Why is a low ranking site outperforming a higher one?
-
Hi,
I've got a question here that is more about learning than about rectifying this specific situation, as it is a low traffic (low dollar) situation. I would appreciate your help.
Thanks,
Ken
The targeted long-tail is: carrollton ga internet marketing
The targeted site is: http://www.kennethlewis.com/
Yet, when I run the keyword search I get this other site of mine, which is older, but has much worse metrics. http://www.breemawellness.com/ On this site, all I did was put a in-text link on it and added the keywords to my title tags.
Open Site Explorer shows these metrics:
KennethLewis.com 34, 23, 18, 98
vs. BreemaWellness 27, 15, 7, 10.
Both are on the same server.
Note:
-Until two months ago the KennethLewis.com was only partially about Internet Marketing- mildly so, actually- and it was a 2-3 page iWeb not-optimized site. But BreemaWellness has never been about Internet Marketing, and those words were just added two months ago for the first time.
-KennethLewis.com gets regular content changes, to the blog. BreemaWellness.com almost never gets touched.
Thoughts?
-
Links are what you want in SEO, they are probably the strongest ranking factor (at least for the time being), but the easiest way to get those is to visible create content that people want to create links around. This is the reason that content is so important.
If you are doing all your linkbuilding manually, by yourself, you have a long road ahead of you.
Google has indexed your page, so it's been crawled but it only has the one link pointing at it and as I said that's not providing any particular context.
I don't think that anyone is going to disagree with the concept that knowing more about SEO is an advantage, but it's not a game winner.
Your situation will all be solved by sorting out that slider and getting some more links with the right anchor text pointing at KennethLewis, specifically at the page we're discussing.
-
I obviously haven't optimized KennethLewis.com for the given term, but the term is all over the site on multiple pages. As for the Breema site, it is mentioned just on the homepage of a site that otherwise has no relevance to the keywords.
I thought Google would know better, and wouldn't give much weight to the addition to the homepage of a different topic (Breema in this case). I put it on there clearly for SEO purposes, and find it strange that Google is taking the bait so easily.
**What happened to all I've read about Google looking site-wide for relevance, and not just on one page? ** How can an Internet Marketing website appear lower in an Internet Marketing search than one with a radically different topic and three usages of the keyword on one page?
In my eyes this reveals that it is not content/relevance that is important, but rather one's ability to play the SEO game, which is exactly what Google says it wants to avoid. Right?
Just trying to wrap my head around this.
-
Yes, maybe I was a little blunt there, sorry about that, it wasn't how I intended it.
Nothing wrong with a sales page as the front page if your clients are mostly direct and you expect that to remain the case.
With that said if they have gone to the trouble of typing in your URL, they are expressing quite a lot of interest already, so it's unlikely that they'll begrudge clicking through to a sales page if you make it an obvious and desirable option.
-
"cars, hunger, and statistics" LOL
Yes, it is true that I used the index page as a sales place for potential clients, and significantly overlooked SEO. Hypocritical, I must say of myself.
Thanks guys for pointing out the obvious. It is funny how much easier it is for me to see other site's issues then my own.
Any other thoughts, anyone?
-
It's a bit tricky to give you anything firm, because in very broad terms these things are down to the volume of links pointing at a site, and both the sites in question are low on links (if you were to get a few reasonable external links pointing at KennethLewis.com I think you'd see a rapid change). But going on the data we have I think this is a mix of site structure, content and page title.
Breema has reasonable content relevant to the query you've mentioned on the front page. It's in plain text there is really no messing around, it's nice and simple. On the other hand the page on KennethLewis is somewhat buried behind a slider containing none of your quoted keywords (and it's the last slide as well).
Moving on to the titles Search engines will read in the region of 70 characters of your title, anything more than that and you are likely to be losing the later words in it. In the case of the page Google is ranking the word "marketing" gets cut off halfway. Breema on the other hand has Georgia mentioned twice and Internet Marketing all covered within those 70 characters and this is going to have an impact.
If you were to create even a few text links to that page from other pages on the site using your quoted keywords I think you would see an improvement, it would be even better if you got the text on your slider sorted, right now it's all about cars, hunger and statistics rather than internet marketing.
Links are the key, get a few reasonable external links with the right anchor text and you'll see some results.
Hope that helps.
-
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your query. Based on a very cursory review, http://www.kennethlewis.com/ isn't optimized for any georgia or carrollton terms. On the other hand, http://www.breemawellness.com/ contains several optimizations for those terms (i.e. title tag, internal links, etc).
Like I said, perhaps I am misunderstanding at what you're driving...
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
-
Unsolved Mobile Rankings for me and competitors disappear in Moz but still ranking.
Hi, I'm trying to create an SEO report for my client however their mobile rankings have completely disappeared for Google Mobile rankings. Competitors rankings have disappeared as well. Could this be a Moz configuration issue?
Moz Pro | | baddjuju0 -
One of my sites fell off the earth
I manage a handful of sites and have ranked top 5 for a handful of keywords for a long time. I recently checked one of my clients websites and other tier 2 pages will come up but the home page is now not showing up for any listings on Google. Was there a recent update was I put in the mysterious sandbox? I have not modify anything or using any black hat seo tricks. Only thing that was done is the client installed demand force onto their website. Any feedback about an update or about demand force or issue would be helpful. The site is https://www.nwichiropractic.com/
Moz Pro | | Tylerr19850 -
Why is my page rank disapointing
Hi fairly new here, so just getting used to everything one questions please. Just ran a crawl test of the website and this page http://www.livingphilosophy.org.uk/teaching-philosophy/index.htm came back with a page authority of 1. Other pages have a rank of 18 through 26 scratched my head for a few hours and came up with no ideas. thanks andy
Moz Pro | | livingphilosophy0 -
Results of keyword rankings way off??
I just did my first crawl, and a bunch of the keywords show my rank as being like 76 or 102 and I'm number 1 for the search when I search manually. **I of course have personal results turned off and I'm not logged into gmail when I search.
Moz Pro | | immortalgamer0 -
Site Explorer - No Data Available for this URL
Hi All I have just joined on the trial offer, im not sure if i can afford the monthly payments, but im hoping SEOmoz will show me that i also cannot afford to be without it! In my proses of learning this site and flicking through each section to see what things do. However when i enter my URL into Site Explorer i get the following message "No Data Available for this URL" My site should be crawl-able, so how do i get to see data for my site/s. I wont post my URL here, as the site has a slightly adult theme.
Moz Pro | | jonny512379
If anyone could confirm if i can post "slightly adult" sites. Best Regards
Jon0 -
Why are the rankings of my keywords different to rankings from other programmes such as 'Access my Lan' and 'Firefly'? Does SEOMoz count 'Google Places and Maps' in their rank count? Im thinking this could explain the difference
Why are the rankings of my keywords different to rankings from other programmes such as 'Access my Lan' and 'Firefly'? Does SEOMoz count 'Google Places and Maps' in their rank count? Im thinking this could explain the difference
Moz Pro | | john_Digino0 -
How to see rankings for a group of keywords over time?
I have around 1200 keywords in an seomoz campaign, chopped into various groups using labels. I am interested in tracking how keywords perform over time, especially groups of keywords. As far as I can tell, in the seomoz tools I can only see historical performance for a single keyword at a time. Is there a way to get a historical performance graph of more than one keyword at once? We often run optimizations for sets of words, so it seems like you would have better stats looking at groups of words vs picking one at a time. Is there a way to export historical data for more than keyword at a time? (So I could graph and analyze this sort of thing myself) Does anyone have other suggestions for tracking rankings in this way? Thanks for any help!
Moz Pro | | mlenz0