Question Ranking Issues - Onsite SEO?

[VmWeb]

Hi

I run a chauffeur company and we had visibility of around 3600/3800 on around 397 search terms from our industry we had a large number in the top 3 and top 10, however since the 12th March we have seen a huge decrease dropping to around 2000-2400 and lost maybe 70+ top 3 rankings, I increased the number of search terms to check across the board for about 1236 recommended by Google, this only increased visibility to 2600 although lots of number ones for small terms.

In the same time, a much newer site has rocketed back up from 3000 to 7000. The number one website is sitting on around 15000 and SIXT 32000

I have been reviewing metrics and data from different sources, adjusting minimising files, adding content, reducing the "duplicate content" caused by blog categories and other things. But our website keeps dropping.

I have checked the domain authority against the other two websites

THEEXECUTIVECARSERVICE .com - MOZ PA 43 & DA 36 (my site)
NO.1 Ichauffeur - MOZ PA 35 & DA 40
No.2 Egchauffeurs - MOZ PA 24 & DA 31

I have upgraded our servers to VPS, we have used Cloudflare and WP rocket Cache for some time.

The site has been built on a child theme, using Beaverbuilder.

The only difference I could really see between the sites was the HTML to TEXT Percentage for theirs was higher, although their sites are larger by download size and slower on Pingdom etc.

I am really lost as to why our website is struggling so badly, and would really appreciate some thoughts and advice on what we can do to correct it.

Does it need a new more streamlined design? do we need to restructure the internal links? do we need to increase strong backlinks? do i need to reduce the HTML size?

Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Julian

 

[Community]

At a very quick glance, I'd say onsite details are probably the least of your problems. Looking on ahref's your backlink profile has hundreds of Keyword anchored links, mostly from forums , community sites and web 2 properties such as weebly.

First thing i would do is remove the sitewide keyword footer links on the site, possibly then improving internal linking where possible on content pages.

Remove ALL duplicate content, whether that be through effective canonical attribution for paginated pages or redirecting appropriate pages/categories/tags to a relative page. I can see you've already used siteliner as this was a cached result :

Siteliner - Find Duplicate Content on your site

www.siteliner.com

Then I'd start working on that backlink profile, citation building can help you saturate those keyword anchors into branded and URL anchors but you've got alot of work to do for sure.

 

[VmWeb]

At a very quick glance, I'd say onsite details are probably the least of your problems. Looking on ahref's your backlink profile has hundreds of Keyword anchored links, mostly from forums , community sites and web 2 properties such as weebly.

First thing i would do is remove the sitewide keyword footer links on the site, possibly then improving internal linking where possible on content pages.

Remove ALL duplicate content, whether that be through effective canonical attribution for paginated pages or redirecting appropriate pages/categories/tags to a relative page. I can see you've already used siteliner as this was a cached result :



Then I'd start working on that backlink profile, citation building can help you saturate those keyword anchors into branded and URL anchors but you've got alot of work to do for sure.

That is strange because I changed all the settings and removed the duplicate content issues and checked with siteliner and it had fixed from the report you highlighted, but now it has gone back to the original results of high duplicate content. i will work on this again as i thought these issue had been resolved.

 

[Community]

That is strange because I changed all the settings and removed the duplicate content issues and checked with siteliner and it had fixed from the report you highlighted, but now it has gone back to the original results of high duplicate content. i will work on this again as i thought these issue had been resolved.

It maybe that I'm seeing cached results, so if you have fixed them then great. My observation is purely touching the surface using the tools available , it wasnt an in-depth audit of your site

P.S, Authority , DA etc etc is all relative and can be manipulated so the metrics generated by various sites should be taken with a pinch of salt and for assessment only, for example your lower quality backlinks from web 2 sources, will likely be giving you false authority metrics.

400+ links from low quality places, can easily be knocked off top spot by a new site with 5 well placed, real authority links.

 

[VmWeb]

Sorry, i just ran it again, and the new results are below

Duplicate 13%
Common Content:31%
Unique Content:56%

Which is again higher than the previous sites i mentioned.

So should i remove links that have been previously actioned by the previous SEO guys?

 

[Community]

So should i remove links that have been previously actioned by the previous SEO guys?

I would certainly be looking to even out your branded, URL anchors over keyword links. Would I remove them ? Would largely depend on individual links and it would be a last resort in my humble opinion unless its very obvious spammy and low quality.

I would bring down the anchored link ratios a considerable amount, get some super good authority backlinks ( again branded or URL anchors not keyword ) and monitor the effects.

 

[VmWeb]

So for instance, I checked Ahrefs and it gives scores

EGch - AHREF Rank 8,031,400 - UR 9, DR 20
TECS - AHREF Rank 5,158,987 - UR 43, DR 26
ichau - AHREF Rank 986,188 - UR 11, DR 43

can obviously see that Ichauff is def number one there, but you would assume that i come in second.

ichauf also has a lot of anchor links, whereas EGch appears to have less anchor links and more branding and trustpilot reviews.

This where i always get confused from comparing our site to others and not understanding where the main issue is.

Is it basically best just to ignore all these SEO software providers and say obviously it doesn't match with how Google is ranking stuff.

For instance, if you were to search bing for chauffeur service London, we appear 1st and EGch 5th

Yet on google, EGch 4th and we are 7th and then some spammy websites in 3rd & 5th with Ichauff 1st and SIXT 2nd .

 

[Community]

I would certainly recommend not paying as much attention to DA metrics as you are and instead look at the merits and downfalls of both you and your competitors. When doing competitor analysis you shouldnt be using a tools metric to give you an answer, you should be manually looking each backlink profile and making your own judgement based on the info you gather.

https://majestic.com is probably one of the better Metrics to follow in respects of quality of links, but again should be taken as guidance and yet another tool in the tool box to gather more info.

Personally I look at these types of metrics as confirmations of manual research, rather than using them as first port of call metric.

Exactly the same for site audits, usage of info from 10's of different sources of information to get a rounded more accurate picture.

Ultimately, the top 10 for which you are challenging for are all pretty spammy, so it would only take one of you to ramp up your branded phrases, get some GOOD high quality, highly related links and one of you would smash the others out of the park.

It seems like all of you are copying each other, getting crappy links from low value sources when really you'd all be better off not looking at the competitor. You also have no idea if the link profiles you are looking at are tangible, your competitor could have disavowed a large amount of their crap links............but that's another debate.

 

[VmWeb]

Yes it is a very competitive spammy industry that we are in, but i have relied on SEO chaps telling me they are doing the right way , when it seems they were just doing it the easy route.

Where do i find a decent SEO team that won't financially cripple me

 

[Community]

Where do i find a decent SEO team that won't financially cripple me

Haha, That's a million dollar question as what you get will always depend on your budget. If you want to PM me your monthly budget, id be happy to tell you if its viable for what you are asking.

Sometimes if the budget isnt there to do it properly, you are best off not risking spending lower as you will attract the pond life of the industry.

 

[VmWeb]

I might even be too embarrassed to admit that. but looking at MOZ i can see that there is about 10% of links that need removing for high spam score for sure, SPAM score of 3% similar to ichauff, but EGch has 0 spam score.

So all things i can look at improving quickly. Should i just use the google disavow tool with spammy links?

 

[Community]

No I would only ever recommend using the disavow tool if you are 100% sure that the links you "think" maybe an issue are actually causing a problem, a tool such as moz or SEMrush will not give you definitive answers to your link profile problems, they are just an indicator that "maybe" these links are not as high quality as they should be.

What many of these tools do not judge is alot of these lower value links, add to the diversity of a backlink profile, adding such value as diverse anchors ratios, branded and URL ratios and giving a profile a natural feel. If you've got 100 links of nothing by high quality links...........it's going to be obvious that they are links that have been built, so like it or not lower hanging fruit still has a place but in moderation and when assessed properly.

In todays Google overview, where Google's algo is capable of discounting links it doesnt really rate, disavow tools should only be used when absolutely 100% sure it's needed. For example if webmaster tools is indicating a manual penalty for "pure spam".

In my opinion disavow tool usage could indicate an admission of bad practice, that you or an SEO at some point on your site has done something wrong. That alone in my opinion isnt worth the risk, especially when you are not "de-indexed" or ranking badly, you've just been re-ranked and fluctuated in the wrong direction but still only a few positions away from where you were. For that reason, I wouldnt touch the disavow tool incase you done more damage than good.