UK company not ranking .com domain in UK
-
Hi,
we have a slight issue with our website. We have been proactively doing SEO for the past year, but we have run into a slight issue.
Our website is ranking for search terms everywhere except Our local area (UK)
We have tried creating separate sections of our site targeted just at the UK In search console. As well as targeting the whole site as UK preferred and setting the hreflang tags to en-GB.
Nothing seems to be working, any ideas?
Thanks in advance!
-
Darn. If you'd be willing to share the domain I'd be willing to do a full crawl of it and return the data to you. If there are no glaring technical errors then at least we'd know it was probably a combo of content issues and off-site popularity metrics which could be corrected over time
Up to you though. Seems complex though, like we should begin ruling stuff out
-
No it's not that i'm afraid. Thanks for your help though.
There's also no country targeting when you add a domain in the new version.
-
The targeting in Search Console isn't working for you very well right now as Google is overriding it. I might leave it in place but know that all it will really do, is limit the traffic you get from elsewhere. It does apparently push up your rankings in the location specified but only very, very marginally. Mainly it cuts traffic out from other locations, so based on that decide what's best for your site and business
It makes me wonder if you're working with the wrong search console property. Most sites are not currently on the domain-level search console property as it's currently annoying to set up (you need to edit DNS records or go through your host, instead of just uploading a file as it should be, as it has always been). This means you're probably working with non-domain level GSC (Google Search Console) properties
If that is true, you should have at least four registered (HTTP WWW, HTTPS WWW, HTTP non-WWW, HTTPS non-WWW). If you have always worked with a GSC property that references the site as beginning with "http://www." and then you move to HTTPS with WWW, and you still continue working with the old property, it won't do anything as it's the wrong one. When you change architecture you very often need to add a new GSC property to accommodate that. If that's true in your case it could be possible you've been making all the GSC changes in the wrong property to no effect, so do check that too
-
Hey,
Thanks for your response.
Are you saying that we should remove the country targeting that we have set in the search console?
The reason we're confident that there is a technical issue is because there are competitors with lower pagerank than us and far fewer links, that are ranking in #1 for relevant search terms.
Are there any particular things i should look for?
You are right in saying the majority of our backlinks are from overseas. But it's a catch 22, as our content is ranking elsewhere and not in the UK -
-
That can happen due to poor coding and misaligned hreflang tags, but more commonly happens due to a misaligned Digital PR strategy. In the absence of traffic data to dive into, Google will often look to popularity (link) metrics to decide whom it thinks should see a particular website. If lots of your links are from the USA and you are on a .com site then it might be pushing you up over there
Google's search console actually has a tool that forces a property / domain to rank only in a certain area. It doesn't move your rankings across though, it just nullifies any outside of the specified region (so either way you still have an uphill climb ahead of you, no magic bullets I am afraid)
I can only imagine it's having done something silly like building a UK site that lists prices in USD or something crazy like that. The sheer determination of Google to not rank you guys in the UK, should in the end point to an obvious and glaring error of some kind
It could be Digital PR related or to do with the structure of the site. Because Google seems adamant to rank you in the wrong area, I'd say it would be extremely likely to be a cascade of failures, converging to give you these unrelenting issues
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
-
New domain or subdirectory?
I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website. However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose. Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense. Thanks, Mickey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VSphoto0 -
Our domain is ranking quite ok on google.ru, but not at all on Yandex. What could be the main differentiator here?
Hi, The internet let me down on this one. What's the issue? We are ranking quite ok on the most important keywords for our business with our .ru TLD on Google.ru. On Yandex however we don't seem to rank at all. What could be the main differentiating factor here? Could the fact that our servers are in th US play a role? Thank you for your time. Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unilin0 -
Drop in rankings
Our keyword rankings have dropped greatly since July'12. Our site used to be in the top 8 rankings for the most competitive keywords on our industry and now rank 30+. Being new to this industry any help would be greatly appreciated. www.fragileremovals.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings
I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage. We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links. This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared. Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile. This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it. An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor? So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Can a domain rank for a competitive term with no links?
Hi, I know that this topic has received a lot of attention recently (Not all of it good) and I am not normally one to re-open a can of worms but the whole 'Camper Mens Shoes' fiasco has got me thinking. If you're not familiar with the story then you can get the highlights of it here - http://martinmacdonald.net/the-curios-case-of-camper-shoes/ My question is this - Say that you had a domain (Domain A) that was ranking well for a competitve keyword and that it had a good backlink profile. If you used rel="canonical" on every page of Domain A to point to a duplicate site on a different domain (Domain B) , would Domain B then rank well in place of Domain A? I know that this probably doesn't have much practical use but I am trying to get a better understanding of the effect of using rel="canonical" Would the result of doing the above mean that Domain B would rank well without having any links pointing directly to it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
Any tips for moving my blog from blogspot.com to a domain I already own?
I own a blog that's getting popular, http://iworktemplates.blogspot.com, and I have many good linking domains pointing to it namely, apple.com/iwork/resources. I wondered if anyone had any tips on how I could move this without loosing that tremendous link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoelWolfgang0 -
Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain
Hi, We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain. It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website. e.g. Before - we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com After - we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com This change took place on July 19th. After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com. Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped. We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made. Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged? Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages? Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation? Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0