My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
-
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there.
I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12.
And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes.
It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least.
So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful.
I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess.
We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
-
I'm no expert, so you can take this with a pinch of salt...
But, to my knowledge google gives a lot of weight to domains such as .ac.uk, as these are some kind of educational website and not available to just anyone etc... not saying it is right that they rank above you, just saying that might be the reason google puts them above you.
-
Thank you! That gives me something to focus on - and the site HAS been through a lot of evolutions in recent years, so I guess we've left a lot of debris
-
Harry,
it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know what Google's algo take (or do not) into consideration.
I don't know, maybe your competitors have less links but those links may carry a higher weight, value.
I see every day websites that should rank better than other but still...
But I do get your frustration.
-
I did a quick crawl of your site and found a lot of crawling issues.
You have a lot of canonical issues, broken links, unnecessary redirects, these errors would be wasting your link juice for a start
Problems and counts
<colgroup><col width="348"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| The tag does not have an ALT attribute defined. | 2,338 |
| The page contains broken hyperlinks. | 900 |
| The page was excluded by a noindex attribute. | 591 |
| The page contains multiple canonical formats. | 548 |
| The description is missing. | 541 |
| The page contains unnecessary redirects. | 263 |
| The page contains invalid markup. | 251 |
| The URL for the hyperlink is broken. | 230 |
| The title is too long. | 111 |
| The link text is not relevant. | 99 |
| The description is empty. | 32 |
| Thetag is missing.
| 22 |
| The description is too long. | 15 |
| The URL is linked using different casing. | 14 |
| The page contains multiple title tags. | 10 |
| The title is not relevant. | 10 |
| The description is too short. | 8 |
| The page contains multipletags.
| 2 |
| The title is empty. | 1 |
| The page contains too many hyperlinks. | 1 | -
Sorry - maybe I should be clearer: the search term we're chasing is "Creative Writing Courses" which is the term that has the most traffic and the most associated revenue.
And yes, our web page has only 27 linking root domains, but the #5 competitor (solihull.ac.uk/creative_writing-52514.html) has 0 external links from 0 domains. Fewer internal links too.
Our domain as a whole has 700+ linking root domains versus just 300 for our competitor. So I'm still confused!
-
As you may know, Google's algo implies hundreds of factors. The importance of on page SEO, compared to the importance of relevant backlinks is almost neglectable.
I've seen websites without any onpage SEO ranking better just because they have a buch on relevant backlinks.
According to OpenSIteExplore, you have 2962 backlinks from only 27 root domains.
You can use the "Keyword Difficulty Report" and select Google UK.
For me, for the search term "Online Creative Writing Courses" you're on page 1, Place 2. You can also run a full report for more detailed data.
Also, you might want to check out in opensiteexplorer the anchor texts you and your competitors are using.
Best of luck!
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
-
What to do about one site dominating search results? (multiple pages ranking)?
Anybody have thoughts on dealing with search results where the same site gets listed multiple times? "weebly vs wix" is one example (same site #1-3, repetitive articles, not crazy high authority), but I see this now and then. I know Google likes variety, so it's weird for me to see results like this dominating search results. Thoughts? What gets these sites to take over the top rankings for a specific term? Any way to rise up in this situation, outside of the usual? Any tips on duplicating this kind of success?
Competitive Research | | davidwaring0 -
Competitors ranking in top three with worse SEO
Ok I am at a loss. Our client is trying to rank for keywords like "dental assistant programs utah", but they are still on the bottom of page 1/top of page 2. The guys in the top 3 have terrible SEO. No links, newer domains, etc. I looked into it extensively and learned about the "honeymoon period" people talk about but we are long past that. I've looked through webmaster tools to see if there are any issues, and I can't find a thing. Anyone have an idea of what we could be doing wrong that is making us be put down so far on the page? Before I got here the SEO guys were doing older tactics which I think was starting to hurt them with penguin and what not so I tried my best to delete the crap content and clean everything up on the website. thanks for all your help! I really appreciate it.
Competitive Research | | boyackp0 -
Screaming Frog for competitor research
Hi guys, Does somebody experienced an issue with Screaming Frog spider while trying to crawl a website? It's weird since no error message appears and at the same time the crawler cannot crawl anything. There is no restriction in the robots.txt. Has someone encountered such an issue? Thank you. Cheers
Competitive Research | | lgrozeva0 -
Continuous drop in Rankings on Google.uk
I have a Website who was ranked top 6 for most competitive keywords on Google.co.uk but suddenly dropped to page 2 after 21st January 2013 and later back to top 10 position and now dropped to pages 2 to 5, for most terms. I initially thought it was the transition rank causing this fluctuations. The strange thing is, i haven't done anything wrong in terms of back linking efforts. My site is content rich and offers real value to users also, the website PR increased from 3 to 4 recently, my site seomoz rank, PA, DA and Moz trust is higher than top ranked websites above mine. Please any suggestions?? Kindly help.....
Competitive Research | | ayo10 -
So What's Up With Those Crappy Search Results?
I used to rank for some keywords now I've been outranked by crappy websites. But what amazes me most is that among the top 10 results for a particular keyphrase, 3 of these results point to websites that are no longer online! Worst than that, these websites have to backlinks! So how come 404 pages / non-existing websites rank higher than I do? Is Google loosing it or are they trying to create so much confusion in the hope that website owners will turn to Adwords?
Competitive Research | | sbrault740 -
What is a reasonable time frame to get to the 1st page
If my site is not in the first 50 results and the keywords are medium to highly competitive? I have just started adding to directories, planning out a blog, fixing seo mistakes, updating sitemaps etc. The 1st ranking competitor has external links in the tens of thousands whereas I have maybe a few hundred. I see a light at the end of the tunnel as competing sites in between me and the 1st place ranking competitor have external links only in the 1000-2000 level. We are an ecommerce site and want to be ready for our high season which is Nov-Jan.
Competitive Research | | ribandhull0 -
Keyword difficulty/research question
Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users' I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month). As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list. Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress. The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword. Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later? Thanks Carl
Competitive Research | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Any chance to out rank Google flight data for company name?
If you search any number with "co" after it you get Continental Airlines flight information of the corresponding number. So you if you search "4co" you get the current flight details for Continental flight 4. Is there any chance if you have a company called 4CO and you own 4co.com that you could get the number one spot for that term or will google flight results always trump the "organic" results? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | 2comarketing0