How on Earth are These Sites Outranking Us?

[allseasonshire]

Hello all,

My colleague and I have been doing a lot of work to optimise our companies site (www.allseasonshire.eu/). The project is still massively work in progress. While we've been analysing the SERPs for KW's we're trying to rank for we've noticed two sites that are outranking us and we can't work out why.

The sites in question are www(dot)nationwide-boilerhire(dot)co(dot)uk & and www(dot)nationwideboilerhire(dot)com. They're both very small sites, with hardly any content and basically zero external links pointing to them. When we compare the root domains in OSE our site comes out on top on every single competitive metric as well, most of them by a long shot.

I'm just wondering if anyone can help shed some light on why these two sites would be appearing so high in SERPs and why they would be outranking us? Any input anyone has is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ryan

Edit: Keyword in question is 'boiler hire'. Thanks for your answer Nishadha, would that alone really be enough though?

[allseasonshire]

Hi irvingw,

Could you give me some pointers on how we could better optimise http://www.allseasonshire.eu/boilers/ for the term boiler hire?

Thanks in advance,

Ryan

[irvingw]

The page is not well optimized for "boiler hire" is mostly what is comes down to.

[allseasonshire]

Hi David,

Awesome response, cheers.

The .co.uk domain is 4 years old and the .com domain is 1 year old according to a who.is lookup.

Couldn't agree more about the backlinks. I've only been with the company for about 4 months and when I joined the backlink profile was in an atrocious state thanks to them participating in a lot of link schemes. Due to them having been burnt before the MD has been reluctant to earn any more links. I've managed to bring him round to attempting white hat methods so will be pursuing that going forward.

Thanks for the info about the URLs, we are aware of the issue and are currently in the process of trying to improve it.

Interesting point about conversion based meta descriptions too, had never thought about using them that way.

Our site used to create a page per location but that got us reamed by Google pretty quickly. Having a 'locations served' list somewhere could maybe be an idea though.

Thanks again David,

Ryan

[allseasonshire]

Hi Ronald,

Thanks for your reply. The page we're trying to rank for boiler hire is actually http://www.allseasonshire.eu/boilers/.

• there is no boiler hire in the URL - **we are aware of this and are looking into a way to re-write some of our URLs, particularly our product ones as they are painfully non-descript **
• The H1 should be "boiler hire". - the h1 is 'Temporary and Emergency Boiler Hire & Rental'
• The page does not have enough content (minimum 300 words at least) - The word count for this page sits around 1000
• Keyword combination "boiler hire" is not found (enough) in the content - The keyword 'boiler hire' is found 11 times in the text. Do people feel this could be too many?
• Keyword combination "boiler hire" is not found in the 1st part of the content - **it's found 3 times within the first paragraph **
• You have no external links on this page - Moz says we have 7 linking root domains and 1, 973 total links (we have also had trouble with a very poor link profile and I am still in the process of cleaning it up, a lot of those links are site wide footers from partner sites) Could this be the cause?
• Its not a top link in your navigation - **it is a top link in our navigation (you can access it by clicking 'Boilers' in the navigation bar) **

With all this in mind are there any other recommendations you would make based on the page we are trying to rank?

Thanks,

Ryan

[David-Kley]

As much as most people hate to admit it, exact match domains can get a ton of favor in Google's ever evolving quest to provide "relevant" results.

How long has the other domain been around? If it's an oldie (6+ years) along with being a EMD your are going to need some killer backlinks to validate your site enough to bump them off. Also, there whole site is based upon just that one keyword, whereas your site is based upon many different keywords. They are focused on just one keyword, that can constantly be repeated on page because it's their name. Not only that, but I'm sure every citation profile link is also titled something like "Boiler Hire" since again, that is their name. So they have possibly hundreds of links that specify they provide boiler hire, where your site most likely has your name. Do they rank for any of they other keywords your are competing for? Or just boiler hire?

The way that we approch these situations is to get creative in reaching more people, and think of ways that you can get backlinks from high ranking sources. Is there any big publications or resources you can get links from?

I was looking at your URL's, and many of them don't specify the exact keyword you want to go for. Might be picking at straws here, but it's just an idea.

http://www.allseasonshire.eu/lease-or-buy.php

• does not list the word boiler once in the content, page title, or url. This is under the boilder dropdown menu...
• H1 and H3 together

http://www.allseasonshire.eu/boilers/boilers.php

• could modify url to include "hire" rather than repeating keyword twice
• H1 has an H2 right under it, with no content between them
• Description is not based around a conversion "Boiler Hire & Emergency Rental | Electric, Containerised & Mobile Boilers | 22 kw – 1.2 MW | Bespoke builds | All Seasons Hire | 0800 082 8001"

Site design looks great. Just wanted to throw that in there I think with some minor on-page tweaks to increase the density without being spammy, and a killer backlink strategy you will be good to go

Not that I usually recommend doing this, but they also have the areas listed on the page. Could be that Google is putting two and two together, and targeting the site to those areas?

[Tribevibe]

I expect the page you optimzed for boiler hire is http://www.allseasonshire.eu/boilers/boilers.php

• there is no boiler hire in the URL
• The H1 should be "boiler hire".
• The page does not have enough content (minimum 300 words at least)
• Keyword combination "boiler hire" is not found (enough) in the content
• Keyword combination "boiler hire" is not found in the 1st part of the content
• You have no external links on this page
• Its not a top link in your navigation
• etc.

Sorry to say but the site just does not looks optimized to me.

I would advice to take some time and read this: https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ and than create a great page!

Good luck!

Ronald

[allseasonshire]

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for your reply. I hadn't even thought about whether the .eu domain could be having an effect so it's good to get a different view point.

I just did an incognito search in Google FR, Google DE and Google ES for the term 'boiler hire' and they rank 4th (for the .com domain) and 6th (for the .co.uk domain) across the board. We actually fair worse in all of the above search engines than we do on Google UK.

In answer to your question though I can't think of any instances where I've seen a .eu domain outrank a .co.uk domain in the UK. Has anyone else ever encountered this?

Thanks,

Ryan

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I ran your sites through OSE, and your site is better on every metric. Though "boiler hire" is in the domain, it shouldn't be enough considering how much better your site is that there's. I do have one theory, though it's just a guess. Are they outranking you in all European countries or just the UK? I'm wondering if the fact your site is an "eu" domain and there site is a "uk" domain has anything to do with it.

In your other searches (just any old search) to you have see an "eu" domain in the top position over a "uk" domain (in the UK)?

Best,

Ruben

[allseasonshire]

Hi Nishadha,

Thanks for your response. The keyword is boiler hire. Do you really think alone would be enough?

[Nishadha]

It's hard to say without knowing what is the keyword you're trying to rank for. But if its "Nationwide Boiler Hire" they do have it in their title.