Anyone Care to Share Some SEO Tricks for Competitive Industries?
-
[Insert word "hack" if you prefer that, but it's so overused that I'm using "trick" instead]
I've been doing SEO for ten years, and I'm pretty good at covering my bases. For the client I'm seeking help with, here's what we're doing: strong and regular onsite keyword optimized content (both long tail and competitive keyphrases), good local SEO, high-quality guest posting on relevant local news sites and blogs, heavy community involvement and support, scholarships and sponsorships, lots of videos, all the social media, tons of competitive research and link building, ongoing website architecture analysis and tweaking, a systematized process for getting reviews, onsite chat, Google Search Ads, etc.
This client has been around for years in a very competitive industry in a medium-sized American city. We do alright in the local pack for certain search terms, but overall his rankings are not good.
For anyone who works in a super competitive industry, do you have any tricks you'd be willing to share? I don't want to steal your secrets, but I could use some advice. Thank you!
-
For anyone new who stumbles across this question, definitely check out The Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis: https://moz.com/seo-competitor-analysis
There are lots of great tips in there. Hope this helps!
-
Have you done a side-by-side comparison of your client and his top competitors? Things I'd be looking for:
- Are his top competitors specialists in the topics you want to rank for whereas your client is more of a generalist?
- What is your client's online reputation relative to the competition? Is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative?
- How does their anchor text compare? Are the topics you want to rank for included in the link text?
- Do competitors have keywords in their domain name? I know that's not a ranking factor, but it often translates into incoming anchor text with those topics / keywords which IS a ranking factor.
- Is the content on your client's site organized around the key topics he wants to be known for?
- Is your client listed as its author?
So, no tricks or hacks. Just a few things I look for when in this situation.
-
Hi Natalie
We chase featured snippets for customers, not rankings, ie position 0 delivers a huge ROI for the right customer query. It is great branding exposure as well if it a zero-click snippet. Featured snippets are not a huge amount of work, more training and guidance. We start with the below and work from there.
- Content on page has to be perfectly optimised for mobile.
- HTTPS
- Use lots of headers (H2 and H3) tags
- Short answer to the question/s - 40-45 words - ideal 42.
- Link out to Authority Sources.
On schema again, not huge on time but high on impact.
Go get em.
-
Thank you both. We have pretty great content and many high quality contextual earned links already. And we're always working on expanding this. This is stuff that I know from all the years in SEO. We don't have a lot rich snippets, and while I know they help search engines, they're assumed not to actually help rankings, right? In my experience they've done very little to actually boost rankings (or CTR), but if you've seen some huge impact from them, we can see if a complete schema markup is viable. I'm hesitant to direct a ton of time and resources toward busy tasks that don't have much results.
-
Onpage optimization can get you rankings when competition is low, especially in local SERPs in sleepy little towns.
When things get competitive, then onpage optimization has much less of an impact. Then, great content and great links are much more important.
-
You cannot beat high quality contextual earned links.
That said schema makes search easier for search engines, so review the schema mark-up and help feed structured data to google in the best way possible. So start with a schema audit.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Best Practices for SEO 2021
What are the best way to do on page and off page seo in 2021?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SaraClay0 -
What do you think about SEO of big sites ?
Hi, I was doing some research of new huge sites for example carstory.com that have over million pages and i notice that many new sites have strong growing for number of keywords and then at some point everything start going down (Image of traffic drop attached) there are no major updates at this time but you can clearly see even on recent kewyords changes that this site start loosing keywords every day , so number of new keywords are much less that lost keywords. How would you explain it ? Is that at some point when site have more than X number of indexed pages then power of domain is not enough to keep all of them at the top and those keywords start dropping ? Please share you opinion and if you have any experience by yourself with huge sites. Thank You very appreciated 2LC3AxE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | logoderivv0 -
Ecommerce, SEO & Pagination
Hi I'm trying to workout if there's something wrong with our pagination. We include the rel="next" and "prev" on our pages. When clicking on page 2 on a product page, the URL will show as something like - /lockers#productBeginIndex:30&orderBy:5&pageView:list& However, if I search site:http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers in Google, it seems to find paginated pages: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers?page=2 I have a feeling something is going wrong here, but haven't worked massively on Pagination before. Can anyone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How to find a good seo company?
Hello there, Can anyone recommend how to go about finding a good seo company?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
How to lay off your SEO compnay?
I have decided to replace my seo company. The pint is this company has been partly my developer too. So he has set up a demo server of my website. 1- Should I be worried about duplicate material when I end my cooperation with this company(The demo server) 2- Should I be worried that if they do not like it, they go and delete all the submitted materials and destroy my pages rankings? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Anyone Experimented With YouTube SEO?
Primarily questions I want to know definitive answers to: Do incoming links to a YouTube video affect Google's decision to show a YouTube video thumbnail in the results? If so, does YouTube rank the video higher due to incoming links? Does YouTube take any off-page factors into consideration when ranking a video? Does anyone else have any other helpful tips/thoughts/suggestions? Please don't answer this just to get points and give me fluff information. I'd really like to get some concrete data/info 🙂 Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0 -
SEO Consultant for site audit
Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0