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Google does look at h tags to understand the structure of the content on the page better, Googler John Mueller confirmed this several years ago. Therefore it’s good practice to have your H1 as a main page or title of the piece then main subheadings as H2, any further sub-headings needed to divide content under these H3-H6. A lot don’t go to this depth and focus on H1 and multiple H2s achieving good results. When I have taken it further I don’t believe it has made a significant impact on rankings compared to when I haven’t. 
Hope this helps

Thanks for the update Christy

It’s a shame as it gave a real incentive to people when it used to work properly. I’m hoping the Moz staff see this and give feedback or can look to get it fixed. Earning points and getting on the first page takes some doing and held some recognition over the years, so it would be good to see it working again

Oh on a side note sorry if this is in the wrong category wasn’t an obvious choice unless I missed it

Not as active as I would have liked recently but still visit and login, answering a question now and again, yet I can see my profile is still listed as unranked. until recently I was somewhere around 45-49 and have been for many years - the criteria appears to be what it has for the last ten years or so. I see people with lower moz points outranking members with far more points. I can even see one with 0 points now appearing in the top 50 so my question is - is the moz community rankings broken or have I missed something? I know once before I pointed it out and it had to be fixed...input from all welcome

The key is competitor analysis I would say in your case to work out what content the others are doing successfully. In reality, I have worked in similar (managed apartments that could be rented for work or holiday in well-known cities) and done posts around attractions that have earned links ultimately increasing the site's authority and rankings. I did an outreach campaign asking the places for some input and images that we could use then I wrote the post and sent it to them. These were posts such as top attractions in x.

I think the best way to answer this would be go look at the landscape - e.g. I used London Bike Tour and you will see what titles are ranking and then click the links to get an idea of the page contents intent - what I saw was mainly tours you can book listed. Page titles are important but so is the page content - even if you get to page 1 briefly if the searches intent isn’t served by your content you are likely to see poor engagement metrics and you won’t stay there long.

If you take Burgundy specifically the results landscape is slightly different with more pages ranking with specific routes rather than tours available from providers. For your page title in theory it would be possible however I would personally go more down the route of Burgundy Bike Tour - A Cyclists Guide To Burgundy. Again it is hard to judge without seeing your page and domain but it appears competitive, so it’s hard to judge your chances by page title alone. However in my opinion it would be wise to have it laid out more like this with specific term at the front and then additional related text after leaving room to capture related longer tail searches and encouraging engagement. If I were looking for a biking tour of Burgundy with the intent of finding routes I would be encouraged to click on one that says guide...

Have a look at Brian Deans Skyscraper technique - backlinko.com. in general if you put relevant content (such as decent long form blog posts) out in front of a relevant audience such as on social media you will find you automatically start to pick links up. Engage with influencers and interact with their stuff - you will find they often reciprlocate. Another technique that can be quite successful is asking others to guest post on your site or include their tips in an expert round up - that way you are often getting links without directly asking for a link. Great thing is if they don’t link other fans often will and either way you are adding more quality content to your site.

I tend to see bigger jumps prior to page 1 and then once on page one it can be slow moving sometimes gaining and losing a few places as it moves up. In the earlier stages you can see several movements in a month often weekly (hence Google Search Console having 7 day filters)  but again I tend to find slower on page one. It’s quite common to see ranking jump 3-4 pages or even more  on the way to page one. During the first 3 month or so you often see most movement slowing down in the months after as it settles to its potential on page one - again depending on what engagement and links keep coming in. I wouldn’t say there is a definitive pattern across all the sites and niches I work however the general improvement I have spoken about here is I have found common. I have seen others say it takes blog pieces over 12 months to reach their full organic potential.

Have you explored what the current landscape for both types of term is? I would start there so you get an idea if any with title tags of similar intent rank for the types of terms you are asking paying close attention to keyword order and the page content. For instance, when I looked at page 1 for a "[major city] bike tour" one of the top results had the page title containing "explore" however in terms of keyword order it was later in the page title and the on-page elements such as the URL and H1 were focused on the more specific term [major city] bike tour. I think you also need to take into account what the page content is - for instance, this one with "explore" in the title still had the intent of listing the best bike tours to book rather than route or landmarks again making the intent more relevant. I think you are right to think in this instance you would struggle to outrank pages that are listing specific bike tours you can book when I had a glance at the landscape.

I think it all depends on your domain and what your post is about as to how quickly it can start ranking well. To get any reasonable ranking for a reasonable search term with some volume I would expect it to still take 3+ months to gain any real traction/rankings in terms of getting towards the top of page 1. This is obviously impacted by the competition of the terms your blog is trying to rank for and also other elements such as your domain authority and so on.

Hmm, I am a big advocate of quality content and a good user experience with decent on-page SEO having a positive impact on rankings. However the majority of high ranking sites all have links - after all, they are a vote of confidence in the eyes of Google (obviously a very broad statement and not all links are equal or help). If your site is that good and lots of people visit it you would expect to earn links whether you actively go after them or not. In order to help yourself why would you not try to earn links, I would say, even if a low competition term.

In relation to your original post will it take longer to rank? There are lots of factors that can impact this but I would say it will definitely take you longer to rank and your rank would likely be lower. At a very basic level if you take two local business sites and one site does nothing other than have a great site and no links, yet the other has an equally good site but it has set up it's Google My Business and made sure it has links from relevant local directories plus maybe some local media/interest sites - Which do you think Google would trust more and rank higher? I have had some great sites that have come to me as clients - well optimised with nothing major needing changing to optimise the site but their rankings have all improved significantly in a short period of a few months through a structured outreach campaign earning links and ultimately increasing the DA. One final thought - even zero backlink experiments that have been successful have ended up naturally earning links and increasing their DA - to an extent worthy content in front of the right audience, such as social media, earns exposure/links.

Hope this makes sense...

Hi - In my experience doing a rebuild/redesign improving the content and then redirecting sees fluctuations with some rankings dropping initially but overall there being a pretty quick positive response to an improved site with rankings peaking for redirected pages between 3 and 6 months. With quite a few terms that ended up page 1 average position 1-3 i have seen the most fluctuation in rankings during the first 3 months - assuming Google is deciding where you should sit testing a higher position and seeing if you belong there. Hope this information helps a little

Hi Tawny,

It looks like the system is working again - my ranking is back.

Thank you

Matt

Hi Roman - yeah I was wondering if it was an issue that Moz and/or the community were aware of. I am still getting Moz points but my rank isn't appearing. I have been active on here in the Q&A since 2010 and never had issues before, to be honest

Thanks

Matt

Hi Alick - thats the same criteria it has always been and I fit that criteria but it isn't working...

I have logged in multiple times over the last week and I have 2032 moz points - something has changed or is off with the system.

Thanks for trying - hoping one of the Moz team might have the answer...

I have been busy and away from MOZ for a while, but over the years I have been an active member of the community. I have over 2000 Moz points and usually if you haven't been on in the specified time period you become unranked, however this usually updates in 24 hours of logging back in. I have been active again since Sunday and I am still unranked yet I have gained several more points answering a couple of questions. My question is - have I missed something and the system has changed (not according to the top users table) or is the system broken?

I think your problem is you have google all confused - your site still default loads http://www.makemoneyadultcontent.com/ if you enter it in your browser address bar. When you search in Google it now shows the https version - however you haven't redirected http version to https - links pointing at your site will also be still going to http which has all the links and authority pointing at it to rank but Google isn't recognising this and passing authority for ranking to the new https version it now indexes. Have you checked this article out - you need to get some 301 redirects in place to start. I also noticed your styling isn't working properly on https. Not sure what your site is on but if it's WordPress you can fix that with a plugin usually.

I hope this helps

hi - you will want to make sure all your canonicals are updated to https as these are now the master copy of the page. Check out this migration article from http to https guide from search engine land - https://www.google.co.uk/amp/searchengineland.com/http-https-seos-guide-securing-website-246940/amp

Hope this helps

It should do Ricky - let me know how it goes!