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.
-
sorry but I'd rather not give out the domain publicly. I appreciate the help and will continue to investigate
-
boyakp,
We're still waiting for you to share your client's website....
-
Here is something interesting. This is the company in the top spot:
http://www.dentalassistingschoolofutah.com/
but I also found this: http://assistingschool.com/
so they are mirroring their sites... which my client had been doing (they have several domains) and I assumed it to be bad (duplicate content?) so I turned it off...
also just did a backlink check and the top domain has ONE link, a crappy one at that. what the heck??
-
When 16 is winnin' it means really easy SERPs and when 58 is loosin' it means they done sneaky stuff and got in trouble.
-
I sometimes see that happen too and wonder if the competitors have one golden link, one super authoritative followed link incoming to their site that just blows your client out of the water. I know your question says "no links", but take a look. It's all I can think of.
-
Would you be willing to provide your domain so that I could look at it?
-
my client has a score of 58%, the company in the top spot has a score of 16%
seriously I am so confused... I just don't get google sometimes
-
Have you tried doing an audit of your business citations to see if your NAP information is consistent across all the various business listing sites? Since Moz acquired GetListed.org (now called Moz Local), you can check your own site versus your competitors here: https://moz.com/local/search
You might try this and see if you gain any insights. It's a place to start at least. Hope that helps a bit!
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
-
# of links and how it impacts ranking
Hi everyone I was running a competitor analysis in Moz Pro of my site and 3 competitors that are ranked above me. One of the things I noticed is that my # of total links is very high compared to 2 of my competitors(please see attachment). Other seo tools are telling me the same. This is mainly due to a few affiliate sites that have us in their footer. I was wondering if this could impact our ranking if some of these sites have very low domain authority and have thousands of backlinks to our site? I am looking into starting the disavowing process. Walau
Competitive Research | | wdsguy0 -
Why is my website not in the top 3 if our Moz statistics are better?
Hi, We've been using Moz, for our E-commerce sites, for some time now and are improving all of our statistics, be it on-page for specific keywords or general crawl errors, but I've not been seeing a lot of change in our rankings... (we've moved from place 7 to 6 on our main keyword). I'm thinking of looking at our backlinks, through Link Detox, after we finish our Moz optimisation to see if anything weird is going on with that. Are there any other areas I should be looking at? any other clues as to why we're not ranking higher than our competitors. Even if our Moz statistics are better and our Market Samurai values are similar? Thank you very much! Alexander
Competitive Research | | WebmasterAlex1 -
Why do keyword competition rankings differ between Google and SeoMoz?
I am a novice at keyword ranking etc. so I appreciate your patience! I checked a longtail keyword - how do i get out of this relationship - in Google AdWords and it came back 'low competition.' When I entered it in SeoMoz it came back as 'very competitive.' Any thoughts? I appreciate your help.
Competitive Research | | UncleTodd0 -
Can anyone explain this top-10 ranking?
How on earth can http://www.plimun.com/ be at #6 for "web design", with only 15 total linking root domains, and no mention of the term in link text?! See: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.plimun.com This is one of the biggest anomalies I've ever seen.
Competitive Research | | BenHuntLtd1 -
How do i improve my site's google ranking against my competitors?
the searches that i would like to improve my ranking on are
Competitive Research | | oswaldjr
st kitts real estate
nevis real estate
st kitts and nevis real estate. my website is www.sknlistings.com0 -
Free SEO tools appearing in SERPS for a site
Hi there, I've just taken over a site and it doesn't have a huge amount of shelfspace on the SERPs for it's brand name. Looking at the results that are there are a lot of free SEO tools that are coming up. They haven't had an SEO before so it's not coming from their side. There's such a lot of them I was wondering if anyone had come across this before - is it simply a competitor looking at the seo, could it be one of the seo analytics packages using free sites or is there anything else to be aware of. I can start knocking the sites down the SERPs but just wondering if anyone has a good solution for this. thanks Shiv
Competitive Research | | Shivvyt0 -
When providing search results for SEO purposes to you use the exact results in Google Adwords
Hi Mozzers Just quick question When an SEO company are supplying their testimonials for example
Competitive Research | | mcliddy
Keyword Search Term has 33,000 visits a month
Keywords is in position 1 but the search volume they are showing is broad, i was always brought up to do research on exact results unless im using the reserch for a PPC campagin? Has anyone got any ideas?? should it be braod im looking at or exact?? Many Thanks Matt0