SEO Help, Site not ranking in Google and Bing

[JJay]

Hi Guys,

I'm having a hard time working out why my site is not ranking, even though I have done everything that should at least list me in the first few pages in the search engines.

My website is http://www.express-homeloans.com.au

Even when I enter my company name "Express Home Loans", only 1 of my pages will rank, and it's on page 3 on Google, but on Bing my site is nowhere to be seen.

The first time I submitted my site to the search engines, it was unsuccessful because my robots.txt file was set to 'Disallow" my sitemap, so I changed it to "Allow" and re submitted my site, but it's made no difference. In the Webmaster tools, it shows that my site has been indexed, plus I'm even using the Wordpress Plugin "Yoast" to improve my SEO. A few of my pages including my homepage have been modified to near perfect SEO (according to the "Yoast" Plugin) so I don't know what the problem is.

I would have thought if I typed my own company name, I should at least see my homepage show up in the first few search pages.

I'm lost. If anyone can help me, I'd really appreciate it.

Cheers​

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[TheTruth]

It took me 3 seconds to figure out why you aren't ranking.

Have you talked to someone who knows about SEO?

If you are going to utilize SEO, you should do a lot more research to understand what it takes to rank in the search engines.

Just a heads up, the market you are in is probably the most expensive on the whole internet ( I am talking people paying $80+ PER CLICK), let alone organic rankings.

What is your marketing strategy other then SEO? do you have a budget?

 

[Nick]

You need to build links to your website- aka other people linking to your website in order to rank.

The fact that you have your name in the url is not enough, especially as there are countless other domains that have those keywords as well. Yoast SEO is on-page seo, which is generally considered to be worth 10% of total seo (offpage seo being worth 90% and considered way more important).

Submitting your page to seach engines is usually worthless and only helps with being indexed - which your website it is. Does not help with ranking high.

 

[JJay]

It took me 3 seconds to figure out why you aren't ranking.

Can you let me know? PM me if you like.

Have you talked to someone who knows about SEO?

No, I thought I'd try this forum first as I am already a member. I am new to SEO but I am reading the Beginners guide to SEO by SEOmoz and using Yoast to avoid SEO errors.

If you are going to utilize SEO, you should do a lot more research to understand what it takes to rank in the search engines.

What do I do if I can't even rank by searching my own company name and using all the keywords in my url and metatags, snippets etc.

Just a heads up, the market you are in is probably the most expensive on the whole internet ( I am talking people paying $80+ PER CLICK), let alone organic rankings.

I'm not interested in pay per click advertising, not yet anyway.

What is your marketing strategy other then SEO? do you have a budget?

I am advertising locally, in local newspapers, Yellowpages directory, fliers etc. Its my website not ranking that's giving me headaches.

Thanks

PS. My answers are under your questions above.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[JJay]

You need to build links to your website- aka other people linking to your website in order to rank.

The fact that you have your name in the url is not enough, especially as there are countless other domains that have those keywords as well. Yoast SEO is on-page seo, which is generally considered to be worth 10% of total seo (offpage seo being worth 90% and considered way more important).

Submitting your page to seach engines is usually worthless and only helps with being indexed - which your website it is. Does not help with ranking high.

In my industry, there really aren't many ways to have a great number of links to your site. I'm a mortgage broker in 1 city.

 

[goodfella]

Don't listen to the dude above that say you're in too competitive of a niche. You just need to readjust your strategy. Since you domain is .com.au I'm guessing you're targeting an Australian audience. You're ranking on the 3rd page in google Australia for your company name.

What you need to do is in order to get a share of the home loans market is to change the title tags on seo yoast to target an alternative keyword from "home loans" to something less competitive (I'll pm you the keywords). Make sure you update and add more content on you're homepage to include the keyword.

Then target low comp long tail keywords and get articles written on those topics so you can increase the overall traffic coming to the site. Thirdly, you should focus on getting links from high quality and high pr sites. Links wouldn't have played a big role if you were in a low comp niche but since home loans isn't exactly the easiest industry to rank websites for, links WILL matter.

Hope that helps

 

[JJay]

Don't listen to the dude above that say you're in too competitive of a niche. You just need to readjust your strategy. Since you domain is .com.au I'm guessing you're targeting an Australian audience. You're ranking on the 3rd page in google Australia for your company name.

What you need to do is in order to get a share of the home loans market is to change the title tags on seo yoast to target an alternative keyword from "home loans" to something less competitive (I'll pm you the keywords). Make sure you update and add more content on you're homepage to include the keyword.

Then target low comp long tail keywords and get articles written on those topics so you can increase the overall traffic coming to the site. Thirdly, you should focus on getting links from high quality and high pr sites. Links wouldn't have played a big role if you were in a low comp niche but since home loans isn't exactly the easiest industry to rank websites for, links WILL matter.

Hope that helps

yes, I'm targeting Melbourne, Australia. I don't know how you found me ranked number 3 for my name in Australia, unless you are getting me mixed up with another broker with Express in their name, there are a few. There is unfortunately another company called "Finance Express Home Loans".

I really don't know how I'm going to get other websites to put my links on their pages. I'm dealing directly with consumers for the most part, all the other mortgage brokers and lending institutions are direct competition.

I'll have to dig deeper. There are some guys on Fiverr who apparently can create a lot of links to your site. Not sure if they are legit or not though.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[goodfella]

yes, I'm targeting Melbourne, Australia. I don't know how you found me ranked number 3 for my name in Australia, unless you are getting me mixed up with another broker with Express in their name, there are a few. There is unfortunately another company called "Finance Express Home Loans".

I really don't know how I'm going to get other websites to put my links on their pages. I'm dealing directly with consumers for the most part, all the other mortgage brokers and lending institutions are direct competition.

I'll have to dig deeper. There are some guys on Fiverr who apparently can create a lot of links to your site. Not sure if they are legit or not though.

You're on the 3rd page for google.com.au. And I would avoid Fiverr, theres only so much value you get for 5 dollars. You'll just end up getting crappy links from low quality websites that will hurt your rankings and even make it harder for you to rank.

I do sell high pr links privately maybe pm if you're interested.

 

[Nick]

The good thing is that your competitors do not have that many links as well and for the australian google search engine, your term is not competitive at all. Some backlinks will definitively get you to top spot, but make sure not to do anything stupid (blasting thousands of links from fiverr is stupid and can get you penalized)

(Example of a website where your number one competitor has links
Finance Directory - Finance-Mortgage Loans

1. I would start with basic stuff that any business has access to and give you links, like setting up social profiles on twitter, facebook, youtube and placing a link to your business on the profile page etc..

If you are looking for inspiration, check out this website listing legit, white hat social profiles:

Social Media Networks Currently Tracked By KnowEm

They also offer to build the links for you, but are way overpriced. Their seo helpfulness is very limited, but add an air of legitimacy to your business and diversify your backlinks profile. Low effort to obtain some links, just sign up, name, address, place a link, etc..

2. Then go do basic stuff, local directories in australia, business directories, etc... You can look up your competitor's backlinks and see where they get their links from. If you are a legit business you ll have no problem getting accepted in local business directories.

3. If you still need links, prepare to write content in exchange for inserting links in your article. There are universal websites that accept any type of articles and you can link to any niche- like ezinearticles, squidoo, hubpages, etc... Although optimally would be to find out sites in your niche that allow you to "guest post" it's called the procedure.

4. Buy links. A good rule of thumb is to purchase links on websites that will send you potential visitors and clients regardless of the seo benefits. If someone sells you a link on a website that has nothing to do with your business and you can't imagine visitors coming from that website and becoming clients, that's a bad link for seo as well. There are other ways to assess the quality of a link, but this is a good one for those inexperienced in seo.

 

[JJay]

You're on the 3rd page for google.com.au. And I would avoid Fiverr, theres only so much value you get for 5 dollars. You'll just end up getting crappy links from low quality websites that will hurt your rankings and even make it harder for you to rank.

I do sell high pr links privately maybe pm if you're interested.

I'm showing up in a local directory which is near useless called Start Local. My actual site is nowhere.

PM your offer.

Cheers

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[JJay]

The good thing is that your competitors do not have that many links as well and for the australian google search engine, your term is not competitive at all. Some backlinks will definitively get you to top spot, but make sure not to do anything stupid (blasting thousands of links from fiverr is stupid and can get you penalized)

(Example of a website where your number one competitor has links
Finance Directory - Finance-Mortgage Loans

1. I would start with basic stuff that any business has access to and give you links, like setting up social profiles on twitter, facebook, youtube and placing a link to your business on the profile page etc..

If you are looking for inspiration, check out this website listing legit, white hat social profiles:

Social Media Networks Currently Tracked By KnowEm

They also offer to build the links for you, but are way overpriced. Their seo helpfulness is very limited, but add an air of legitimacy to your business and diversify your backlinks profile. Low effort to obtain some links, just sign up, name, address, place a link, etc..

2. Then go do basic stuff, local directories in australia, business directories, etc... You can look up your competitor's backlinks and see where they get their links from. If you are a legit business you ll have no problem getting accepted in local business directories.

3. If you still need links, prepare to write content in exchange for inserting links in your article. There are universal websites that accept any type of articles and you can link to any niche- like ezinearticles, squidoo, hubpages, etc... Although optimally would be to find out sites in your niche that allow you to "guest post" it's called the procedure.

4. Buy links. A good rule of thumb is to purchase links on websites that will send you potential visitors and clients regardless of the seo benefits. If someone sells you a link on a website that has nothing to do with your business and you can't imagine visitors coming from that website and becoming clients, that's a bad link for seo as well. There are other ways to assess the quality of a link, but this is a good one for those inexperienced in seo.

I need to be tight with my budget right now but ill look into it. I have a link to my website from my LinkedIn profile and a Yellow Pages Online (paid) listing. Doesn't this count for anything?

I may have to get onboard with some Real Estate agents and work out some sort of arrangement where I can advertise on their site in exchange for commission from any business it generates.

When you say that my keyword isn't competitive at all, are you saying "Home Loans" in general isn't competitive, or my chosen keyword is not a good one?

I'm on 3 or 4 local directories and they are proving to be useless with zero enquiries so far.

Thanks

 

[Nick]

I have a link to my website from my LinkedIn profile and a Yellow Pages Online (paid) listing. Doesn't this count for anything?

When you say that my keyword isn't competitive at all, are you saying "Home Loans" in general isn't competitive, or my chosen keyword is not a good one?

I'm on 3 or 4 local directories and they are proving to be useless with zero enquiries so far.

The Keyword "Express Home Loans" in the australian google do not seem to be that competitive to me, based on the low quality profile of the websites that rank in top and the fact that you are already on page 3 with virtually no offpage seo done so far.

Most of the links you said that are useless because of zero inquiries may be useful though because of the search engine value that the links offer. Perhaps that is the reason you are on the third page, without them you would be lower.

Nevertheless, it's not a matter of 2-3 weak links here and there to get you ranked , local directories and social profiles are weak links. Even quality article directories are weak links. If you build these kind of links you need to think in terms of acquiring on the order of hundreds of links to see some significant results in serps. A couple of weak links will not make a difference.

If you are looking to build just a couple of links, look for higher quality links. These require either high creativity - and someone researching your exact niche to find out these link opportunities - or a high budget (simply paying for them).

Your website also seems to have some internal structuring problems, the page that i see you rank in page 3 of google:

http://www.express-homeloans.com.au/loan-types/

Seems to be an error page 404 page.

You can add your website to google webmaster tool (www.google.com/webmasters/tools) and google will point you things that are wrong with your website - as far as indexing and crawling goes, so you should definitively do that, you could avoid the whole disallow fiasco in the first place.

In my opinion the answer to your question why do you not rank is due to virtually no links that you have and this is where you may want to take a look. The niche is not competitive and you should definitively rank in top if you put some effort, don't be discouraged.

Good Luck

 

[splok]

I would have thought if I typed my own company name, I should at least see my homepage show up in the first few search pages.

If I named my business "Credit Cards", do I deserve to rank for that term? Your business name is totally generic. You're competing with every other website in the world that has any relation to home loans. If you want to rank for something without some colossal effort, you need to be more focused.

In my industry, there really aren't many ways to have a great number of links to your site.

Oh? Somehow your competition was able to get thousands upon thousands of links...

I'm a mortgage broker in 1 city.

Then why are you focusing on a generic keyword? Why not "home loans cityname/cityname home loans/citynames mortgages/etc."? Maybe that's not the name of your business, but that's how new customers are going to find you.

There are some guys on Fiverr who apparently can create a lot of links to your site.

Don't buy SEO packages involving "lots" of anything unless you understand exactly what you're doing. You can negatively affect your ranking in ways that can be very difficult to recover from.

I have a link to my website from my LinkedIn profile and a Yellow Pages Online (paid) listing. Doesn't this count for anything?

Your competition likely has thousands of links. If you really want to dig into it, you need to start researching what they're doing. There are lots of tools to help, site explorer and serpiq are a couple that I've used.

You need to understand that you're in no way entitled to rank for anything. You are competing with thousands of sites, and Google puts 10 of those on the front page. Is your site really in the top 10 most useful on the entire internet for your search terms?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[goodfella]

Then why are you focusing on a generic keyword? Why not "home loans cityname/cityname home loans/citynames mortgages/etc."? Maybe that's not the name of your business, but that's how new customers are going to find you.

That's another good strategy to target a keyword like "home loans melbourne" Since you're just based in 1 city it would be the obvious thing to do. Like splok said make your site more valuable, answer questions related to home loans that clients may have through high quality content. Heck you could even start off with a new domain with "melbourne" in it to make it easier to rank, plus your current domain really has zero authority.

 

[JJay]

Ill look further into your responses.

Would creating a blog for my site improve things? My Wordlress theme already has an option to create one. There wouldn't be many (if any) Mortgage/ Finance brokers who have a blog, that's for sure, it would just be a matter of getting readers. Not sure if there would be a big enough market for it though.

 

[goodfella]

Would creating a blog for my site improve things?

Yea it would definitely get more people coming to your site and as long as people are searching there is a market. So go after keywords that even have 50 searches per month as long as their low comp.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Tom.V]

After a quick lookover, I'd go back through and do an on-site SEO audit.

1. Modify your titles appropriately to specifically target your keywords you are attempting to rank for, for each page.
-Personally, I like to create a targetting spreadsheet with each page outlined. Include URL, Title, Meta description, target keyword(s), and rankings for each keyword.
2. Try using some contextual keyword anchors for internal linking within your content.
3. In the Yoast plugin, under titles & metas, under post types, under pages edit "%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%" to be "%%title%% %%page%%". This will give you full control over your head titles and not adding "- sitename" to the end of all titles.
4. Get citations. You are a local business, get local business listings.
5. Be VERY careful building links if you are as green as I think you are. Google has been making more and more algo changes lately, just tread carefully. Take a look at any IM forums, people are losing their shit.
6. As splok said, research your competition. Do what they're doing.

Hope that helps!

 

[KLaw]

Jj,

I am in the same boat as you. I have no clue what I am doing, but was able to create a webpage - delawarepainting101.com. I guess this was this easy part. Now I've got to figure out the seo end. Thanks a lot to all of the above that gave some great advice. I appreciate it!!!

 

[JJay]

After a quick lookover, I'd go back through and do an on-site SEO audit.

1. Modify your titles appropriately to specifically target your keywords you are attempting to rank for, for each page.
-Personally, I like to create a targetting spreadsheet with each page outlined. Include URL, Title, Meta description, target keyword(s), and rankings for each keyword.
2. Try using some contextual keyword anchors for internal linking within your content.
3. In the Yoast plugin, under titles & metas, under post types, under pages edit "%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%" to be "%%title%% %%page%%". This will give you full control over your head titles and not adding "- sitename" to the end of all titles.
4. Get citations. You are a local business, get local business listings.
5. Be VERY careful building links if you are as green as I think you are. Google has been making more and more algo changes lately, just tread carefully. Take a look at any IM forums, people are losing their shit.
6. As splok said, research your competition. Do what they're doing.

Hope that helps!

2. Try using some contextual keyword anchors for internal linking within your content.

Can you explain this a bit further?

3. In the Yoast plugin, under titles & metas, under post types, under pages edit "%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%" to be "%%title%% %%page%%". This will give you full control over your head titles and not adding "- sitename" to the end of all titles.

According to Yoast, having your site name at the end of the page titles was advantageous?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.