Rankings stuck on page 2 - what am I missing?

[OhYeahSteve]

My business website ranked on the first page for 48 of 51 keywords for years. Then 10 months ago I had a duplicate content problem from a bad plugin and every keyword ranking dropped off the first page. I got the duplicate content problem fixed, but I've been stuck with only 3 keywords of 51 on the first page ever since. This is a local site and without much competition at all.

http://www.pmaaustin.com

The Yoast SEO Plugin shows the on page optimization of nearly every page/post on this website as solid Green, but MOZ rates nearly all of my pages' On Page Optimization as an F. It rates nearly all these keywords as an F as showing they should all be optimized on the Home page. I don't understand that.

Also according to MOZ ,versus my competitor's websites, I have mostly the highest Domain and Page Authority. I also has the largest # and most relevant Root Domains. It also has the best written content, and the almost only active blog. Still, nearly every keyword is sitting on page 2. It seems like it wants to "Spring" onto page 1!  What am I missing?

[MickEdwards]

I have not delved deeper but running the site through Screaming Frog you have a massive amount of malformed URLs that have 301 redirects - example: /summer-2013-belt-testing-requirements//

So it looks like you have an internal rewrite issue creating double slash that you then need 301s to correct.  You need to check your settings and htaccess file to troubleshoot the core problem.

[David-Kley]

Could not get the site to load, so I could not take a look at what you have going on. I'm guessing you are messing around with some redirects.

But I can help with the MOZ and Yoast graders. The tools you are describing are only tools. If you look at the report that MOZ gives you, its only there to point out any areas where there may be missed opportunities, or if there are any standout errors. If the report is showing the page to have an F grade, it most likely is not set to target the correct keyword, or is trying to check multiple pages for the same keyword phrase. People often have issues with the MOZ grader, but don't understand how to set it up. I hope that one of the Admins on here can direct you to a tutorial, as I did a few Google searches and didnt find any worthy results.

Yoast is a great tool and plugin. One thing you have to watch out for is again: its only a tool and will recommend best practices based upon the settings you enter. If you have followed its recommendations to a perfect degree, that may get you a green bar and a nice score, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the page is well optimized for that keyword. For most SEO-graders, as long as you stay with a set character limit, and make sure the URL is search engine friendly and all fields are filled out, you will get a high grade. This can have nothing to do with the content that populates those areas, only that you met the predefined requirements to get you a high grade.

Once you fix all these redirect errors, I would resubmit the entire site and sitemap to Google, as they probably have a mixed idea of what the real destimation URL's are after all the issues.