Australian search - ZERO visibility and stumped

[Brafton-Marketing]

Fair warning, this is going to be long, but necessary to explain the situation and what has been done. I will take ANY suggestions, even if I have tried them already.

We have a sister site in Australia, targeting Australian traffic. I have inherited what seems to be an incredible rat's nest. I've fixed over two dozen issues, but still haven't seemed to address the root cause.

NOTE: Core landing pages have weak keyword targeting. I don't expect much here until I fix this. The main issues I'm trying to resolve first are with the unusual US-based targeting, and the inability of the homepage to rank for anything.

The site is www[dot]castleford[dot]com[dot]au. Here's the rundown on what's going on:

Problems:

1. The site ranks for four times as many keywords in the US as it does in Australia.

2. The site ranks for a grand total of 5 keywords on the first page for AU keywords.

3. The homepage, while technically optimized on-page for "content marketing agency", and with content through MarketMuse, has historically ranked between 60-100, despite having a fairly strong DA with fairly weak competitors, based on AHREFs keyword difficulty, and Moz keyword difficulty. Oddly, the ranking has gone up to 5-7 for three day spurts over the past year.

4. Infrequent indexing of homepage (used to be every 2-3 weeks, I've gotten that down to 1 week).

Sequence of events:

1. November 2017 - they made some changes to their URLs - some on the blog and some on the top nav LPs. Redirects seem okay.

2. November 2017 - Substantial number of lost referring domains, not many seem to be quality.

3. January 2018 - total number of AU ranking keywords more than halved.

4. May/June 2018 - added a follow inbound link sitewide to an external site that they created. 20k inbound links with same anchor text to homepage. Site has a total of 24k inbound links.

5. July-Sep 2018 - total number of US ranking keywords halved

6. November 10 - I walked into this mess.

What's been done:

1. Reduced site load speed by over 150% (it was around 20 seconds).

2. Create sitemap (100 entry batching) and submit to GSC.

3. Improved MarketMuse score for the homepage.

4. Changed language from "en-US" to "en-AU"

5. Fetch and render - content is all crawlable and indexed properly.

6. Changed site architecture for top nav core landing pages to establish clear hierarchy.

7. All version of GSC created, non-www and www http, and non www https and www https

8. Site crawl - normal amount of 404s, nothing stands out as substantial.

9. http to https redirect okay.

10. Robots.txt updated and okay.

11. Checked GSC international targeting, confirmed AU.

12. No manual links penalty

I'm clearly stumped and could use some insights. Thanks to everyone in advance, if you can find time.

[JohnSammon]

Hey Irene,

Here are a few things to take a look at:

1. Internal linking structure (see image attached via screaming frog) - the homepage is the 5th most internally linked page. Increasing that, should help with ranking it

2. Have you done local SEO work in Austrailia - claimed locations via a tool like https://www.yext.com

3. Build links from .com.au sites to help Google see where you are located.

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[Brafton-Marketing]

Incredibly helpful. Thank you very much!

[Brafton-Marketing]

Well, seems that GSC contradicted this report. I don't think that's the issue.