I have to admit, SEO has taken a back burner to my list of priorities over the years. I've always been of the belief that if you focus on good, user-friendly content, then placement will come naturally.
And two years ago, my sites all had top placements on relevant keywords because of that.
Today, though, that's not the case! My largest site is on the 4th page for the most relevant keywords and phrases, where I used to be #1! And I'm not talking about highly competitive keywords; I target people in a fairly small local area with a population of around 60,000. Think of me like a hometown newspaper (which I'm not, but similar enough for the discussion).
So I'm hoping you guys can give me a few bullet points on what I might change. Here's where I am right now:
1. The domain name includes the main keyword in the name, and has been active since 2002.
2. The logo is an H1 tag that includes the main key phrase. Floating next to that is an H2 tag with the second most important key phrase. Both are styled to fit the area, of course, and are less than 250 lines from the top.
3. On the homepage, the main key phrase is used 5 times in the body text, and 13 times in the title and meta tags (cumulative). I have about a 2.5% keyword density for this phrase on the homepage. I could increase it a little, but I'm concerned that it would look spammy if I increase it too much more.
4. According to Google Webmaster Tools, I have about 137,000 inbound links to my site (a lot of which are on the same server, since we host a lot of local websites). I have about 80,000 unique visitors a week and roughly 7 million monthly pageviews... easily 100 times more than my competitors. The local Chamber of Commerce is one of the top results, which is a site that we host, and I know they have less than 200 unique visitors a month.
5. Most of my outgoing links have rel="nofollow" so that it doesn't look like I'm selling links.
6. I have no real errors in Webmaster Tools, other than a few pages with duplicate titles (these are in the user-driven areas, so it's hard to prevent that). I went through and updated everything with the recommended Structured Data early last year, and even though my site has a few issues on mobile, it's nothing that would make it unusable (the top error is that content isn't sized to the viewport; the second error just refers to Flash that comes from Google ads).
7. Load time is fast; Analytics shows an average load time of less than 2 seconds. The site is also on a dedicated server that I manage personally.
8. I block most non-US IP addresses through the firewall, so (according to Analytics) 99.3% of my traffic comes from the US.
Comparing myself to the sites currently in the top 10, none of them have any of these traits. Or even close! The second result is a single page on a generic Wiki-type site with the key phrase in the 4th section of the URL (eg, example.org/whatever/whatever/whatever/key_phrase/ )
So what have I neglected over the years that would make my placement suffer? My traffic has dropped by about 33% in the last 2 years, and it looks like that's mainly due to the search engine placement, so getting it back is pretty important!
Site dropped over the years, not sure why
