Can't get past the 15th page of Google SERPs

[BrianJGomez]

I've been doing Local SEO for 9 years and have never had an issue that frustrated me as much as this one. I have a client who I can't get past the 15th page of Google's SERPS for their #1 KW. Here are the details:

• The domain is 4 months old
• In that 4 month span the site has gone from a DA 1 to a DA 24
• Spam score is a 0. I know this doesn't mean a ton but I can tell you from closely reviewing their AHrefs report, there's no influx of spammy links or anything like that.
• The design is a custom wordpress design
• The content is 100% unique and professionally written content
• The backlink profile (in my opinion) is full of high DA and PA sites from authority sites with high trust flow ... in my opinion their backlinks are superior to all but maybe a handful of competitors.
• I was not expecting 1st page results by now but I would have expected top 50 results a the very least. But to not crack the top 15 tells me there's some major issue here.

I really need some insight as to what could be holding me back here ... I don't want to share the domain publicly but but I will PM you it if you're interested in taking a crack at it. I will seriously pay someone a small fortune if they can help me figure this out.

[Vijay-Gaur]

Looking at the details provided by you. I am sure about few things:

• Your website is already ranked for few related keywords, that you might or might not be aware of .
• You are targeting a VERY high competition keyword.

Having said that, there should be no reason you should be moving up from the 15th  page for the target keyword. Please discuss the details, I would like to take this as challenge and publish the findings here to help others (without revealing specific details of the project)

Regards,

Vijay

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Brian,

As I reviewed your website and found following points to fix

• Most important (this might fix your problem) Your website is accessible via http:// and https:// .. this can be a major issue as Google would view your content as duplicate. 301 all your http requests to respective https pages
• Robots.txt missing from the website, add it and enter the sitemap location on it.

Few less important but relevant points to fix.

• Promote > "Main keyword" to H1 instead of H2 (you can take help of developer if required)
• Your webpage has 46 'img' tags and 43 of them missing the required 'alt' attribute.
• Your webpage is using 17 inline CSS styles, fix it.

I hope to get positive results with this.

Thanks,

Vijay

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Brian,

Unless you are able to share the identity of the website, it's going to be shooting in the dark as to what might be going on. You've categorized this as 'local'. Could you be targeting keywords that don't actually relate to your client's geographic location? For example, a business outside city limits trying to rank for a geo+keyword term inside the city.

Everything cool with Google Search Console? No warnings?

How competitive is the market/keyword phrase you are targeting?