Competitor outranks us, even though we are better in every measurement
-
I run a site www.rent.com.au. We are a realestate portal that is dedicated to the rental market across Australia. We have been adding more content to our site and now have close to 80% of all realestate agent listings in Australia. Over the past few months we have spent time on:
- Canonicalisation of our search result and property pages
- Updating titles and descriptions to match key terms
- Adding a internal link structure to promote the capital cities of Australia
Yet despite this work there are sites which are much smaller, have less traffic, and haven't changed for years outranking us for terms like:
- rental properties perth
- houses for rent perth
One of these site is rentfind.com.au. Looking at the competitive domain analysis between us and rentfind we are better in every measurement.
I have compared our backlinks and there isn't too much difference with who is linking to us.
My conclusion is that there is something wrong with the way we are organising our content for search engines. I think that it could be because of our search drill-down from our home page, but before I do anything drastic it would be good to get some feedback on what we could be doing wrong.
-
Hi Rupert,
I'd be careful doing this. You need to plan your strategy very carefully.
For instance, for the page http://www.rent.com.au/rent/properties-in-north+perth-wa-6006 you still might want that indexed for very specific, longtail searches about rental properties in north perth.
I'd start with some on site optimisation of existing pages. Get more content on whatever page you want to rank for and make sure the keyword is in title tags, alt image tags, headers, body text, anchor text from other parts of the site etc.
Also, try and build links to the pages you want to rank for, that will give Google a good indicator.
The noindex, follow - I would do a full site audit and identify exactly what pages you want to apply this to. This should be done VERY carefully.
Thanks
-
My hands are tied about the number of ads. We comply with AdSense for the number of ads we display (3x AdSense for Content or 1 AsC + 3 AdSense for Search).
I would hope that the ads are offset by the content we provide.
-
Thanks Brad, I suspected something like this. Our site has two link structures - the drill down and the suburb. The idea was the drill down would be useful for users and also provide a way for crawlers to index our site. We would run with any page that would rank - although ideally it would be for the suburb page /rent/properties-in-perth-wa-6000 rather than /rental/wa/perth which is for all suburbs inside the greater metro area.
I think we should set a noindex,follow for all the drill down results, yet that would remove almost half of the pages indexed so I'm not sure if it is a good idea.
-
Hi Rupert,
Just having a quick glance - if you go a Google search for 'rental properties perth' for your site (enter "rental properties perth site:rent.com.au" in Google) - your top ranking page for that term is http://www.rent.com.au/rent/properties-in-north+perth-wa-6006. I assume you'd want to rank for a page like this, however: http://www.rent.com.au/rental/wa/perth
Is that the case?
The URL http://www.rent.com.au/rental/wa/perth rates as only a 'B" in SEOmoz's on page report card tool. The keyword is only mentioned only 3 times on the page, only once on the body.
There's obviously some issues with that - plus your internal linking structure. You need to direct all 'Perth' type pages to a central Perth location.
Hope this helps,
Brad (also from Perth :P)
-
Just a first impression and I'm not by any means an expert here but there are quite a few ads.
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
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
Link Spam from Competitor Help
A clients link profile is recently getting lots of spam links related to "abortion pills" and "does my husband cheat" I found a few of the sites that link, and it appears that there is some malicious code on the site injecting links at the top of the site. http://www.med-reporter.at/index.asp?men=Gesundheit&submen=Produkte&artid=1587&kategorie=&blockzl=3 Can anyone look at the link above and tell me what network or software is creating these links?
Technical SEO | | webbroi0 -
About Us in the Footer
For our new site we created a simple navigational footer. The development team wants to put a short "About Us" paragraph with relevant links to our products or services. I know putting footer links for the search engines is a big no-no, but is this different because it's meant for the users convenience? This is an image of our unfinished footer: https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/jihw Are there any other changes we should implement? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Does our new home page design look better and better for seo
Hi, i would like to know if our new design for our home www.in2town.co.uk page looks better than it did. We are trying to target the keyword for lifestyle magazine and lifestyle news. We are wondering if we should add more colour or graphics to the home page. we are going through each section of the site to make it a more enjoyable experience for our readers. If anyone can give us advice on keeping people on the page and using different social media techniques then that would be great. Through some excellent advice on here we are going to be starting a facebook page
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Are building a page using HTML 5 better for seo?
Very general question really, but does anyone know whether Google sees html5 pages as being superior in any way to xhtml or html 4.x pages?
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0 -
Considering redirecting my site from .com/us to just .com. What could the possible SERP consequences?
Today we use country-specific .tlds but have the US site on .com/us; .com is now a 'flag-site.' Ikea uses that structure too (.com/.com/us). Looking potential risk to redirecting current US site to .com.
Technical SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Are (ultra) flat site structures better for SEO?
Noticed that a high-profile site uses a very flat structure for there content. It essentially places most landing pages right under the root domain folder. So a more conventional site might use this structure: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/landing-page-3/ This site in question - a successful one - would deploy the same content like this: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-3/ So when you're clicking deeper into the nav. options the clicks always roll up to the "top level." Top level pages are given more weight by SEs but conventional directory structures are also beneficial seen as ideal. Why would a site take the plunge and organize content in this way? What was the clincher?
Technical SEO | | DisneyFamily1 -
What should i do with the links for "Login", "Register", "My Trolley" links on every page.
My website ommrudraksha has 3 links on every page. 1. Login 2. Register 3. My trolley My doubt is i do not want to give any weightage to these links. does these links will be calculated when page links are calculated ? Should i remove these as links and place these as buttons ? ( with look a like of link visually ? )
Technical SEO | | Ommrudraksha0