How can I work out why my niche site isn't ranking at all, despite low competition?
- SEO |
My site targets a literary niche. It has a front page of 1000 words+ completely unique content, and about 30 article pages, each of which has some public-domain quoted text and some unique commentary on the text.
The site is a .co (the former tld for Colombia, now regarded as global by google) that's an EDM for my primary keyword. Primary keyword gets 30k exact match local searches per month
The site has a good number of tier 1 backlinks with good content from ADs, blogs and web 2.0s, and a good number of tier 2 backlinks to those sites
Competition for the keyword seems week. #1 results is a PR0 site (that's stayed PR0 after the latest update). The top 5 results are all PR2 or lower. The backlink profiles aren't great and the content is almost exclusively garbage.
My site is not deindexed and has no warnings in webmaster tools. There is nothing spammy about the site at all. It doesn't carry any ads at the moment and only has minimal 100% whitehat onpage SEO. A similar site I made for a different niche using broadly the same on- and off-page SEO is ranking #2 for it's target keyword.
It ranks in the top 20 for quite a few very low traffic related keywords.
The problem is that it doesn't rank at all for the primary keyword. Using tools it isn't in the top 200 and using manual searches it isn't in the top 1000. The site is about six weeks old and although it was indexed quickly, best I can tell it hasn't ranked for the primary keyword at any stage.
I'm completely baffled as to why it isn't ranking at all. Even if it was #400 or something like that, it would be weird but I'd at least have something to go on. But it just doesn't come up for that keyword in the SERPs.
If you could suggest reasons for this, I'd be super grateful. I'm still new at niche site marketing and this site being a total failure has been a bit of a punch in the gut. I've put in tons of work and genuinely believe the site offers visitors a lot more value than the sites ranking at the moment.
The only possible reason I can think of is that my site gets the "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the x already displayed." when you do a site:mydomain.tld search in google. But the only reason that happens is that it's built using wordpress, so some of the category pages (which only contain blurbs from article pages) don't get listed. But I find it hard to believe this is a problem because it's wordpress's default behavior and the same thing must happen with literally millions of legit sites. I only mention here because I'm trying to be 100% transparent and not leave anything out.
Thanks for your help. This is really discouraging for me because as it stands my site gets pretty much 0 traffic per day.
Thanks!
RIP Dad Oct 14 1954 - Mar 14 2015.
The best things in life aren't things
The best things in life aren't things
The best things in life aren't things
The best things in life aren't things
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