Single keyword not ranking in US only

[ricalebro]

I recently took on a client who had a 6 month old site, and had not done any seo or link building. All links so far have been natural, I can't see anything dodgy that would cause a problem.

It's fairly niche so just sorting out the page titles and a bit of on site stuff got them ranking on page 1 & 2 in the UK and US for most of their keywords.

However their main keyword which is just the name of the product (lets say xxx and xxxs ) does not appear anywhere in the US search, despite ranking #10 in the UK and all related terms ('what is xxx', 'how to use xxx', 'benfits of xxx' etc) having similar rank on both.

They didn't have any analytics installed before I took over so I can't see any historical changes in traffic from different keywords.

Any ideas why one single keyword would not show up at all just on Google US when everything else is ok?

[NakulGoyal]

Clearly, it sounds like there isn't enough domain authority / page authority or off-age that is needed to rank competitively for that term. The other terms that you are ranking for in the US and UK, might not have enough competition that you were able to trickle through the SERPS and get higher positions.

I would look at the link profiles of some of your top ranking competitors and see what they are doing in terms of links and help / suggest / propose to build some natural / authority links.

That off-page is going to help the entire site BTW.

[ricalebro]

I should have clarified that link metric wise there is no reason why it wouldn't rank as well as all the other keywords.  2nd results page on google and onwards has many results with very very few links and very poor titles, yet our page doesnt even seem to be in the first 20 results pages at all.

So it seems like a penalty, but why with only natural links, and why on google US only or one keyword only?

[NakulGoyal]

There are a lot of ranking factors that influence the ranking for a certain keyword, right ? Given that thought, there has to be something beyond the Page Title / Meta data. Think about some of these things:

• Extermal In-bound links
• Internal Links
• Size of the site / Number of pages within your website
• Nature of content
• Images, Image filenames, Alt Tags etc
• Any social media related to that keyword ?

It's absolutely possible for a website to rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords but that does not mean if they are targeting another keyword, they optimize it, create a page and rank for it ?

Think about it, if Amazon.com wanted to rank for Car Insurance (Extreme examples, super competitive keyword and an equally strong domain). The site may have lots and lots of pages somehow related to Car Insurance (Books, DVDs etc) with Page Titles, On-page content and so on, but they still probably would not rank higher then the competition even though the competition may not have anywhere close to the link profile as Amazon.com

Does that make sense ?

In my opinion, it's a combination of content and internal/external links.

Maybe I am wrong and it's something else. Did you actually get any penalty ? Are/were any of your other keywords affected ? Keep in mind, your site is 6 months old. So it does not really have the age aspect as well as domain authority.