we are doing. The one problem we had, was the site was blacklisted about a year ago. Some seo hack was hired and ranked the site in 3-4 weeks, but then Google cops showed up and shut it down. It took a lot of money and effort to get a clean bill of health from Google, but it has been a slow climb back out. The site has been clean for a whole year now, it just seems like we should be dominating based on our metrics and efforts, but alas we sit on page 2-3 for some of these important keywords.

Any help is appreciated - Ryan