Website Not in SERPS

[grissom]

I have a website that's 14 years old with a keyword as the domain name.
it's https: /ibluewidget.com (example) and in the loan business.

1.) Does the "i" hurt the keyword in the domain name?

There is no business name on the site. The logo is ibluewidget.com.
It is a site for current informational purpose only.
Consumers do have an option to click to a lic'd lender/person listed on the site.
If someone likes the general info they read, they fill out a short application; no SSN's or DOB.
Then they are redirected to a licensed loan person in that particular state.
So, it's a real estate info site with a small directory of agents.

It's a legit business; but no business address is listed on the site. The phone number is a voicemail.
So there's business available in each city within the state.
all work is done online, just gathering an application.

Metrics:
AHREFs 0.7 DR
Moz - DA 17 and PA 31

There's about 170 spam backlinks (how they linked to me idk)
There's 5 high DA/PA contextual links (not social networks) that have 10-20 Referring domains

It ranked well about 6 years ago on the 1st 2 pages but has been replaced by competitor's with a real address.
The site is not even on the top 10 SERP pages.

I could probably get 30 to 50 more very good links in one or two months but there's still those bad links everybody gets when they rank on page 1 now or did in the past.
Problem: I can't really ever get those high sought local citation links from Yahoo, BBB, etc.

2.) What would you do for a site like this to rank?

let the website go or continue to build solid backlinks and add more trust to the site.
I used to be a really good at SEO pre-2011 and had one of my sites featured in Google's TV commercial Parisian Love back in 2008.

I hope I have some helpful nuggets for others when the opportunity arises.

best regards,

 

[dgrunited]

1. No.

2. Do more SEO on the current site.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Agree with dgrunited that it is a definite no for question #1.

For #2, I think Google is intetionally making it harder and harder for lead gen sites to rank. They often fail when it comes to quality unless they offer something that the actual small businesses don't offer themselves. If I was in your position, I'd stop working on it and just reap the benefits from any traffic you do still continue to get but discontinue putting effort toward getting more.

 

[PaulSteinbrueck]

For #2, I would recommend doing a complete SEO audit of the website. There are a lots of things that could keep a site out of the top 100:

• Is Google Search Console reporting any Google penalties (manual actions)?
• Is it mobile-friendly?
• Is it failing Core Web Vitals?
• Is Google Search Console reporting and indexing problems?
• Look at Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to analyze the trend in search traffic. Is it getting any? For what keywords? Was there a big drop in search traffic at a specific point in time? If so, what does that correlate to?
• How do the number of links to the site compare to competitors?
• How well are the pages of the site optimized for targeted keywords?