How can such a small company out-rank the big players?
-
I'm really puzzled how for many keywords the company www.leathersofaworld.com, a retailer of sofas is able to out rank very large companies such as DFS.co.uk and IKEA. They rank 1st for the phrase 'black leather sofas' and have done for a long time. They currently rank 4th for 'leather sofas' and don't seem to move.
Having looked at their back links, I can't see anything special and their domain authority is only 25 compared to DFS which is 45.
Can anyone help me with this?
-
Can any one else give an answer as to how a small company can outrank large companies?
This is still unsolved. Thanks.
-
I can see the search results for "black leather sofa" and Leathersofaworld.com is the only one with black-leather-sofa in the product URL. So for relevancy search, I suppose Google gives them the gold for this term.
For popularity, I'm not sure. If you do a search for "red leather sofas", they are #3 behind two of the companies you mentioned. For "brown leather sofas" they are #4. I see this site is consistently ranked highly for this group of keywords, so the query isn't a fluke. I'd venture a guess that popularity helps the other sites rank better for the other keywords here, but for some reason all the factors just make it work for "black leather sofas."
I'm not pretending to know exactly how Google's algorithm works, but looking at this in terms of a relevance/popularity split does help explain some of what's going on.
-
Thanks for the replies.
I can see that IKEA doesn't have such a pretty looking URL but other big companies do. Looking at what other companies show up for the phrase 'black leather sofas' there is SCS and Harveys which are very large companies here in the UK and leaders in their field. Using the Open Site Explorer the large compaines out do this cmpany easily with considerably more links. Surely its can't just be down to their pretty looking URL can it?
-
Did you need specific help to out rank www.leathersofaworld.com or do you just want to understand how they perform better than Ikea and DFS?
One question I have is where you are located. Google will likely show results based on location. Leather Sofa World has "leather sofa" in their domain name and in their product URL, plus they have structured data and Google authorship set up. Ikea's URLs are not as human friendly.
Compare: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/00214416/ and http://www.leathersofaworld.com/sofas/brown-leather-sofas/latina-3-1-1-seater-espresso-brown-leather-sofas
Just seems that Leather Sofa World is more relevant than Ikea for terms like "leather sofa."
Now I will say that Leather Sofa World could greatly improve their Magento e-commerce site, but it's generally a nice site.
-
From Moz's Knowledge Base we know this:
"Page Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given webpage is likely to rank in Google.com's search results."
There are two pages:
1. http://www.leathersofaworld.com/ (PA 36)
2. http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/categories/departments/living_room/10662/ (PA 46)So there is no such big difference in Page Authority, but there is a really big difference in external links. I'm still sure that it is about external links, but let's see what other SEOs are going to say. Also don't forget that links are influencing on PA...
-
Thank you for the quick reply Nedimtalovic,
Surely IKEA and DFS would be able to outrank this company easily by being so large and having many links to their root domain? IKEA and DFS are much more well known and have a much higher authority. I can see that Leather Sofa World so have some good external links but this only looks to be a few in comparison.
I would assume these really large sofa companies would have teams of people working on their SEO but this small company do not seem to lose rank at all.
-
Hi GoMetrics,
please check out this: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.leathersofaworld.com%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0
It shows only external links (filtered). IKEA doesn't have any external links, and if you see Leather Sofa World has many links with anchor "Leather Sofa World". For me, links are still the most important factor in SEO.
Please, don't forget that long tail keywords are about 70% of search traffic. So, I think for new websites is better to focus on long tail keywords instead keywords like "sofas", "beds"...
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
-
How do i rank for 1000 keywords?
i have dr 25 and 200 referring domains and ranking for 90 kws in usa. i saw this trend that if you rank for more kws then chances are that you can rank for those high traffic kws in 1 to 5 positions. what i mean is that it increases your odds ? possible answer1 :increase dr and da both and ur and pa ( ahrefs and moz) i know pagerank matters but these are some metrics we can look at for right now possible answer 2 : get a lot of backlinks maybe from same site but how does my backlinks can help me to rank for 1000 kws so that i can have at least 100 kws to rank in position 1 to 5? detailed answers will defi be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Big retailers and duplicate content
Hello there! I was wondering if you guys have experience with big retailers sites fetching data via API (PDP content etc.) from another domain which is also sharing the same data with other multiple sites. If each retailer has thousands on products, optimizing PDP content (even in batches) is quite of a cumbersome task and rel="canonical" pointing to original domain will dilute the value. How would you approach this type of scenario? Looking forward to read your suggestions/experiences Thanks a lot! Best Sara
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SaraCoppola1 -
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
National Company Needs Local (7 Box) Rankings in Test Metros
A lot of pressure on me for this one...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayt
I have a national client with excellent naturals, and a huge PPC budget. Getting killed locally, forcing use below the 7box. I need to find either a definitive way to get into the 7 box in dozens of metro areas, or HIRE a consultant who knows this landscape better.
Any thoughts?
The client serves all 50 states, by phone and online, in a very competitive market. I've killed it for 12 years, and volume has slipped so we need to grab more local.
Complimenting matters, we are currently migrating their main site to CMS (Umbraco).. a little busy!0 -
Can a domain rank for a competitive term with no links?
Hi, I know that this topic has received a lot of attention recently (Not all of it good) and I am not normally one to re-open a can of worms but the whole 'Camper Mens Shoes' fiasco has got me thinking. If you're not familiar with the story then you can get the highlights of it here - http://martinmacdonald.net/the-curios-case-of-camper-shoes/ My question is this - Say that you had a domain (Domain A) that was ranking well for a competitve keyword and that it had a good backlink profile. If you used rel="canonical" on every page of Domain A to point to a duplicate site on a different domain (Domain B) , would Domain B then rank well in place of Domain A? I know that this probably doesn't have much practical use but I am trying to get a better understanding of the effect of using rel="canonical" Would the result of doing the above mean that Domain B would rank well without having any links pointing directly to it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
Seasonal links, seasonal ranks
As the garden season begins to wane I notice yet again how my ranking for some garden specific terms - eg ' garden tealight holders' start to rise again.Since I am doing nothing much I can only assume that my competitors have moved their focus to more winter based merchandise. Does anyone have a good understanding of how some websites are able to acheive high rankings during peak season only? I am assuming they are buying advertising (with the follow) for say 3 months before the season peak and manipulating internal linking to direct link juice from one section of the website to the other. Is this strategy risky. Has Google ever made mention of this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Google Places - How do we rank
So, google places showing up on search results is great feature . . . But how can we get our results to the top? I mean I can see some terrible websites appearing at the top of the google places with their places page having no activity whatsoever. Is there a trick to this at all? What can we do to increase our ranking on Google Places because our old GOOD rankings are now appearing BELOW the map results Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayweb0