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

[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.