Website won't rank in home country (but does in others).

[Jeff_Baker]

I have a bit of an odd scenario for you.

I'm working with a content marketing company based in Sydney, AU**.** Oddly, this web property ranks for almost 4x as many keywordsin the US than the AU. (See attached). It also ranks much more favorably for target keywords in NZ.

This is despite having an AU ccTLD, proper geolocation targeting in GSC, and Google My Business and other NAP citations pointing towards an AU address.

To add to this geo-targeting issue, the site has absolutely bombed in search visibility over the past year. We are talking more than halving our search exposure.

**What's been done: **

1. Sitemap created and submitted.
2. All versions of GSC created and verified.
3. New site structure for top level landing pages.
4. Redirects okay.
5. Internal link structure okay.
6. Robots.txt and other indexing issues fine.
7. Google My Business fixed (Incorrect NAP previously).
8. No duped content.
9. No known penalties
10. Site crawl - no major issues.
11. html lang changed from "en-US" to "en-AU".
12. Reduced load speed by over 100%.
13. Fixed an issue with Yoast creating duped pages for media files (same title tags on orphaned pages).
14. Currently auditing and working through citations.
15. Removed .js banner causing indexing issues.
16. Removed a sitewide footer link from an external site, sending 20k inbound links w/same anchor.
17. http --> https redirects okay.
18. Title tags structured properly, and targeting well-researched KWs.

**Despite these necessary corrections, I haven't seen a blip of life. **

TL;DR,

• Poor visibility in general, especially over the past year.
• More favorable rankings in foreign search (not AU).
• Stumped!

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[effectdigital]

If you have regional redirects in place which are snatching up first time users and pushing them to their own regional page(s) or sub-site(s), those can interfere with Google's crawling which in turn affects rankings and indexation.

I answered a slightly different (yet highly similar) question here: https://moz.com/community/q/branded-product-dropping-from-1st-position-why#reply_392487 - so this answer might help you too!

Basically Google was crawling their site from the wrong data centre and then their bot was being bounced away, stopping a certain page from indexing very well. Google were even caching a page from one language, as the same page from another language :')

Could be that you need to exempt user-agent GoogleBot from your regional redirects. It's been floating around as an issue for a few people lately so... may be worth checking?

[Brafton-Marketing]

This post is deleted!

[Jeff_Baker]

I don't think that would be the problem because we are only targeting the AU and English language, so we never set up any regional redirects (there would be nothing different to redirect to). We only use the ccTLD '.com.au'

[effectdigital]

That's interesting, makes me wonder if it's the volume and quality of links from AU being smaller or lesser than inbound signals from other regions

• https://d.pr/i/ddx8Jt.png (Ahrefs screenshot)

Certainly seems like a possibility but would need a lot more work to prove. Basically download all backlinks for the site from all sources (SEOSpyGlass, Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO etc) and then re-crawl to see which ones are live. Split them by origin country, then put metrics (Page Authority, Citation Flow, Trust Flow etc) against all the links and see what 'region' most of the 'authority' (not the link count, the sum of SEO auth) is coming from

That's what I'd do next

[Jeff_Baker]

That's good thinking. I took a cursory look in AHREFs and found the inbound links to be fairly similar in origin to local competitors, but I didn't really evaluate them as thoroughly as this. Thank you!

[katemorris]

Huh. Let me be clear, this seems odd. Here are some questions to see if we can narrow a few things down.

1. What's the demand like for these terms US vs AU vs NZ? Do you have a set list to compare the three countries?

2. What is the competition in each country? About the same or are there new players in each one?

3. What are the local packs in each country for each term? Strong, weak, or non-existent?

I'm trying to get down to if this is a competition and market problem or a technical problem bc it sounds okay technically.

And to be 100% clear, none of your content exists on another domain right?

[Brafton-Marketing]

This post is deleted!

[Jeff_Baker]

1. Demand in AU for the targeted terms is sufficient (I'm really only targeting the AU) - the demand is definitely there. See image.
2. Competition - as shown above, the terms I'm targeting have an average difficulty of 21, our DA is a 42. In looking at the domains ranking for each target term, we should have zero problem ranking in the top 5 for each.
3. **Local Pack - **We now rank in the local packs. There is a significant amount of competition for our HQ in Sydney. Lots of content marketing agencies in the same area, and ranking in the local pack and maps.
4. **Technical - **I'm 99.9% sure this is technical problem rather than a competition or demand problem. I just can figure out what it is.

Correct, this content does not exist on any other domain.

[Jeff_Baker]

I took a deeper look. This doesn't seem to be the issue. My competitors have similar inbound link profiles by region origination. Scratch that one off the list!

[katemorris]

Huh. Okay, we are going to figure this out.

Did you change the domain recently? Within the last year? When was that footer link removed?

[Jeff_Baker]

Woo, thanks for the help!

We have not changed the domain, except for switching over to a secure site in November of 2017. The footer link was removed about 30 days ago.

[katemorris]

When did you change the URLs on your site? A crawl is showing some older URLs so I'm curious.

[Jeff_Baker]

They changed the blog URL pattern, and changed to secure in around November of 2017.

[katemorris]

Did they ever see good rankings and traffic in Australia? Do you have a date that things went south or has it always been like this?

[Jeff_Baker]

No they never performed all that well. Here's a chart of the avg. keyword position and impressions for AU-based searches over the past 16 months.

Strangely, here's the average keyword position for NZ-based searches (where we don't target at all).

[katemorris]

That only goes back to 2017, any data before then? Is there any information before the 2017 changes? I doubt they tracked it, but here is to hoping.

I truthfully don't like the average position metric site-wide, at least for my business. It doesn't tell a complete story. What does the average rank look like over time for 1) the homepage and 2) a product page like https://www.castleford.com.au/amplify/social-media/

Also, I tried to find blog/article content and came across a 404. Resources >> Content Marketing Library >> Under Ads "Read 25 tips for better Google Ads campaigns."

https://www.castleford.com.au/whitepaper-adwords-campaign-download - broken

Are there articles still?

[effectdigital]

Am still following this by the way, seems to be quite the mystery!

[MonaLisa4]

Still, after so many times, this problem happens with every home website. I have tried many methods of SEO to rank like Onpage and LInk building but face the problem.