Weird SEO Problem with my Money Site - Advice Sought

This problem has had me stumped for quite a while now, I’ll greatly appreciate anyone who can provide any type of insight into this. Thanks in advance!

OK this is my current dilemma. I registered a domain that had my main keyword reversed. So let’s say my main keyword was “Dog Training”, the actual domain I registered and own is www.trainingdog.com

The domain is 7 months old now. I have a wordpress site installed on it with 4 unique self-written articles of 500+ words as posts.

One of the posts I made I optimized for my main keyword; continuing with my example, we’ll say that keyword is “dog training”. So the URL to the post that’s optimized for my main keyword is www.trainingdog.com/dog-training

That page has perfect onsite SEO.

Now the problem is my site, the root domain, ranks 1st for my secondary keyword, “training dog” (my secondary keyword being an EMD of my domain).

However, for my main keyword, “Dog Training”, my site has been doing the google dance for over a month now. Alternating from about the 14th result all the way down to 30th+ result sometimes, but typically it stays around the 14th to 22nd result.

Now this is the part that I don’t understand and want to change. For my main keyword, the one doing the google dance, (dog training) it is not the page www.trainingdog.com/dog-training that is ranked, it is actually just the root domain www.trainingdog.com

So if I type in my main keyword in google, go to the 2nd page where it’s ranked, the result found there is for my main domain “www.trainingdog.com” instead of my optimized page of www.trainingdog.com/dog-training

6 Months ago when I first started building a few backlinks, about 20 of them, I had the backlinks pointing to my root domain www.trainingdog.com. I used my main keywords, and secondary keywords, as well as a few variations of those keywords as anchor text. Those few backlinks were enough to get my root domain ranked for my secondary and primary keywords like I just described.

Now for the last 60 days or so I’ve been building Tier1, 2s, and 3s, to my www.trainingdog.com/dog-training page, the page that’s optimized for my main keyword. I am using correct anchor text variations and %s while doing this, as well as Unique, highly sentence spun articles that contain images and videos for my Tier 1s. And GSA for my Tier 2s and 3s

But www.trainingdog.com/dog-training still does not make an appearance in the SERPS. www.trainingdog.com continues to show up for, and google dance, for my main keyword on page 2. And www.trainingdog.com also continues to show up as result 1 for my secondary keyword.

Any idea why this is happening? Should I stop making backlinks to www.trainingdog.com/dog-training for my main keyword, and instead make backlinks of my main keyword to my root domain, hoping that it will climb out of page 2 to page 1?


Thanks.