Detailed ranking question for the pros

[ERpro]

Hi Community,

We've been struggling with the search engine ranking of our SEO optimised homepage for a number of months. I'm going to provide an overview of the page stats in hope that somebody might have a suggestion as to what the problem might be or where we should be focusing our efforts. I have also provided the stats of our main competitor as I have no idea why they are ranking so high based on the stats provided:

URL in question: https://mysite.com

• On Page Grade for our targeted keyword: A
• Domain authority: 36
• Page authority: 45
• Root Doman Links: 57
• Total Links: 634
• SE Ranking: #17

Competitor URL in question: https://competitorsite.com

• On Page Grade for same targeted keyword: A
• Domain authority: 32
• Page authority: 43
• Root Doman Links: 28
• Total Links: 919
• SE Ranking: #1

Another strange this about our homepage is that a second tier page on our site is actually ranking higher in the search ranking for the Targeted Keyword (#9), even though this page has not been optimised and has an On Page Grade of F.

Does anybody have any suggestions of what we might be overlooking or what the issue here might be?

-JF

[ERpro]

Thanks Netrepid - that might be a last resort in order to just boost up the internal page, but at this stage I'm trying to get to the bottom of why the homepage is ranking so poorly and why the internal page is ranking better. Once we understand what the issues here are then we can probably put together a better plan to optimise and fix both of the pages.

[ERpro]

Hi Sheena,

I'd like to post a direct link but I've been told that it opens you up to getting a lot of contact from agencies/freelancers looking for new biz (not a bad thing though!). Also, I recognise that some competitors may have their eye on the forum so we'd just prefer to keep it private at this stage - at least until we figure out the issues!

Would it be OK if I PMed you with info in case you might be able to see any glaring issues on the site upfront?

[ERpro]

Cheers AMHC,

I took a look at the trust flow and I see that our competitor does have a slightly higher trust flow than us. However, the trust flow of our internal page (which ranks higher than our homepage) is 17 whereas our homepage is 23. Taking into the fact that the On Page Grade and the back link profile for our internal page is much lower than the homepage, it's really confusing as to why it might be ranking higher. Any other thoughts on that?

[Netrepid]

I say optimize the internal page to an 'A', put a keyword rich text link from the homepage to that internal page in content, and get some co-citations for either your homepage or your internal page to match the link profile of that top ranking page.

And when that's done, add a reciprocal link from that internal page back to the homepage and see if you can get that bumped up in the SERPs, too.

Might work, might not. But it's worth a shot.

[AMHC]

Sheena is spot on. Google has over 200 ranking factors. A tool that I like is Majestic SEO and it's trust flow metric. Quite often, when I can't figure our why a site is outranking us, they have a higher TF than we do. I rely on Moz's DA/PA and Majestic's CF/TF, and they are usually pretty accurate when used together.

Here's one other factor - DA/PA/CF/TF needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Majestic and Moz have their own Bots, and don't crawl and index nearly as thoroughly as Google does, and they also crawl more slowly. I've seen some studies that show that Majestic and Moz only pick up 1/3 of your actual backlinks. If your competitor has some awesome links that were missed by Moz and Majestic missed, this could also be the answer.

[Sheena_Schleicher]

There are a thousand possibilities as to why they're outranking your site. I know everyone tries to keep their sites private in here, but for such a specific inquiry, we really need to see the pages in question. Kind of a 'help us help you' situation.