I have a website that has been up for 4 months now. We have been indexed by google, and we’re getting very minimal (1 to 5 clicks a day) organic traffic. Here’s the thing, within our space our website absolutely dominates everything else that’s out there. Essentially we are competing against a bunch of wordpress templates where people have 5 pages of junk content and then a “Request an offer” form people fill out to get in touch. Compare this with us, and we have a full blown education center with 10+ pages of valuable content that our users would want to read.
We aren’t even ranking for the keywords we want. I’ve gone 20 pages deep in google and we never show up. I look at my competition, and some of them (with horrible websites and no content) are hitting page 1. Of the top 10 page one rankings, on 3 different keywords, we have more content than any of them.
We didn’t focus at all on SEO during development, so my theory is that our SEO is so horrible we can’t even rank in the top 5 pages on google because we’ve done literally nothing.
The question is this, we have some cash to spend on SEO but don’t have enough to do the 1K monthly SEO expense that seems so common. Would a one time SEO optimization be beneficial enough or should we just wait until we can afford to do monthly SEO? Obviously the easy answer is “Just try it” but capital is limited and we want to put our money to best use.
[font=calibri]Without seeing the site and the competitors, it’s difficult to know what is going on.
(If you want an in-depth review of your site’s SEO, rather than general comments, you can ask for one in the Website Reviews forum. Before you are eligible to ask for a review there you need have reviewed at least 3 other websites with a substantial (i.e. more than just “nice”, “I like it”, etc) reviews)
A few things to consider:
[list][]How long have the other sites been up and running? If they have been there for longer than yours then it may take some time to dislodge them.
[]I’m taking it as read that you’ve used semantic HTML with headings and everything properly marked up, easy non-JS navigation, and so on. If not, that’s your first priority.
[]Just check that you haven’t got a <link rel="canonical"> pointing to the wrong URL in the page <head>, because that can send things pear-shaped.
[]Has Google indexed all the pages on your site? If they aren’t there at all, that’s quite a different issue to them not appearing in general searches.
[*]Have you got links to your site from any other websites? While spamming and trying to flood the internet with links isn’t a good idea, it is important to have at least some links out there to point Googlebot your way.
[/list][/font]
Welcome to the penguin etc update. 1k lol. Give that to someone and they should be spending mucho effort on it lol. Seo these days does not envolve anything you can’t do on your own. Google thinks age ranks all. So bob can put up a one page blogger site 5 years ago and beat you. In a few years though you will be beating him. 4 months is short in googles eyes. Keep hammering away at it and you will surpass him a couple years. Get a sitemap up at tell google about in the webmaster page. Both html and XML. Do all the social blah blah. Make sure each page has a unique h1 and title. Submit to the top 5 directories and review sites. Make a blog. Make a forum. Remain active on blogs/forums in your field. Etc etc. won’t take long.