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JordanLowry

I crawled your site and you have roughly 30 pages with under 300 words on them and the rest of your pages are under 1000 words or so. I'd recommend building out some of the content on these thinner pages.

You also have some paginated urls with a /page/ folder attached to them that you could apply a meta no index tag to and remove from Google.

I'd also look at disabling your current SEO plugin because "Your SEO optimized title" appears on all the pages and is causing your duplicate title tag issue. And I know meta descriptions aren't a ranking factor but all yours are blank and it's a great opportunity to build these out to drive extra click throughs from Google search results.

I hope that helps a bit.

JordanLowry

I dont think there is a hard and fast rule for this. I have noticed ranking increases and page traffic after building out additional directories within a site. It took around a week or so to get indexed and begin ranking within the serps and drive traffic back to the site. This was a site with a modest domain authority. I think it depends on a variety of factors. One thing id recommend is track all the keywords you hope to rank for and keep an eye on the indexation of your site.

JordanLowry

Is there anyway you could try to do both and see which one yields greater results? That might be a better approach instead of limiting yourself.

JordanLowry

This may be a silly question but have you checked in Google Webmaster tool's? I have noticed for some clients I work on Moz may not always show all the backlinks but it is still a good starting point to see if you have any questionable links pointing to your domain. Whereas Search Console or Webmaster tools gives a more complete breakdown of all my backlinks.

If you have Search Console set up download all your backlinks and compare it the other backlink checking tools you have.

JordanLowry

The issue is that there are duplicate title tags on the site. You could have a developer remove the extra title tag that say "Your SEO optimized title". Then, you would need to work with a developer to correct the tag issue also. Currently, there isn't any content within the tag just leftover generic text "page contents". I'm not a developer but it appears as if it's an issue with the theme and these appear to be generic default settings. You can view this on any page of your site by pressing "CTRL U" on a PC and then pressing "CTR F" and search for <title>or <body> and you should be able to see the code issues. The Moz report could be incorrect I looked and you definitely have more than 50 words on certain pages but the majority of the pages are thin content. I wouldn't pay too much attention to that report. Also, just because Moz or another tool can't recognize certain content doesn't mean Google isn't actively crawling and indexing it. To double check this take a page where Moz is telling you there is 50 words or no content and do a "fetch and render" in Google Webmaster tools. This will show you how Google is viewing the page and will be a more accurate representation of what they are viewing. I hope that helps clear up the situation a bit more. Like I said I'm not a developer so that's my best guess as to what's going on.</title>

JordanLowry

I worked with a company that had done this same thing a few years back and experienced roughly a 30% drop in traffic and revenues. Of course with solid SEO and digital marketing you will slowly start to build everything back up. However the new branding initiative could be a good thing too and the company may see improvements in revenue.

Here are some resources to help with your rebrand:

https://moz.com/ugc/overcoming-a-rebrand-seo-search-engine-opportunities

http://searchengineland.com/rebranding-seo-important-considerations-184208

JordanLowry

Like Gaston said there are quite a few tools that regularly crawl the SERP's and return rankings periodically. I recently came across a free tool called Traffic Travis that is pretty accurate and will let you set up campaigns and upload keywords you want to track and provide ranking data in Bing, Google and even Yahoo I believe. Going a step further you can specifiy which Country you want to track rankings in and even conduct some keyword research within the tool as well.

Going a step further you can specify which Country you want to track rankings in and even conduct some keyword research within the tool as well.

Hope this helps some let me know if you have any more questions.

JordanLowry

Your welcome I hope that helps you some.

JordanLowry

Sorry I couldn't attach the screenshot. But I wouldn't panic too much a lot of times websites tend to experience a loss in rankings after web redesigns so I'd give it some time and see if rankings improve. In the meantime, I'd look at updating the code to remove the extra title tag and fix the body tags.

JordanLowry

First I assume you have webmaster tools set up?

They have a robots.txt tester tool which you can test out different parameters to make sure you get the right syntax. For example color would be blocked by: Disallow: /?color=91* and you would follow that similar format more or less.

If you are confused I highly recommend reading through Moz's robots.txt best practices guide before you make any changes. Be sure to test all out in webmaster tools(search console)>robots.txt tester.

Let me know if you run into any problems.

JordanLowry

I did a quick search and it appears this question was asked in the Q & A section a little while ago but here are a few resources I found. Google has a tool called shopping insights which will give you some more geographical keyword information. Also there is another tool called Follow that has a free plan which should allow you to get some demographic insights into keywords. Here is the original question asked on Moz back in 2014.

Hope this helps you out some.

JordanLowry

SEO takes time to yield results and I wouldn't worry much about your domain authority being .1%. Reading your response I don't personally see anything that would signal alarm bells yet. Also regarding WordPress, I am not a fan personally but I use them for my personal websites. The issue with WordPress is everytime you add an image, plugin or whatever it will create a new page and multiple files for your CSS and Javascript files. CSS and Javascript are what add interactivity to your website. This can slow your website down over time and cause unnecessary bloat. Now that Google ranks websites based on the mobile version of their site and speed is a ranking factor I would definitely keep an eye on your site speed.

However, if you account for these issues and take the proper steps you should be fine. The main concern I'd keep an eye on is site speed. If your website is loading fast and being indexed within Google then that's a solid start. As far as the hosting provider that's not important for SEO necessarily. It comes back to having a website that loads fast and is responsive.

Also, steer clear of Fiver and anyone who offers to get you backlinks for cheap or quickly. Any backlink that will help your business will not come easy.

Moz offers a lot of good resources to get you up to speed. I'd recommend reading https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

Hope that helps some.

JordanLowry

I just took a look and it appears your site is indexed at least when I use the Google operators. I know that's not the best indicator though. I also ran a quick site crawl using screaming frog and nothing insidious jumped out at me.

Here's a few things to check:

Look at your search console account to see if your pages are indexed?
Have you submitted an XML sitemap?
Have you looked at your server logs?

Based on your question it seems like your site is relatively new? If that's the case it will take some time to actually rank for more competitive terms. No need to worry just yet.

JordanLowry

I would think you would want to create unique content and either remove duplicate content or implement rel=canonicals. I would imagine hiding duplicated content could be seen as manipulative to Google.

JordanLowry

I kind of dig trulyawake.com. I would try to choose a name that would be easy to brand and market to people interested in those topics. Come up with a giant list and slowly weed out ones that would not be a good fit. If you are having some trouble Shopify has a neat business name generator that may help.

Ps: I think "The Theorist" would be a pretty awesome name.

Hope that helps some

JordanLowry

Personally, I've worked with a wide variety of content management systems and part of being an SEO consultant you have to be able to adapt to the clients specific business needs. The appeal to Wordpress is it's easier to implement SEO changes by using plugins. For example, if you have an image heavy site it's easier to set up a plugin to dynamically compress images and add another plugin to cache static resources to improve your site speed.

Whereas in a custom CMS you may need to work with a developer to implement certain changes and it can become costly on your end. But with Wordpress there comes possible performance limitations and security vulnerabilities since it is an open source platform.

Does your old site have a content management system by any chance? If not it may be easier from a content creation standpoint to stay within Wordpress. For example, if you wanted to add a new page because you identified a content gap would your developer need to code a page from scratch or do you have templates that can be easily implemented? How difficult is it to implement title tag and other metadata updates vs. using Wordpress?

I hope that helps some. It's kinda hard to give you a concrete answer without knowing what your backend system looks like and what limitations would be imposed by making the switch. In the end, it's not enough to have a sharp looking site if it's not driving leads for your business.

JordanLowry

If they are high-quality directories that are relevant within their niche then they would offer some benefit I would imagine. If they are low-quality directories I know Google devalues those links.

JordanLowry

I like gathertruth.com I would go with that one.

Hope that helps some. Good luck with the new website.

JordanLowry

Sorry to hear you have to come on board and clean up someone else's mess :/.

The first thing I would do is reach out to the development company and request they remove the extra site. It's very likely it's having an impact on your organic visibility. If that doesn't work you could request Google remove that website from its index based on a violation of intellectual copyright laws.

The second thing I would do is a detailed audit of all your redirects. It's likely there could be a few key missing redirects in there somewhere.

Request a copy of all redirects within your Htaccess file and make sure: they are topically relevant(think 1:1 matches no blanket redirects), and no redirect chains present.

Also, go into your GA and pull the top 100 or so pages with any sort of historical organic traffic and make sure they are redirecting properly.

Another thing which I'm sure you're aware of but whenever you migrate domain names there can sometimes be an initial drop in organic rankings.

Best of luck

JordanLowry

Maybe they are using really niche directories that are relevant to their industry. That could be a possibility,however this might help:

"Your Industry" + intitle:“write for us”
"Your Industry" + intitle:“guest post”
"Your Industry"+ intitle:“contribute to”
"Your Industry" + intitle:“submit” + inurl:blog
inpostauthor:guest + "Your Industry"
inpostauthor:”guest blog” + "Your Industry"
inpostauthor:”guest post” + "Your Industry"

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JordanLowry

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