How ot optimise a website for competitive keywords?

[nasi_bg]

Hi guys,

I hope to find some good answers to my questions, because here are some of the best SEO's in the world.

I'm doing SEO as a hobby for a few years and had some very good results before the latest Google updates. Now I'm not able to rank any website for competitive keywords. The last project I started is this website (man and van hire company targeting London market).
The problem is that I can't rank even in Top 100 in Google UK for the main keywords like: "man and van london" , "man and van service london" ,"london man & van"...
The site has over 1k good backlinks (according to Ahrefs), unique content, titles and descriptions but still can't rank well. Am i missing something? Few years back that was more than enough to rank well in Google.
I will be very grateful to hear your suggestions and opinions.

[Matt-Williamson]

I would definitely say that your site is over-optimised and that you are having issues as you have built a lot of landing pages for locations which are very similar just with postcodes and location names being the main difference.I know you have tried to write unique content and specific location information but it still feels very similar and over-optimised purely written as an aggressive way to rank in all these London locations. I would say your site could be classed as being full of doorway pages for all the locations and this is definitely something Google doesn't like and falls fowl of their guidelines thus hurting your ranking ability. You also don't appear to have physical locations in these places so they are more of a service area. As you aren't ranking at the moment I would personally cut everything back focus on ranking for your actual physical location then you may want to choose service areas and build some pages around these, but you don't want to overdo this and you definitely don't want a cookie cutter approach. Look to build pages that really are unique. You also need to look at building the main service areas you cover into your main navigation not at the bottom of your page.

Here is an article on Search Engine Land which addresses this very well and gives you lots of points to consider in order to help you get your site sorted and hopefully ranking - http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Have you also looked at how others have ranked for the main terms you mention above? Competition that is successful is always a good place to look

Hope this helps!

Matt

[EGOL]

Matt has made lots of accurate points.

This site might have a Panda problem that would require noindexing, deleting, or improving those doorway pages.   If the analytics show a sharp drop in traffic that matches a Panda roll-out date that would help in the diagnosis.

Algo change dates can be found here...  https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/

[nasi_bg]

Thanks for your response guys. I got your point - need to remove some keywords repeating to make the website look more natural and need to update the site architecture. But I can't agree on "doorway" pages statemnet. Every page of the website has unique content. Infact, there is one of our competitors who OUTRANK US with copy/paste text on every area page like this:

"Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Barnet"

"Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Acton"

"Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Hammersmith"

How is that possible? I thought that content is king for Google but in this case a website with duplicate content outrank a website with unique content.