Competitive Analysis: Links & Keywords
-
I'm noticing that for some key local search terms our company is not ranking in SERPs as I would expect considering it's size relative to the local sites that are ranking. I subscribed to SEOmoz to get a better understanding of what's going on, and haven't figured it out yet.
Our site is higher in almost every metric than the sites we're competing with, but our competition consistently ranks higher in organic results for industry standard keywords. The few metrics we're being outranked in are, "Linking C Blocks" and "Page MozTrust" (we're very close to the leader in MozTrust).
Are these two metrics enough to account for our companies poor SERP performance or do I need to be paying attention to something else?
-
The bulk of your main content needs to be above the fold. This is the same area where your h1 tag should reside. You can certainly see this with many ecommerce stores.
i.e.
"h1"
"content here"
try to link to two inner pages if you can for additional content that cannot be fully explained on this page. Also try to have a 1 or 2 % keyword density in a 200 word paragraph.
You should be set.
*Keep your keywords in your h1 tag and title tag to the left!"
-
Another question that's come up is content placement. Does Google care where on the homepage text content is? In other words if we had a couple paragraphs of text would Google care if that text appeared where you saw it when loading the page or if that text were located down the page where you'd have to scroll to see it?
-
Defiantly agree with the Penguin Algo.
*When you do initially build out your directory links or custom links, try to use randomization on your anchor phrases. You can do search within searchengineland.com and searchenginejournal.com for post on junk anchors and random anchor phrases.
This algo update rocked the seo industry and many of the over optimize links-anchors were diluted in seo value.
-
Hey, if you need other advice or help with analysis; I usually can point you in the right direction. Good luck!
-
That helps a lot! Thanks for your input. I'll definitely be putting your advice into practice.
-
You Heading Tags also know as your h1 and h3 tags are important for on page seo.
Especially the H1 tag. You should probably define a css class for styling because this tag can be big, bulky, and ugly; however, Google uses this as a large signal for what a web-page is about. The title tag is also the other most vital signal and it should match the h1 (I mean the keyword phrase you are targeting).
I emphasize everyday to internal departments where I work about the importance of on-page-seo. In competitive search ninches, these on page scores and organicness (if that is a word) will matter in stable rankings.
Also where you have your h1 should be above the fold (nerd jargon), right under the top nav. The h1 followed by a simple paragraph that has useful content and one or two links to direct users to targeted pages or directories.
Hope this helps.
-
These are some exceptional answers gentlemen! I think our answer may lie in content. After reading these responses and looking at our site I noticed that our homepage doesn't have any text up front and center on the homepage. thinkwebstore.com is the domain. We have some text navigation, an image of our team and a slider...it's not until the user scrolls down the page that we get to some actual text content.
I took a look at the sites that are ranking for the keyword, "website design jackson ms" and each of them has prominent text front and center. There is one site that doesn't have prominent text on their homepage, and they're ranking #1 for, "website design mississippi". What that site has that I have not gotten to yet (I just recently rebuilt our site and haven't finished our technical SEO yet) is titles for their navigation text.
Would you all mind commenting on the importance of text content placement on the page (front and center vs further down the page), and titles for navigation and how these elements relate to ranking well in SERPs.
-
Some good information already from Chad, but to answer your question directly, yes the amount of unique links (c-blocks) as well as the anchor text of those links could have a large impact on ranking positions.
Without knowing more about your site, the competitors and the phrases you want to rank for it is hard to know exactly what the issues could be, but other things to consider:
-
On page SEO - Are your optimised properly for the terms you think you should rank for and how do you compare to the competition?
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/newAbove and beyond the general checks the tool above will run, do you have 'great' content in place on-page to match the search queries you want to rank for?
-
Penalties and Filters - 2012 was massive for Penguin and Panda, make sure you have not been over-linking or doing anything else Google doesn't like. It could be another reason why you are not doing so well for these terms.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
Good Luck!
-
-
I would suggest using Majestic SEO to look at your website's overall trust for links coming into the website.
They have a great graph that shows the "trust flow" and "citation flow" of your link profile. The closer to the orgin point the better those links are and chances are Google will trust those links voting for your site.
There is also on-page seo too. Make sure you audit each website ranking over you in link profile and on page seo. Things like too many characters in title, meta description, meta keyword matter! On-page-content and or keyword density matter too; you don't want keyword density higher than 3% (if you're using static type of content), this too will be a make or break difference in where you sit in Google's SERP!
Also the delivery of actual content has a lot to do with were you'll sit for certain keyword phrases. The more organic and useful the page to the user; naturally your social signals will increase, organic links will increase and thus stronger more stable ranks for certain phrases keywords.
*In SEO today the best thing you can do is study what your competitors offer in content on the page and beat'em. Syndicating your content to places where people can share you're great content or product (whatever) is really the best way to direct your overall efforts!
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
-
Best Approach to Rank For Multiple Locations With Similar Targeted Keywords
I'm trying to determine the best way to set up a website to rank for a similar set of keyword phrases in three different cities. The keyword phrases I want to rank for are all pretty much the same with the only difference being the city associated with the keyword phrase. For example, "Austin water restoration" vs "San Antonio water restoration" vs "Houston water restoration". Each city needs about 7 or 8 pages of unique content to accurately target the group of keywords I'm trying to rank for. My initial thought was to write up unique content for each city and have each city act a site within the main site. For example, the main navigation for xyz.com/austin would be Austin specific, so when you land on xyz.com/austin and go to Services - Water Restoration, it would be all Austin specific content. The same would be true for San Antonio and Houston. The only problem with this approach is that I have to build up the page authority for a lot of different pages. It would be much easier to build up the page authority for one Water Restoration page and just insert a little "Areas we serve" on the page that includes "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" and maybe work the coverage area in again at the bottom of the page somewhere. However, it would be much more difficult to work "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" into the title tags and H1s though, and I couldn't logically work the cities into the content as much either. That would be a downside to this approach. Any thoughts on this? Wondering how large companies with hundreds of locations typically approach this? I'd really appreciate your input.
Web Design | | shaycw0 -
Can external links in a menu attract a penalty?
We have some instances of external links (i.e. pointing to another domain) in site menus. Although there are legitimate reasons (e.g. linking to a news archive kept on a separate domain) I understand this can be considered bad from a usability perspective. This begs the question - is this bad for SEO? With the recent panda changes we've seen certain issues which were previously "only" about usability attract SEO penalties, but I can't find any references to this example. Anyone have thoughts / experience?
Web Design | | SOS_Children0 -
Will keyword optimization for a landing page impact SEO for subsequent pages?
For example, if I optimize keyword “pleurx” really well on our landing page, I'd like to know if subsequent
Web Design | | Todd_Kendrick
pages linking back to that landing page will rank higher than before for “pleurx”
even if “pleurx” wasn't optimized on the subsequent pages. Thanks! -Andrew0 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
How many keywords is too many?
Since it seems it takes so long for Google to revisit a changed page, we sort of loose track of changes made trying to optimize a specific URL for a keyword. Any sense of how many times is the optimum number of times to use a single keyword on a single page? I'm referring to the total including Title, Description, Content, Alt=. The whole shooting match. I have seen our Google results improve after we have removed several iterations of a keyword Thank You
Web Design | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Linking root and domain authority
Hi SEOMOZ community, Can you please advise on how to increase Linking root domains and domain authority. much appreciated.
Web Design | | wahin10 -
Link Pages/Directory
Hello, What is best practise for dealing with alot of links. I was thinking of breaking them download to alphabet pages i.e. all A on one page etc... BUT should I then make the links clickable on this list OR that they load to a sub company page which has a clickable link to there website.
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
The primary search keywords for our news release network have dropped like a rock in Google... we are not sure why.
Hi, On April 11th, a month after the farmer update was released for U.S. users of Google, the primary keywords for ALL our sites significantly dropped in Google. I have some ideas why, but I wanted to get some second opinions also. First off, I did some research if Google did anything on the 11th of April... they did. They implemented the farmer update internationally, but that does not explain why our ranks did not drop in March for U.S. Google users... unless they rolled out their update based on what site the domain is registered in... in our case, Canada. The primary news release site is www.hotelnewsresource.com, but we have many running on the same server. EG. www.restaurantnewsresource.com, www.travelindustrywire.com and many more. We were number 1 or had top ranks for terms like ¨Hotel News¨, ¨Hotel Industry¨, ¨Hotel Financing¨, ¨Hotel Jobs¨, ¨Hotels for Sale¨, etc... and now, for most of these we have dropped in a big way. It seems that Google has issued a penalty for every internal page we link to. Couple obvious issues with the current template we use... too many links, and we intend to change that asap, but it has never been a problem before. The domain hotelnewsresource.com is 10 years old and still holds a page rank of 6. Secondly, the way our news system works, it´s possible to access an article from any domain in the network. E.G. I can read an article that was assigned to www.hotelnewsresource.com on www.restaurantnewsresource.com... we don´t post links to the irrelevant domain, but it does sometimes get indexed. So, we are going to implement the Google source meta tag option. The bottom line is that I think we put too much faith in the maturity of the domain... thinking that may protect us... not the case and it´s now a big mess. Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Do you think it was farmer or possibly something else? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | jarrett.mackay0