Case Study Mystery
-
This has been driving me slowly mad for ages - a site that consistently outranks my client site despite my clients site apparently being more SEO friendly on every level:
Google UK search term "chimney sweeps london"
My client site: http://apexchimneysweeps.co.uk
The other site: http://www.firkinschimneysweeps.co.uk
Can anyone shed any light on how this is happening? I really hope I'm being an idiot and missing something obvious!
Comparisons: (A = apex F = firkin)
Domain age: A 2000 / F 2013
Domain Authority: A 16 / F 9
Page Authority: A 29 / F 22
I would say Apex page content is better and is certainly updated more often.
-
Many thanks Kristen, I appreciate the answer being specific to the question
-
Yes, we've racked our brains over this one. The business serves London almost uniquely but the HQ is further out. I wonder if anyone has found away around this that works?
-
This is interesting and a bit of a minefield. I guess the only thing we can do is test. Hopefully Penguin 4 will ensure quicker feedback on testing than previously.
-
-
Hi Chris
Many thanks for this. I'll look into this.
Point 2 - we already have a listing on Foursquare. Do you have any other suggestions for backlinks? Hard to get too viral with Chimney Sweeps!
Regarding point 3 - all our content is unique except the one you looked at, sods law I guess!
-
Hello,
There's an number of reasons of why a site may outrank another site. With a quick comparison it does appear your site is better in a few areas. There are some pretty typical SEO changes I would make to increase the site's ranking.
- Review your meta - Looking at a few pages on your site I would suggest reviewing your meta, including title and description. Utilize your location and keywords within both the title and meta description. You're wasting some great real estate.
- Build some back links - The number, and quality, of back links pointing to your site are very low. Avoid posting to strictly directories. I suggest finding quality business listing sites (like FourSquare) to post your business. A few high quality back links will separate you from the competition.
- Write your own content - I threw your latest blog post into CopyScape and it turns out it's just a copied and pasted article from another site that was posted a few weeks prior. Create some content that people are asking questions about, develop content that is helpful and entertaining to users.
These are just a few points, I would suggest a complete site audit to see where else you are missing opportunities. If you would like some additional information feel free to contact us.
Chris
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
-
Upper and lower case URLS coming up as duplicate content
Hey guys and gals, I'm having a frustrating time with an issue. Our site has around 10 pages that are coming up as duplicate content/ duplicate title. I'm not sure what I can do to fix this. I was going to attempt to 301 direct the upper case to lower but I'm worried how this will affect our SEO. can anyone offer some insight on what I should be doing? Update: What I'm trying to figure out is what I should do for our URL's. For example, when I run an audit I'm getting two different pages: aaa.com/BusinessAgreement.com and also aaa.com/businessagreement.com. We don't have two pages but for some reason, Google thinks we do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmac1 -
Mystery URLs showing in Analytics - All 404s
Hi Guys So we have a whole load of mystery urls showing in analytics .The urls are completely not relevant and have somehow been created However - when you click on the URLs - they all go to 404 pages - pages not found. The website is a travel website but is showing pages like /overcome-fatigue-during-mesothelioma-treatment/ in analytics. Webmaster is not showing any of these pages - but analytics is showing traffic for them??? My initial thought was that it was a spam URL injection - but they are not pages. They don't exist Our database is fine, WP admin seems fine - none of these supposed pages have been created on WP - so why are they showing on analytics as having driven traffic??? None of the urls are indexed on Google. Its a mystery!!!! Can anyone help? Has anyone seen this before????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Internal Clicks and CTR. Is REL=canonical better than Noindex in this case?
I currently have a search facility in a website that noindexes the search results which is ok. But when you click one of the results it takes you to a product which is noindexes as it has URL params. e.g. https://www.visitliverpool.com/accommodation/albion-guest-house-p305431?bookurl=%2Fbook-online%3Fstage%3Dunitsel%26isostartdate%3D2017-10-31%26nights%3D1%26roomReq_1_adults%3D1%26NumRoomReqs%3D1%26fuzzy%3D0%26product%3D305431 The product also exists as this which is indexed : - https://www.visitliverpool.com/accommodation/albion-guest-house-p305431 Should I canonicalise is this instance instead of no index? Does CTR apply to internal links? i.e. Does search console consider internal clicks? Are internal clicks a ranking factor?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Mobile Friendly Site yet rankings are in alot of cases worse than desktop
Hi All, We made our Website mobile responsive well in advance of the recent mobile algorithm changes . We only have a couple of pages with minor errors but yet our mobile rankings have not improved that much (maybe 1 place) and in alot of cases, we rank higher on desktop than we do on mobile for the same term etc. No the ranking boost is minimal at best and worse in many cases. I have checked our site on google mobile test and we are mobile friendly and on page speed test our mobile site is 99/100 user experience etc. Just wondered if anyone else has found the same ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
301's, Mixed-Case URLs, and Site Migration Disaster
Hello Moz Community, After placing trust in a developer to build & migrate our site, the site launched 9 weeks ago and has been one disaster after another. Sadly, after 16 months of development, we are building again, this time we are leveled-up and doing it in-house with our people. I have 1 topic I need advice on, and that is 301s. Here's the deal. The newbie developer used a mixed-case version for our URL structure. So what should have been /example-url became /Example-Url on all URLs. Awesome right? It was a duplicate content nightmare upon launch (among other things). We are re-building now. My question is this, do we bite the bullet for all URLs and 301 them to a proper lower-case URL structure? We've already lost a lot of link equity from 301ing the site the first time around. We were a PR 4 for the last 5 years on our homepage, now we are a PR 3. That is a substantial loss. For our primary keywords, we were on the first page for the big ones, for the last decade. Now, we are just barely cleaving to the second page, and many are 3rd page. I am afraid if we 301 all the URLs again, a 15% reduction in link equity per page is really going to hurt us, again. However, keeping the mixed-case URL structure is also a whammy. Building a brand new site, again, it seems like we should do it correctly and right all the previous wrongs. But on the other hand, another PR demotion and we'll be in line at the soup kitchen. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yogitrout10 -
ECommerce Google PR mystery
Dear all, Our eCommerce site has the following structure Home .. PR=5 Category .. PR=4 (linked from home) Sub-Category Linked from Category PR=Un-ranked The domain has several years and perform well the site is here: http://tinyurl.com/5v9hrql Any idea or suggestion? Thank you Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
What will the effect of normalising the case of my URLs be?
Hi all, I have a web site with a selection of pages with excellent rankings, mostly in the top 3 for the keywords we want to rank for. Currently, the URLs are mostly presented mixed case, like this: www.mydomain.com/Type/ITEM-IDENTIFIER/ However we have problems of different cases being used in different parts of our application, and also it's obviously not that attractive the way it is. What we are proposing to do is deploy a change to our web site that lowercases all URLs in internal links, as well as present the URLs in lowercase in our sitemap.xml, and provide any links to partners from this point on in lowercase format. We are also proposing to 301 redirect any non-lowercase URLs to the lowercase version. These pages already have a canonical link tag due to us hosting different versions of these pages on multiple domains, for skinning purposes. The link in the canonical link tag will also be changed to be lowercase. What I am concerned about is, URLs of the case above have been in the rankings for a few years now, and if all of a sudden our links are all lowercase, will they drop off the rankings? Or will the above measures mean that the pagerank is transferred to the lowercase version of the URL? Thanks in advance, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeeTickets0 -
Should I optimize for broad or exact match in this case?
Best to illustrate with an example: the term "do girls like chest hair?" has a volume of 210 for exact match, 390 for broad. The term "do girls like hairy guys?" on the other hand, has an exact match volume of 73, but a BROAD match of 8,100. Assuming either is a suitable title for a piece of content and all other things being equal, which page title should I use? As a sort of follow-on, when should one care for broad over exact match?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030