Stuck on Page 2 - What Would You Do?!?
-
My site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e
My main keyword is : Plastic Bins
i have been going back and forth between page 1 and 2 for this keyword and i was wondering if any of you could provide any guidance as to why i can't get on the top of page 1, and stay there...
My site has been around for a while, we believe we have a great user experience, all unique, fresh content, and the lowest prices...
I must be missing out on something major if I cannot get a steady page 1 ranking... Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance...
-
Joe,
You've certainly given us a lot to think about here. We really appreciate you taking the time to analyze.
Thanks!
-
I worked on a site in your industry a couple of years ago. Brought them from nowhere to the 1st page of Google for things like plastic bottles. They are still on the 1st page for that phrase and many others. Don't worry about the big players - if your site has been around a while you can compete. After all - Google is a machine. You just have to feed it what it wants to see.
Here are things I would do if I were going to rank your site - based on what it appears you have already been doing:
Your non anchor text content is condensed in one area at the very bottom of the page. It's even below the Facebook and Twitter icons that I'm almost nobody visits. I would move that content UP. I would also build it out more. I counted 253 words in that section and 71 of those words are cities and states. I kind of think you're blurring the focus of each geography with all the cities and states jammed together in one spot, but I wouldn't remove it just yet. [after looking at this more I realized this text dump is not unique to the home page - you have almost NO unique content on your home page ----- I would change this immediately]
I would add more non-anchor text content higher up on your site. I know not all of your competition is doing that (some are) but this is not the time to emulate the competition - now is the time to be something else - To stand a little taller and mean a little more.
Seriously - I'm not a "content is king" type of player, but why do I need to buy a plastic bin? Who uses plastic bins? It's easy to see you sell them - heck, according to Google you have "plastic bin" in the title of around 35% of all your pages. Be more confident in your message. Google can see (easily) that you sell plastic bins. Try the soft sell and just tell your story --- right now so much of your site just feels impersonal... industrial. I know your selling plastic widgets, but you can easily add content that makes a conversation.
Start telling the story about WHY someone would need YOUR plastic bins. Talk about the kind of people or industries that need your SOLUTIONS to their problems. It's just like the old adage - people don't buy shovels because they want a new tool - they buy shovels because they want a hole.
If I were you I would start selling holes. Some of your competitors are already doing that in a limited way, but you should just blow it out. Go big or go home. Who needs your holes? People into food storage, crafts, cleaning a garage, organizing basements, accountants, home based businesses to store parts or inventory, the medical industry, emergency preparedness, book storage.... the list can get very large if you just start expanding.
Non-content issues:
Remove the unused pages in your By Industry top navigation. It frustrated me and I am sure Google is not impressed by "There are no categories." Really? If there are no categories then remove the link. If you are using your top navigation as a memory assistant for your "to do" list.... Don't. Tighten your site down. Look everywhere for broken links - make it look like you really care.
Links
Yeah, you need more links. I think you can still climb to the 1st page and stay there without much more link building if you straighten the rest of your site out. It's critical that you start providing solutions to peoples needs rather than widgets. When you provide solutions - people will link to you naturally. Of course, you can and should prime the pump. There are many journalists that will write about a topic of your choosing and include links to your website - if you ask, are willing to pay (my experience has been a minimum of $100 and up to $500) and you have something worth linking to. This is why having that engaging content is important - you can get links from unusual sources and still look relevant.
I would also reduce the number of links on your home page and try to reduce the number of repetitive information break outs across the site. There are likely many more things I would do... but if you pull off the above things you will be fine.
[last thing - I just can't leave it alone -- get those links out of the sitewide footer. Find a better way.]
This advise is free to take it for what it's worth.
Best of luck.
Joe
(I am using a clients SEOMOZ account - my non-pro wouldn't allow me to post)
-
Thanks for your help, you're great!
-
When I am up against the heavy hitters I go to wordtracker or adwords keyword research tool and type in my primary keyword "plastic bins".
That would return terms such as.... large pb..... stackable pb.... clear pb..... colored pb..... p trash b..... p toy b.....corrugated pb
There is a treasure trove of traffic out there of people who are one step closer to a buy decision than the people who are simply searching for "pb". When I would wake up in the morning the fight bell would ding and I would be hammering to get massive amounts of good quality demonstration content, video, etc up on the site for all of those terms. There is enough keyword depth there to keep me busy for months and months.
I am not talking about yada yada yada yada pb yada yada yada pb yada yada content. I am talking about substantive idea-generating content that would inspire people to buy a plastic toy bin even if they didn't plan to buy one when they arrived. I would be trying to sell 'em a bin for their cat and pet raccoon.
When I looked at the keywords for plastic bins I was surprised to see that they are very very deep and very very rich. I would be after top rankings for all of those terms.
-
EGOL, once again, thanks for your help...
I guess i can't conceal the fact that i'm a beginner at this with my next question:
Can you please provide an example of "secondary and longtail keywords" for my keyword (plastic bins)?
Also, what is the best way to build links without spamming?
Thanks again
-
I understand how it is to see this type of site at the top
I don't worry about them. I am old enough that it doesn't get my temper pumping and have been watching the web long enough to see lots of these sites disappear completely overnight.
If I was in this SERP I would be hammering at the secondary keywords and the longtail to the point of keyword cannibalization. I think I would be making good money at it.
I'd be getting my YouTube stuff out to the front and center. If you have that kind of asset you want to show it off instead of putting it in the footer.
-
Thanks for your reply.
I agree, those are heavy hitters... however, the company at the top of the SERP is a 1 man operation that is about 1 year old. He spams all over the internet to get backlinks (check his backlinks, you'll see).... How has he managed to outrank all of the heavy hitters, as well as companies like mine that provide great experience and have been around for a long time and do not spam the internet?
Thanks
-
There are some heavy hitters in those SERPs.
walmart, usplastic, uline, target, grainger, officemax, rubbermaid, homedepot
These big brands are hard to beat. Those kinds of domains just have so much authority that you need a huge load of links to beat them. You're site is all about bins.... Keep hammering for links.
If this was my site I would be saturating the secondary keywords and the long tail.
Good luck!
(I see a small display problem using firefox on a PC. I see a "we're live should you need assistance" and a "x" box. It might be a box that is supposed to be displayed above your design that is breaking".)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website ranking stuck on 2nd page of google. How to bring it in top 10 position??
Hi I am working on a site indianhomeappliances.in that for search terms such as 'best washing machine in india' appears near the top of the 2nd page of Googl for url https://indianhomeappliances.in/best-washing-machine-in-india/ When looking at what is listed on the 1st page for 'best washing machine in india' I would appreciate any advice/guidance on what else could be done to give the site a final push to get on the 1st page of search results. I have made more than 60 backlinks along with sites from competitor analysis via moz for this page Looking at the sites that are on the 1st page I cant understand why many of them are ranking higher than me? Any insight and plan of attack would be most appreciated from any search experts on the forum. My website is 2.5 months old. Many Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pank00770 -
Competing with doorway pages
Hi all, it's my understanding that 'doorway pages' are bad practice. However, when googling for the services that our company offers, along the lines of '[service] [location]', businesses turn up in Google SERPs that outrank us purely with doorway pages. Take this as an example: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=seo+dorking One of the results is this company who seem to rank for pretty much every town modifier: https://prioritypixels.co.uk/seo-agency-dorking/ If you look at their sitemaps you'll see thousands of these pages: https://prioritypixels.co.uk/page-sitemap16.xml All the content is slightly different but broadly speaking it is very similar. It seems that, in the short term, we can't compete with this company but we could if we employed the same tactics. So my question is: is what they are doing really risking a penalty? b1Lpp5
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
How does this company rank this page?
If you Google the keyword "used iPhone 5," the URL ranking #1 in the SERP is the following: http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/ This page has zero content on it and a button on it that takes you to a category page with the iPhone 5 pre selected. My question is **how does this page outrank the sites products pages? **I ran a backlink analysis and don't see any links pointing to that URL. Also, **how does this site deal with its duplicate content issues? **If you look at the following URLs, you'll see a bunch of duplicate content in the "Key Features" section below the fold. http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-sprint If you think about it, this site will have different product pages for each variations of cellphone carrier and cellphone storage capacity. So for an iPhone 5, they will have 15 pages! Any insight into this would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cody_West0 -
Recommend Layout Page (home, categories or section, individual page)
Hello Could you please share with me your advice and recommendations on how to design a SEO layout (H1, Image, body text, etc). I need to give instructions to our website designer. I would like to see some examples. We are going to work with wordpress and visual composer. I really appreciate your help and time Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GHSCostaRica0 -
New Web Page Not Indexed
Quick question with probably a straightforward answer... We created a new page on our site 4 days ago, it was in fact a mini-site page though I don't think that makes a difference... To date, the page is not indexed and when I use 'Fetch as Google' in WT I get a 'Not Found' fetch status... I have also used the'Submit URL' in WT which seemed to work ok... We have even resorted to 'pinging' using Pinglar and Ping-O-Matic though we have done this cautiously! I know social media is probably the answer but we have been trying to hold back on that tactic as the page relates to a product that hasn't quite launched yet and we do not want to cause any issues with the vendor! That said, I think we might have to look at sharing the page socially unless anyone has any other ideas? Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
I have removed over 2000+ pages but Google still says i have 3000+ pages indexed
Good Afternoon, I run a office equipment website called top4office.co.uk. My predecessor decided that he would make an exact copy of the content on our existing site top4office.com and place it on the top4office.co.uk domain which included over 2k of thin pages. Since coming in i have hired a copywriter who has rewritten all the important content and I have removed over 2k pages of thin pages. I have set up 301's and blocked the thin pages using robots.txt and then used Google's removal tool to remove the pages from the index which was successfully done. But, although they were removed and can now longer be found in Google, when i use site:top4office.co.uk i still have over 3k of indexed pages (Originally i had 3700). Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and more importantly how i can fix it? Our ranking on this site is woeful in comparison to what it was in 2011. I have a deadline and was wondering how quickly, in your opinion, do you think all these changes will impact my SERPs rankings? Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0