Dropping Lower and Lower

[spyke01]

So, a little history here, my site is 10 years old, each year I do a theme change to keep things fresh. Over time the site has gone from static html/php to wordpress optimized with yoast seo. I target the area of college station texas mainly but have had clients find me from california to australia. My site has a DA of 26 and a PA of 36 for the homepage and the internal pages range pretty wide.i've tried to go after local keywords since I know that I'm still optimizing for the base keywords even if I can't rank high for them.

I have trimmed down some content over the years and used 301 redirects where needed. I try to keep my landing pages above 800 words and for blogs I try to go for 2000+ words. I have my nap with microdata on the site and this matches my info on google places/google+, facebook, and several other sites including the moz local sites. I do not list a physical address but have my business listed as a service that goes to the client.

I mainly offer web design services so my keywords are items such as "web design college station tx". For a long time my site was typically the #1 to #3 spot. This was before the personalized results and when that rolled out I was typically still on the first page when using a private window or a remote checking site.

My traffic has been pretty bad, in the early days it was typically around 75-100 a day but not I'm lucky to get between 7-12 visits a day. most of these tend to be for software I sell and not for my design services.

I have several social signals on my pages but I don't have a consistent social media or blog posting schedule.

I've never been victim to a manual penalty and I keep tabs on my backlinks and my competitors but I'm at a loss here as to how to beat out my competition. I'm considering creating pages for each local market and doing original content for each but I've never seen much result from this in the past. I'm also considering doing facebook ads as well.

Any ideas on this?

[MattRoney]

Hi there!

I expect you'll get some solid suggestions from the community, but in the meantime, have you ever run a Full SERP Report in the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool? I recommend it all the time, and actually suggested it to someone else about 5 minutes ago. It can give you a breakdown of the ranking factors for the top sites for each of your target terms.

There's info on it here and a video on using it for competitive research here.

[ChrisAshton]

This is a tricky one to answer without being able to look at the site, especially given how old it is. A 10-year-old site can accumulate a lot of "cruft", as Rand put it in this WBF, which may be a contributing factor. Even though you have changed quite regularly.

Beyond this stuff, have a close look at your user experience as well - is the nav easy to use? Is there a clear call to action? How hard is it for your users to find what they're looking for? etc. You may find it helpful to get a friend to take a look at it for an outside perspective on this stuff as well.

If you're comfortable with sharing what your site is I'm happy to take a closer look for you.

[spyke01]

This post is deleted!

[KaneJamison]

Agreed with Matt the comparing your site to #1-10 in the Keyword Difficulty Tool is a good start to highlighting what could be the missing component.

I'm willing to bet nofollowing all of those links is the biggest factor as well. Footer links for web design companies are a tricky business. One option that is safer than a sitewide footer link on a client site is a homepage-only footer link from a client's site. If you do that, I'd recommend "Fast Track Sites" being the anchor text, not "Website Design and Hosting by Fast track Sites", which is too keyword heavy for this type of link.

SEO is a zero sum game as well. If your site looks stagnant to Google, and competitors are active, it's typical that you're going to drop in results.

Some other notes:

It looks like you've got some relatively duplicate content on the site. EG:

• https://www.fasttracksites.com/web-design-college-station-tx/
• https://www.fasttracksites.com/best-web-design-college-station-texas/

Those are probably slightly aggressive and over-optimized. You could probably merge them into a single page.

Your SSL certificate is expired or incorrect, which is causing Chrome to add an ugly red security warning to your URL in my browser. That would be good to fix for users whether or not it makes a difference on SEO. If you don't have SSL setup, then you'll want to fix Webmaster Tools, because Google is indexing your https URLs.

[spyke01]

Thanks for the response Kane,

I'll look into the SSL issue, I know there is mixed content loading which triggers a warning on firefox's address bar but I didn't know that chrome was showing an error. Thanks!

I'll try and get the footer links updated like you recommended as well. I'll also look at adding additional content via a blog page so that things don't appear so stagnant.

For the pages you listed, I'll work on getting those integrated into one. Thats definitely a good case where it makes sense to have one page since "best web design college station texas" contains the keyword "web design college station tx" so it should list for both.

Thanks for the tips!