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
-
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Highly ranked pages to new domain?
Hi everyone! We are ranked #1 for about 30 product pages at www.oldsite.com/product1 and we are wanting to move about 30 of those pages to a new site www.newsite.com/product1 (new domain and hosting - which we own). What is the best way to do this? I'm confused if you recreate those pages on the new domain vs. ftp move them, 301 re-directs, etc. Looking for the things we must do and the sequence to do it all, etc. Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
Can you combine YouTube and on-site hosting as part of a Video SEO strategy?
My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos. We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me. As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced. From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea? 3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description. The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order: the original post on Moz a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input: Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube? Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search? Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
I have rebuilt a website on a new domain and followed SEO protocol to maintain authority, but the results and rankings are declining.
We took over an account for a company called knightdoorservices.com who specialize in doors and windows in Edmonton, Alberta. We built them a new website on a new domain: knightdoorsandwindows.com. We did 301 redirects on all of the old URLs so that they now point to the new URLs so most of the authority should transfer over. Additionally, each page has a properly optimized title, h1 tag, a series of pertinent alt tags, and many instances of the focus keyword for that particular page. Additionally, the website loads quickly and has many high authority inbound links pointing to the domain. We have done this for many other companies and have seen their rankings maintain their position or increase. Is there something that I am missing for this company in particular? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Is site:domain.com + keyword a good indicator of the quality of a page?
Are the results provided by site:domain.com + keyword a good indicator of the quality of certain pages? For example, should the first result be more relevant, have a higher number of links, etc than the second result?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0