[HELP] New Website Doesn't Rank After Geographical Expansion

MadsDK · Oct 4, 2023

Hello lovely people!

I decided 2-3 months ago to expand my business to another country with the same brand and website design. I did this by duplicating the original website to a new domain, translating everything, and hiring a freelancer to proofread the website. The new website is connected to the same Google Analytics and Google Search Console and is hosted on the same host as the original.

After launch, there have been no problems getting the different pages indexed, but they rank as low as page 3-5 despite the fact that competition isn't terribly high and I've gotten some pretty decent backlinks (purchased). The quality of the content is decent as well. I've done internal linking, meta descriptions, SEO-optimized titles, featured images, etc.

Is there something in my expansion process that causes Google to flag the new website with duplication? Is this something you've experienced before, or do you have a way I can solve my ranking problem?

I look forward to hearing from you!

MadsDK · Oct 4, 2023

It is an e-commerce website with 11 products and 416 published blog posts for increased topical authority and traffic.

tazarbm · Oct 5, 2023

MadsDK said:
s there something in my expansion process that causes Google to flag the new website with duplication?

maybe silly question, but how do you know that it tagged it with duplication?

Also, what exactly ranks on pages 3-5: the blog posts, or the products? If it's the blog posts I think they might need some backlinks pointing directly to them, with exact / partial match anchor. If it's the products that rank I don't know as I never did ecommerce SEO and I think google treats ecom sites differently to blogs (they might even take sales into account when deciding the rankings, although I'm not sure about this, it's just what I've heard)

MadsDK · Oct 5, 2023

tazarbm said:
maybe silly question, but how do you know that it tagged it with duplication?

Also, what exactly ranks on pages 3-5: the blog posts, or the products? If it's the blog posts I think they might need some backlinks pointing directly to them, with exact / partial match anchor. If it's the products that rank I don't know as I never did ecommerce SEO and I think google treats ecom sites differently to blogs (they might even take sales into account when deciding the rankings, although I'm not sure about this, it's just what I've heard)

Hi tazarbm

I don't know if Google sees the page as duplicated either, it's just the most obvious reason in my eyes why the pages don't rank as well as on the original website.

I haven't been able to find any blog posts in the top 10 and they are generally far down in the SERPS. The product pages rank around 20-50.

Yesterday, when I went through the audits of the pages from SemRush, it turned out that all my titles are tagged as H2 - i.e. none of my products or posts have an H1 title in them... I don't know why my theme has done it that way (I use Porto). But I'm definitely going to change that

However, the fact that my product pages and posts haven't had an H1 heading hasn't meant that the pages didn't rank on the original website. Here, almost all blog posts rank in the top 10 and product pages in the top 5. So I hope making the titles H1 will make them rank even better.

tazarbm · Oct 5, 2023

the H1-H2 tags part is quite interesting, I've never heard of this being a ranking issue. If making the titles H1 does the trick I will honestly be blown away (and it's the 1st time in 43 years of existence that I use the expression "blown away", so this says a lot about how surprised I'll be if it works lol)... But yeah, in the absence of other ideas go ahead and do it, I am really curious to see if it works

The theme's name doesn't tell me anything, but it shouldn't matter anyway. If one site using this theme ranks, all sites should rank, so the theme is not the problem. With the risk of repeating myself I will still say that it's a backlinking issue. If it's not a content or technical issue, it almost always is a backlinks one. Again, try to point 2-3 strong links with exact match anchors at the pages ranking in top 50, index these links, and then check if the rankings improve. If they do (even by 1-2 positions), you'll know that more links are necessary. If they don't, the problem is somewhere else.

How are your CWVs and site speed / mobile optimization, by the way? Also, do you have good internal linking (within the silos)?

tazarbm · Oct 5, 2023

Sorry for the double post, but I just had another thought... is your content well optimized and does it address the search intent well?

I know that you've said that the content is translated from English but, sometimes, translators do leave out parts of the SEO optimization, so I would run the content through a content audit tool (RankMath, NeuronWriter, Frase, SurferSEO, etc.) and see how it looks like. It could be a content optimization issue, too....

MadsDK · Oct 6, 2023

tazarbm said:
the H1-H2 tags part is quite interesting, I've never heard of this being a ranking issue. If making the titles H1 does the trick I will honestly be blown away (and it's the 1st time in 43 years of existence that I use the expression "blown away", so this says a lot about how surprised I'll be if it works lol)... But yeah, in the absence of other ideas go ahead and do it, I am really curious to see if it works

The theme's name doesn't tell me anything, but it shouldn't matter anyway. If one site using this theme ranks, all sites should rank, so the theme is not the problem. With the risk of repeating myself I will still say that it's a backlinking issue. If it's not a content or technical issue, it almost always is a backlinks one. Again, try to point 2-3 strong links with exact match anchors at the pages ranking in top 50, index these links, and then check if the rankings improve. If they do (even by 1-2 positions), you'll know that more links are necessary. If they don't, the problem is somewhere else.

How are your CWVs and site speed / mobile optimization, by the way? Also, do you have good internal linking (within the silos)?

tazarbm said:
Sorry for the double post, but I just had another thought... is your content well optimized and does it address the search intent well?

I know that you've said that the content is translated from English but, sometimes, translators do leave out parts of the SEO optimization, so I would run the content through a content audit tool (RankMath, NeuronWriter, Frase, SurferSEO, etc.) and see how it looks like. It could be a content optimization issue, too....

Thank you so much for your reply!

I don't think I've been precise enough in terms of my problem with H1 headings. My pages' "main" titles were all H2, and not H1, which is what you normally see on all websites.

I will try to be a little more patient. My backlinks are only 2-3 weeks old, and I can see on some articles that it can take a long time for them to take effect.

Google Search Console doesn't show my CWVs yet, but my site speed could be faster. Everything is mobile optimized.

I have done my best with internal linking. All pages link to at least one other article on the website.

All blog posts are long tail keywords where I answer the question, but you may be right that the problem may be that it's not as SEO optimized because of the translation. I'll have a look at one of the tools you mentioned

Again, thank you so much!

Lie · Oct 6, 2023

Canonical Tags: Tell Google which version is the master version by using the correct canonical tags on both sites. This can resolve duplicate content.

Backlinks: Good backlinks are important, but purchased links are against Google's policies and can hurt your rankings. The important thing should be to get organic and quality links.

Speed and Performance: It is important that your website loads fast and performs well. Page speed has a huge impact on SEO. Try to improve your website speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.

tazarbm · Oct 6, 2023

MadsDK said:
Thank you so much for your reply!

I don't think I've been precise enough in terms of my problem with H1 headings. My pages' "main" titles were all H2, and not H1, which is what you normally see on all websites.

I understood what you meant, don't worry

And I still think that the H1 tags were not the issue, but since you've already changed them it's all good I guess...

MadsDK said:
I will try to be a little more patient. My backlinks are only 2-3 weeks old, and I can see on some articles that it can take a long time for them to take effect.

backlinks usually go into effect in days after being indexed (can take up to 2 weeks occasionally), but make sure to indexed them first

MadsDK said:
Google Search Console doesn't show my CWVs yet, but my site speed could be faster. Everything is mobile optimized.

how fast does it load currently? What do GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights say?

MadsDK said:
All blog posts are long tail keywords where I answer the question, but you may be right that the problem may be that it's not as SEO optimized because of the translation. I'll have a look at one of the tools you mentioned

plop them into a content optimization tool and see what they recommend (and fix accordingly)...

Also, give this guide on topical authority and semantic SEO a read when you have time, it's pretty interesting (and important, of course):
https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo/

MadsDK said:
Again, thank you so much!

you're welcome! Hopefully you'll make this work somehow

mehmetpala said:
Canonical Tags: Tell Google which version is the master version by using the correct canonical tags on both sites. This can resolve duplicate content.

I don't think canonicals will help because it's a matter of geolocation, not duplicate content since the content is in different languages...

mehmetpala said:
Speed and Performance: It is important that your website loads fast and performs well. Page speed has a huge impact on SEO. Try to improve your website speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.

yep, fully agree with this

MadsDK · Oct 6, 2023

tazarbm said:
how fast does it load currently? What do GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights say?

I tested a product page and got the following results:

GTmetrix (Desktop): 84% Performance
Google Pagespeed (Desktop): 88
Google Pagespeed (Mobile): 54

So here I have a bit to improve.

tazarbm said:
Also, give this guide on topical authority and semantic SEO a read when you have time, it's pretty interesting (and important, of course):
https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo/

I've read quite a few threads here on BHW about topical authority, but I'll definitely read this one too. Thank you!

tazarbm · Oct 6, 2023

MadsDK said:
Google Pagespeed (Mobile): 54

ouch! this is serious, I think this is why you're not ranking that particular page (not even on desktop). You want speed to be AT LEAST 90% on both desktop and mobile... for EVERY page. Work on that first

Deleted member 1232083 · Oct 6, 2023

Only 3 months? It's normal, you need to check what kind of authority the top 20 competitors have.

MadsDK · Oct 6, 2023

tazarbm said:
ouch! this is serious, I think this is why you're not ranking that particular page (not even on desktop). You want speed to be AT LEAST 90% on both desktop and mobile... for EVERY page. Work on that first

I'll get that taken care of ASAP. Thanks for your help!

Moschoutis said:
Only 3 months? It's normal, you need to check what kind of authority the top 20 competitors have.

The competition isn't too bad and many of my competitors buy cheap, low authority backlinks, so I should be able to outrank them

[HELP] New Website Doesn't Rank After Geographical Expansion

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