Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It is a little different approach but definitely creative and something to think about..Thanks

I did a pretty extensive analysis a few months ago.on the top 30 ranking sites.  I looked at page speed and user experience using  Google tools,   Page score, domain and page authority using  Moz tools and Trust Flow, Citation Flow and Backlinks using Majestic.   In some areas we performed better than the sites at the very top but I get it may be that we don't have the right combination of these factors to drive us to the top but we are not even showing up close to the top.  If we could even get to the fifth or sixth page of Google we would  have a base line of to start trying things but we are so far down it is hard to know what to try next.

It would be nice if the home page ranked for this term but since the domain name does not contain the keyword we have put most of our SEO effort into a page with the keyword in the URL.  That is the page that makes it to the second page of Bing.  We do point to this page from other strong pages on the site.

Our domain does not have the  phrase "swords" in it as it is the name of the company but we do use the phrase in may our urls.  We have optimized pages for the word sword and include that term in the url.   We have put a lot of energy into content with blogs and histories.  It all works for long tail keywords but for "swords " we are stuck.  It may be a competitive word and I understand why we may not be on the first few pages but  I can't understand why we are so far down and possibly not even showing up for that specific word.

I have looked at authority compared to the competitors in the top ranking and I can understand why they may be ahead of us.  We appear on page two of Bing which seems about correct., but we do do not appear in the first 10 pages of Google (maybe not even the top 50 for that term)which is the real issue.   We have  more authority and pages better optimized for the phrase swords than those further down in the listing and yet still ahead of us.  At least from my analysis.  We have also been around for almost 10 years so we are not a new site.

The domain name does not have swords in it but we do have a page which we have optimized for swords and that phrase appears in the url.

We do have some links with the phrase swords but we have tried to be careful with that.  Some are needed because it is the nature of our business and helps customers navigate the site.  I have looked at how often this appears on our site as compared to our competition who shows up in the first few rankings and we don't seem to have excessive sword links as compared to them.