What if your content is way better than competitors?
-
Do you have any suggestions if you are being outranked by competitors even though your page has way better content and better links?
-
I hope not. If you try it let us know how it works. I think that they should give a bonus for anything that is "kickass".
-
You think Google would penalize for using the word "kickass"?
-
The German in me favors free beer - especially Sam Adams.
If you don't have a brand to leverage (and even if you do) use value propositions and calls to action.
I don't know if our brands are famous or not, but we're 2nd and 3rd generation family brands and we leverage the name for all its worth. Plus, our name offers connotations that our url does not.
Now we're not just in-state but nationwide. Makes us feel good when a customer from Wisconsin sent us this yesterday:
"I am truly impressed with your services. I will be ordering more items very soon. I will be also be suggesting your site to my horse community. Thank you for communicating so well! "
Hopefully, his horse friends won't think he's crazy for referring them to a lumber.com site.
-
I almost never place the brand in the title tag. Because my brands are not FamousBrands. Instead I offer a value proposition like "free beer"... which one would you click?
-
I place the main keywords on the left and the kickass price on the right.
-
While waiting for EGOL, I'll throw this in. I've wondered the same thing as you and have a hard time using that Title real estate for much other than keywords and brand.
So I compromise and put the promo language at the front of my meta descriptions in CAPITAL LETTERS.
-
Mighty Mouse uses more than free beer to steal peanuts! Great tidbits!
Charles - to your point I give a thumbs up to EGOL's post.
I have compared the sites of competitors outranking us and and often times I cannot find a single common thread among them as to why they are ranking so well except for strong PA/DA.
Their site appearance, layout, navigation, user friendliness, promotions and depth of content may not be that great, but they're pulling rank.
If your PA/DA is comparable, then you've got underlying issues.
-
Do you typically put those type of titles in the beginning of the title tag or end? From what I have been told and read "best practice" is to have your best keywords in the beginning of the title tags, however they also say the title tag should have a call to action of some sort.
However who knows these days
-
When I am at #2 and the publisher is #1, placing a kickass price (lower than MSRP) in the title tag pulls in a lot of their sales.
"Fast Shipping" does well in B2B.
"Video" does well in informatinoal.
A huge number works well in some product and info pages.... "350 Brass Widgets"
-
"Free Beer" is very compelling. How's your conversion rate on those titles?
-
If your content is way better and you have better links (and a few months have passed) then these sites are probably beating you on their authority or your site has a lack of respect from Google.
If the sites above me are enormously authoritative then I tweak my title tags with something like.... "Free Beer!"... or a kickass price.... use your imagination. The goal is to elicit clickthroughs in the SERPs.
If they are not enormously authoritative then I would be wondering if I have a problem that is holding my site back... such as bad links, duplicate content, etc. If that is not true then you can wait or promote the page.
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
-
Ahrefs Much Higher Than Competitors But Competitors Doing Significantly More Traffic?
Hey guys, I'm baffled by checking my Ahrefs ratings lately. It looks like our rating just went up considerably... from over 1 million to now around 500k. One of my main competitors, however, has a much lower Ahrefs rank (over 3 million) but he does a considerable more amount of traffic than we do... how is this? My domain rating is higher than his by a lot. Very curious how this works.
Competitive Research | | jfishe19880 -
Best competitor analysis tool comparing my links with competitor links?
Hello All, Can anyone tell me best competitor analysis tool comparing my links with competitor links? Tool which define quality of links either low quality or spammy links etc? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | devdan0 -
Best way to find the highest ranking pages for a message board?
What is the best tool or method to find the highest ranking posts and content on a message board or forum? What is the best tool or method for finding the highest ranking keywords for a message board or forum?
Competitive Research | | Hondaspeder0 -
What's the best SEO way to benefit from your competitor's shutting down?
Hi ! Our main competitor is shutting down (website will be offline) at the end of the month and we are negotiating with them to buy their domain name: the idea would be to take advantage of their good rankings in the SERPs to redirect traffic to our pages (we're planning to crawl their site or get their sitemap and redirect th category / product pages to ours). The question is: for how long this strategy will be useful: days / weeks / months? (= for how long their pages will continue to appear in the SERPs from the day we enable the 301 redirections to our site?) Thanks in advance for your help! And if you have better suggestions, we're up to hear them of course.. 😉 Cheers
Competitive Research | | Kuantokusta0 -
Finding competitors best keywords?
How do I learn my competitor's best keywords? I realize I can add more keywords to my campaign but the problem is - I am not sure I am thinking of the right keywords. I don't want to compare with the keywords I am targeting - I want to know what THEY are targeting.
Competitive Research | | dealblogger1 -
What's causing this site to rank better than another?
As I work on getting a grasp for what causes sites to rank better than others, I'm a bit stumped with two of our competitors. When you search Google for "essay editing" you get these results: 1. Ivyeyesediting.com 2. papercheck.com 3. gradesaver.com 4. scribendi.com 5. essayedge.com When you put these in OSE, it seems crazy that Ivyeyes is anywhere near the top. For example, essayedge creams these guys on EVERY single category. As a new SEO here, what am I missing. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Not only that, it's pretty discouraging seeing essayedge so far down the SERPS with what appears to be some really great numbers. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Competitive Research | | Kibin0 -
What is the best way to know your accurate ranking on google? what analytics are most trustworthy?
with seomoz, i rank on google in one spot. With market samurai, I rank in another spot, With KPMRS (or whatever) i rank another place. But then when i just type my keywords into google, it puts me in a whole different world... am confused... and the client i am trying to help rank higher is confused. Thanks for any help you can offer be blessed bd
Competitive Research | | creativeguy0 -
Competitor analysis
Hi This is obviously a well worn question (I've read the great blog by Sam Crocker last year - see below), but I'm looking for an updated set of opinions on sources of competitor data. The competitor data I'm interested in is traffic volumes either aggregated or disaggregated by referral source (i.e. organic search, PPC, email, social etc.). The types of data I've checked so far are Google Trends for websites (no disaggregation), Alexa (some good sources of free data) and Experian's Hitwise (too expensive for my current needs). In addition I'm aware that Compete will be providing an interface for such data in the UK in January at reasonable rates for what I'm after. I'm interested in views on these and other sources in relation to experience of their relative accuracy, costs, pros, con etc. Ideally I'm looking for something that is free, comprehensive, and is not being used by the competition - is that too much to ask!!! 😉 Any inputs would be greatly appeciated. Thanks in advance! Neil Sam's great blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic
Competitive Research | | mccormackmorrison0