Not showing up in search results for non-branded terms

[bookbubpartners]

Hello!

Can anyone see any glaring reasons why this post: "98 Book Marketing Ideas That Can Help Authors Increase Sales" isn't on page one of Google — or even page 10! — for the term "book marketing ideas"?

Many other sites with lower domain and page authority — even ones linking to this article — are ranking on the first ten pages for this term, and I can't figure out why we're not appearing anywhere. The same thing is happening for ALL of our other blog posts, and the keywords they're optimized for. According to GA, the only terms we're getting clicks from are branded keywords.

This subdomain is now 2 years old, and the domain bookbub.com has been around for 5 years. Our domain authority is 61. We have the Yoast SEO plugin installed and are following all the standard SEO best practices. We have enough external links to at least be ranking within the first 10 pages of this Google search. I feel like there's something technically wrong, maybe in the code or backend, but nobody here can figure it out, and our hosting provider WP Engine has no ideas.

Moz is returning crawl errors on our site, mainly "Error Code 804: HTTPS (SSL) Error Encountered" and "Error Code 803: Incomplete HTTP Response Received." I have confirmed with WP Engine that everything is set up correctly on our end, and that this is a known Moz issue. I've reached out to Moz's support team about this, and am awaiting a response.

But what else am I missing? There's got to be something — I've been blogging for 10 years for different companies and my own personal websites, and I've never come across anything like this before. I'm completely stuck! I'd appreciate any insights you can offer. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I heard back from Moz on those errors.

The 804 errors are a Moz-side issue — their crawler isn't equipped to be able to handle SNI. They're looking into a resolution, and this wouldn't affect search engine crawlers.

Regarding the 803 error: "When you see an 803 error, that means your site closed its TCP connection to our crawler before our crawler could read a complete HTTP response. You don't see this error when you go to the page in your browser because content-length is an outdated component for modern browsers and they will disregard this error, but the intention of our crawler is to report any errors that might be occurring. So the crawler is configured to detect and report such errors."

The only thing I can think to do here is go back to WP Engine with this information, but other than that, I'm not sure what this could mean or how to fix it, or if this might be the underlying technical issue keeping us from ranking.

[Hurf]

Weil, it is ranking - just not where you want it to - it's 15th on Google.co.uk for "book marketing ideas" - under a domain you may be very familiar with  http://dianaurban.com/98-book-marketing-ideas-for-authors - (and 11th for the US).

That may be helpful as it gives something to compare against after all, Google clearly doesn't have any particular issue with the bulk of the content itself.

At a glance, the results in On-Page Grader (https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader give the bookbub page a slight edge - though neither are far off the mark, with both getting A grades.

The URL on your personal site is a little more natural looking whereas the bookbub URL is perhaps a little too sterile (and looks a lot like you're trying a little too hard, perhaps? (However, that's my own take on it, rather than a direct violation of one of Google 200+ commandments)

With regard to your 804 error, this is going to be due to Moz and SSL/SNI not getting along, so it's going to something you're stuck with until Moz resolve this.  (I believe they are working on this and have made some progress, but nothing that's ready to go mainstream, yet - You'll see it referenced thought out the forum) : https://moz.com/community/q/high-priority-error-code-804-https-ssl-error-encountered

That should give you something to kick off with for the moment.

[bookbubpartners]

Well no... that doesn't really count as the post itself ranking. That post on my personal blog is simply a summary and link to the full post. What this indicates to me is that something is technically wrong on https://insights.bookbub.com, since my personal blog summary is ranking, like you pointed out. I'm just not sure what that technical problem is.

Also, I heard back from Moz on those errors. Will edit my original question above with their response.

Thanks for responding!

[Hurf]

Sorry, I was editing my reply to include the 804 stuff when when yours came in.

I understand that your priority is ranking the bookbub version, not your blog. One can't help but suspect that something may be amiss with/on the site, but it's not good practice to speculate too much before we investigate.

Let's see if we can't use the power of Moz and find what the issue is...

[Hurf]

It would also be worth running through a best practice guide for implementing HTTPS on this site, as this can cause problems with link dilution etc. if not carried out correctly:

1. Ensure your HTTPS site version is added in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. In Google Search Console, add both the www and non-www versions. Set your preferred domain under the HTTPS versions.
2. 301 redirect HTTP URL versions to their HTTPS versions sitewide.
3. Ensure all internal links point to the HTTPS version URLs sitewide.
4. Ensure canonical tags point to the HTTPS URL versions.
5. Ensure your XML Sitemap includes the HTTPS URL versions.
6. Ensure all external links to your site that are under your control, such as social profiles, point to the HTTPS URL versions.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/https-setup-causing-seo-issues-254236

[bookbubpartners]

Hello, thanks for your suggestion! I've double checked all of these items. The only ones I needed to take action on were:

#4 - some of the internal links in our oldest blog posts were still linking to the http:// version, so I installed https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ to automatically fix those hyperlinks site-wide.

#6 - I updated a couple URLs in our Twitter bio and Facebook page.

I can see how fixing these two issues could help improve our site's rankings, but I'm still doubtful that these two issue have caused our site to be completely unfindable for non-branded terms on search engines though. Would love to hear any other ideas people have!