Continued Drop in Rankings for Houston Office Furniture
-
I'm working with a new and used furniture client and we're struggling to improve rankings for their site. In the last week, they went from 25th place to 50+ for houston office furniture. Any help would be much appreciated. usedcubicleshouston.com
-
I was aiming for organically, and you bring up a good point, thanks!
-
Were you trying to gain ranking organically or in the 3-pack?
It's not likely you'll rank in the 3-pack for that keyword since you're not in Houston, like Logan pointed out. They rank in the 3-pack currently if you change the city to College Station instead ("Office Furniture College Station").
However, it is possible for them to rank organically for that keyword. Is there a reason why you guys didn't include the keyword you're targeting in the title tag? I don't see a mention of "Houston" at all.
-
That is REALLY helpful. Thank you!
-
Hi,
A big part of ranking for keywords with local intent (anytime a geographical qualifier is used in a query) is the geographical location of the business. In your case, it looks like you're about 100 miles outside of Houston, which means there's little to no value for the searcher to see results that far away (in the eyes of search engines).
The fact that you've got an exact match domain for a city in which you're not located is probably not helping either. Domains like that used to be a sure-fire way to get decent rankings, but nowadays, unless it's a logical fit, it's not going to help and could actually work against you.
I noticed a couple other things that could also be hurting your chances. Your canonical tags don't match the URL format that resolves in the URL bar; on the homepage, your canonical tag is http://www but the actual URL is https://www. To a search engine, this is a confusing signal and could hint at a low quality site. The other thing I noticed is when I pulled up MozBar, it says the target country is Romania, I couldn't find where that's specified in the source code, but MozBar is getting it from somewhere. This mismatch of country targeting could be working against you as well.
Hope that's helpful!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Expectations and Search Intent Alignment
I've recently implemented the page optimization recommendations provided by Moz Pro to help our site rank for specific keywords on certain pages. It’s been about two weeks since we've added these URLs/keyword parings. The optimization scores for the targeted keywords and URLs are looking strong. Also, we've crafted these pages with keyword optimisation in mind. However, we have a couple of questions as we move forward: Ranking Expectations: Since our optimization scores are good, when might we start seeing improvements in our keyword rankings? We know that SEO results can take time, but we would appreciate any insights on a typical timeline based on your experiences. Optimization and Search Intent: While the tool’s optimization suggestions have been helpful in regards to giving us a score for a specific keyword, we’re curious about how this factors into search intent. How does this tool take into account variations in search intent, especially if users search using slight variations of the keywords we’re targeting? Thank you so much for your insight!
On-Page Optimization | | Cricket930 -
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Implementing nofollow tag affect ranking
if a blog that is performing well on the first page at an average position of 4 for an informative term. The blog contains a lot of outbound links, adding nofollow tag to all of them affect the current ranking? There are few other same cases. Here is the link - monk.webengage.com The was a lot of other optimization done on the page but the ranking did not improve at all. Is the issue with my domain authority or is it due to higher backlink to other competitive domains.
On-Page Optimization | | Web-Engage0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
How to rank Product pages over its Resource counterpart?
So, I have a resource page coming up in the SERPs above the product page, obviously both pages are targeting a lot of the same terms... it's like one is how to use the product and the other IS the product. What's your take on getting the money page to rank instead of the resource page? The only things I can think of include making sure that (internal) anchor text hyperlinks are all powering up the product page, and possibly adding more content to the product page and it's sub-pages. Possibly even including the how to use the product info on the product page itself. Any other ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | wiredseo0 -
Table text : Does that influences the website's ranking ?
We are currently working on a new page for one of our clients and there is A LOT of writing, so A LOT of differents pages. If I decide to put the texts on table text instead of creating a link for another page, will that influence the ranking in any way ? I've been a web writer for only a year now and still try to figure out how to optimize the written part. Thank you for your answers.
On-Page Optimization | | marketingmedia.ca0 -
Which page to rank for a Keyword? Home Page or Deep Page?
So, we have a situation where there is one particular keyword we want to rank for. We have been up and down over the years, at our best probably position 4-5, and now at 20ish. Thats for our home page of course, which the majority of our linking is probably pointing at. We also have a sub page which is optimised for that particular service. The term is "web design brisbane".
On-Page Optimization | | MauriceKintek
So as you can imagine, Web Design is in itself a service and we offer others. Should we optimise our home page for it and remove the sub page?
Keep the sub page because its one our services and optimise both?
Do some kind of canonical thing?
Change our interlinking? All our competitors home pages seem to be the ones that rank, and it feels and looks better in results if its the home page, but if switching up to our sub page is better im all ears. Also if our sub page is somehow hurting or leaking SEO from the home page, id like to know as well. Would prefer to not have to provide a link, due to competition but if someone wants to know we can always PM.0 -
How is this page ranking?
Hi. A client of mine is being outranked by a competitor whose landing page does not include the keyword within their page content AT ALL. Nor does their URL. Nor do any image alts. And their page title features the keyword in the middle of it, not at the start. Their link profile is not great with directories and the like. They are not socially active.. I am confused! I thought content on a page absolutely had to include the keyword to get ranked for it. Here's the page: www.springsoft.ie, keyword is "water softeners" Any thoughts I would appreciate. Many thanks.Christoffa
On-Page Optimization | | Christoffa0