Link building strategy

[roberthseo]

Hello Moz Community,

For the last couple of months we have been trying to improve our ranking in Google UK for the keyword  "church candles"

http://www.wattsandco.com/church-supplies/church-candles.html

We’ve been contacting relevant interiors/lifestyle blogs to feature our candles including anchor text linking back to our page. Our anchor text has been predominately our brand (Watts & Co) but also other key search terms (Watts and Co church candles, Watts and Co pillar candles).

We have been tracking our ranking for the keyword “Church candles”  using the Moz “ Rank Tracker” and we started on position 15 in Google UK. We went up to 12 briefly before moving down every week to 15, 17, 19 and 22. We checked today and we have moved back up slightly to 19.

Our progress seems to be a bit slow and inconsistent. We wanted to reach out for any advice on how we can move up? If there was any way we can improve our strategy?

Here’s the links we have built so far:

http://nostalgiecat.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/what-autumn-means-to-me.html

http://blog.pollyrowan.com/2015/10/5-small-ways-to-decorate-your-home-that.html

http://www.happyhomebird.com/2015/10/watts-co-candles-for-cosy-autumn-home.html

http://www.frolic-blog.com/2015/10/beeswax-candles-for-fall/

http://hisforhomeblog.com/lighting/watts-co-church-candles/#axzz3qhqN1wzA

http://lorilangille.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/sponsored-post-watts-and-co.html

http://www.californiahomedesign.com/product-finds/waxing-poetic-must-have-candles

Thanks so much!

[VERBInteractive]

7 Backlinks isn't really a lot, but I'm sure they are all high quality, keep at it, backlink building is a long game.

The first red flag that your site sets off for us is that in your robots.txt (see: http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt) you reference a sitemap that is not your domain http://www.wallpapered.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml. Update that to reference the proper sitemap http://www.wattsandco.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.

Also we would suggest dealing with your 404's we started crawling your site, 35% done and already seeing 91 404ing links.

You might want to consider exploring using Moz Local, although we have found the majority of converting traffic come from Bing Places, Apple Maps, Google My Business and Facebook business listings, the rest of the listings in Moz Local serve as great backlinks.

I hope that helps, good luck

http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt

[roberthseo]

Thank you thats really helpful. Should we re-direct all 404 links to our homepage: http://www.wattsandco.com/ ? Thanks

[VERBInteractive]

No, all of these 404's are from links within your site. You need to explore which pages have the 404 because they now have broken links, redirect all to the home page is a really messy way to deal with these. Do you use a crawler? If not I suggest screaming frog, the paid version is great, but the free version will give you an idea how useful the tool is there is just a limit to how many pages you can crawl.

[TheZenAgency]

One of the hardest things about SEO is having the patience to wait for results! Keep building your high quality links and you should see some results soon.

You may want to revise your page title tag as well, you mention candles in it 3 times, i would mention candles twice max although im sure some would argue with me, it just looks a little spammy.

As another suggestion you could also have some introductory text on the page describing the candles, what makes them unique? why should people buy your candles and not other candles? This may help with ranking but will also add value for users.

[EricaMcGillivray]

It's best to either do redirects to pages that are essentially the same - did the blue candle have it's color renamed to robin's egg and thus got a new SKU/page? - or to build a creative 404 page that helps customers find the most common thing they look for on your site and putting a search box to help them. Here's an article about creative 404s for inspiration.