Newbie off to a discouraging start

[Jacob_A]

Hi guys,

I'm just off to a start with trying to work out some SEO, and so far I seem to be making things worse! Would love to get your insight.

I've had a page for quite some time. From what I've learned so far, it seems that the page has had some good things going for it already.

Just to get things rolling, my goal was to optimize my site for just one keyword phrase. The phrase included a location "Brooklyn", so I jumped into things and got a Moz local account. Then I went through the page and made some tweaks that brought my keywords into more of the H1 tags, URLs etc. Finally, I went into Google Webmaster tools and looked through some of the options and submitted an XML sitemap.

When I started things off, I could regularly find my site on page 8 Google when searching for this phrase. Now when I search Google, I can't find it on the first 20 pages.

I understand that it can take months for optimization to kick in, and I certainly wasn't looking for overnight results. However, seeing that my ranking has gone down is certainly frustrating.

My theories on why this may have happened are that either 1) Something in my changes was detected as being "spammy" by Google, and they've penalized me for this, or 2) Maybe there's some means by which these changes are being "processed" by the search engine, and I just need to have more patience.

I'd love to hear if it looks like I've done something wrong, or if it's really just more a matter of patience.

The site that I'm working on is www.jacobarthur.com, and the keywords set is "brooklyn wedding photographer"

Thanks for any insight!

[LoganRay]

Hi,

It sounds to me like you might be over-optimizing your site for a single word spread across multiple pages. When you do this, you're doing one of two things; confusing search engines to the point where they don't know which of your pages is the best match therefore they're not showing any, or you're being flagged for being too spammy. Optimizing multiple pages for the same keyword is an old grayish/blackish hat technique that people used to do before algorithms caught up to them.

Might be good to take a few steps back and start at the basics. Have you checked out the Beginners Guide to SEO yet? I highly recommend it as your starting point: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

[ClaytonJ]

Jacob

Had a quick look, besides the fact few good looking people get married in Brooklyn the site looks v good. Checked on some metrics, got a few nice backlinks and loading speed for the home page was excellent. The sites does have a couple of broken links. Though as Logan states you are over optimizing some pages, especially the blogs ie each title has in it Brooklyn wedding photographer - when not relevant to the post. Plus most of your Titles are too long, try and stick within 512 pixels. I am also not a fan of having more than one H1. That I find can confuse google. I would suggest fix the multiple H1's asap. Also most of your images have no alt text which given it is a site of pictures I would resolve asap.  So that makes your pages look very thin on content. All that said I am like you a little surprised not ranking at all. One thing noticeable is it does not appear you have any strong domains linking with relevant anchor text.  It is a small factor but we have found can be important on niche sites.

I suggest working through the moz technical - if I cant find a solution, have to go back to basics. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

Hope that assists.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Jacob,

The others are correct in that the site is a little over-optimised at the moment and essentially every single page seems to be competing for that term.

I won't repeat what they've mentioned here but what I will say to add to their great comments is throw your website into Screaming Frog and have a look at what you see. This is a great representation of just how keyword-heavy the site currently is. As you scroll through the page titles and meta descriptions you'll see a wall of "Brooklyn Wedding Photographer" in there.

My other suggestion would be to consider boosting your content. Look for ways that you can expand on it and pad it out with quality content that will genuinely help the users. Internally for our agency we aim for 1500+ words, just to give you an idea. Most pages on your site seem to sit closer to 200 - 400 at the moment.

This extra content will help answer common questions users might be asking which keeps them on your site longer for all the right reasons and it also helps search engines understand what your site is about. Think of it like meeting a stranger and asking what they do for a job - if they give you a 1-phrase answer, it doesn't really tell you much. On the other hand, if they spend 5 minutes telling you exactly what they do, there's no question about it.

[donford]

Hi Jacob,

What the others have said is correct, but let me put some perspective on it.

Why is it that when you didn't know what you were doing your pages ranked better then it does after you gained a little knowledge and made some tweaks? Its because what you likely had was well written info and ideas from the heart. Google is very well equipped at understanding sites that are not perfectly optimized in the SEO department. Sure they won't rank as well as a site that has perfect SEO and well written, but they are likely to rank better then a site that only has one of those things.

Why? This is because Google's goal, and I say this very often, is to return the best site for a query to a user. A site that is well written and interesting with no real attempt at SEO is probably better then a site that has made adjustments to what they want to say in an attempt to impress a search engine. SEO is search engine optimization, not search engine trickery. You should ALWAYS air on the side of caution when making any changes to what you really want to say in hopes that Google will think more of you. Its like picking on the fat kid at school trying to impress the popular guy. It may appear like an easy way to do it, but you only make yourself look bad in the process.

That isn't to say SEO is bad, quite the opposite. By optimizing your site you are putting your best face on the site for the search engine, but that shouldn't come at the expense of your users, who are in fact the most important part.

I hope that makes sense and helps you understand what is going on,

Don

[Jacob_A]

Guys, thank you so much for all of this insight! Everything you mentioned definitely makes sense. I'll be diving in and taking action based on all of this as soon as possible, and will report back if I have any follow up questions, and also to keep you posted on the progress.

Thanks for such thoughtful responses!