Strategies to compete with a new domain/site
-
Hi all,
What would be ( highlights ) your strategy in order to rank and compete with a new domain against competitors that have an average of 50% domain authority and around 2000 root domain linking to them, if you would start with a completely new website/domain?
How long would you estimate the new site to be competitive?
In the retail area.
Working on it a month full time
I would go with
- On page SEO off course, detailling each products and building the internal link structure
- Get back links, backlinks, backlinks and... backlinks...
- Build the social media network
- feed a blog
Thanks for your input
Considering working on the site for a month full time, I would estimate a ranking after a month or 2 although the competitions very high. Your thoughts ?
-
Hi Derek,
Sorry for reviving a very old thread but I was wondering how did it go with this project?
Thanks
Ricardo
-
Ok thanks
-
If you look at the wikipedia article for Philadelphia you will find something very similar to what we produce. (but ours would look a lot better)
-
Nice. Would you mind showing me one live article that you produced.
-
Right, our goal is to beat their content and then use it as a weapon to beat their links.
-
Ok thanks for the clarification. Those would effectively be best-on-the-web articles.
-
In a couple of months (two people working) we would produce perhaps six to eight articles, each with a few thousand words, many photos, data tables, references, graphs/art and more.
We are not going for "high quality". We are going for "best-on-the-web" for their topic. That is what you need to get the links to YOUR article.
-
Thanks for the input EGOL. Question: How many content are you looking at to say "couple of month or more" ? I mean that's a lot of content.
I have a good feeling that a kick start with around 50 high quality 1000 words articles all well optimized, each one targeting one specific keyword and interlinked would be a good starter for the content. And forward on the link building afterward.
-
I like to attack with high quality content that will pull natural links continuously over time.
So, for a retail site I would be looking to produce great content in the same topic niche as the products. That content has to be useful to your visitors and be high enough in quality to attract natural links. The goal would be to have best-on-the-web content for those topics. For a niche retail site like you describe producing this content could take a couple months or more of full time work. Then you need to get a few links to get the ball rolling. At first this would contribute very little to the strength of your site but if you have done a great job on selecting the right content and preparing it superbly the strength of your site will grow steadily over time. And, most important, the growth rate of the strength will accelerate over time as your rankings climb and your traffic increases.
-
Thanks for this input. I going in the same path as your first phrase. Making all the page perfect for the choosing keyword. In fact, pretty much of the competition are ranking due to
- Domain Authority
- High number of links ( internal, external, etc )
Most of the description for the "product" are short and more on a "specifications" style. I think that several good article/spec pages ( like 50 to begins with ) all very well optimise would give an edge putting some "content" up.
"Find the keywords that provide the best traffic (your competitors will be using them) and focus on the best 2-3 word phrases" -> yes, I prefer since a long time now to work with 2-3 and 4 word phrase even more.
Thanks for the input again.
-
Thanks for your input Gordon
-
I would look at getting all the on page perfect for the chosen keywords.
Making sure the urls target those keywords and all the canonical tags are set up to avoid losing juice to upper/lower case issues.
Having good human appreciated headings but still using keywords without overuse.
Get the links and blogs rolling with good anchor text.
See where you competitors are making errors in these areas and just do it better.
Find the keywords that provide the best traffic (your competitors will be using them) and focus on the best 2-3 word phrases.
Most of all keep it white-hat, or the hard work will be short lived.
Our business www.oznappies.com is ranking on page 1 & 2 for the main keywords within 2 months using that strategy and following reports and tools on SEOMoz. We have an SEO doing the links and blogs and I am doing the on-page work.
-
Hello,
As you probably know with a brand new site it is difficult to rank for competitive keywords within the first few months. I suggest create 2 lists of keywords - one keyword list that should contain keywords that are competitive and should be seen as longer term goals. The other keyword list should be less competitive keywords(possibly longer tail), that you can rank for in the short term.
Regards,
Gordon
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
-
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Consolidating Multiple Domains into A Single Domain
I have a client who's website is an amalgamation of multiple domains. jacksonhole.net is the main domain but the site passes traffic back and forth from the following domains/sites. My questions is, would it it be better for SEO to consolidate all of these domains under the single high authority domain and 301 redirect the rest or is that a really bad idea? Thanks for your help. jacksonhole.net (Domain Authority 31) jackson-hole-rental-condos.com (Domain Authority 22) jackson-hole-rental-homes.com (Domain Authority 21) j acksonholehotelguide.com (Domain Authority 19)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbaxa-2613381 -
New Domain VS New Page Backlink?
Assuming you've already got a link from:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz
sitea.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) You have two choices for another link: 1. Another link on the same domain but a new page:
sitea.com/page2 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) 2. A link on a new domain but with a lesser domain & page rank
siteb.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 30, Moz page rank 20) Assuming you have no other links to your site - both sites are relevant to your industry, both 5 years old, both have the same number of visitors/external links/ads and the content and anchor text remains the same. Which will have a bigger impact on SERP movements? Sam0 -
Possible problem with new site (GWT no queries/very low index vs. submitted)
Hi everyone, I recently launched a new website for a small business loan company in the Dallas area. The site has been live for roughly a month and a half. I submitted everything to GWT as usual, including my sitemap. I am not sure what's going on with the site, as there is no activity from GWT in the impressions or queries. The submit vs. index is 24/3 (and hasn't moved). Also the queries graph on the overview stops at 3/18/2015... On another note, when I go to Crawl > Sitemaps, it shows that there were pages indexed during the month of march and then on April 3 it drops from 17 to 2 and never increases. Google says there are no errors or issues found, but I feel like there's something wrong. When I do site:, my URLs do pop up which makes me believe there's just a problem with my GWT. With that being said, I'm not happy THINKING there's something wrong. I need to actually know what the problem is. The only thing I can think of that I have done is purchase SSL for the site, but when I search what pages are indexed using www. it shows all the HTTPS URLS, so that would tell me that the site is getting indexed without a problem? Does anyone have a clue as to what might be happening? I will attach some screen shots so that you can get a better idea... KQ2366i D5xBNZf mF7kkgW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt0 -
Site re-design, full site domain A/B test, will we drop in rankings while leaking traffic
We are re-launching a client site that does very well in Google. The new site is on a www2 domain which we are going to send a controlled amount of traffic to, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% to 100% over a 5 week period. This will lead to a reduction in traffic to the original domain. As I don't want to launch a competing domain the www2 site will not be indexed until 100% is reached. If Google sees the traffic numbers reducing over this period will we drop? This is the only part I am unsure of as the urls and site structure are the same apart from some new lower level pages which we will introduce in a controlled manner later? Any thoughts or experience of this type of re-launch would be much appreciated. Thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leshonk0 -
What is the best way to optimize/setup a teaser "coming soon" page for a new product launch?
Within the context of a physical product launch what are some ideas around creating a /coming-soon page that "teases" the launch. Ideally I'd like to optimize a page around the product, but the client wants to try build consumer anticipation without giving too many details away. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSI0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0