Competitive Analysis: Links & Keywords

[thinkWebstoreSEO]

I'm noticing that for some key local search terms our company is not ranking in SERPs as I would expect considering it's size relative to the local sites that are ranking. I subscribed to SEOmoz to get a better understanding of what's going on, and haven't figured it out yet.

Our site is higher in almost every metric than the sites we're competing with, but our competition consistently ranks higher in organic results for industry standard keywords. The few metrics we're being outranked in are, "Linking C Blocks" and "Page MozTrust" (we're very close to the leader in MozTrust).

Are these two metrics enough to account for our companies poor SERP performance or do I need to be paying attention to something else?

[ChadBreezy]

The bulk of your main content needs to be above the fold. This is the same area where your h1 tag should reside. You can certainly see this with many ecommerce stores.

i.e.

"h1"

"content here"

try to link to two inner pages if you can for additional content that cannot be fully explained on this page. Also try to have a 1 or 2 % keyword density in a 200 word paragraph.

You should be set.

*Keep your keywords in your h1 tag and title tag to the left!"

[thinkWebstoreSEO]

Another question that's come up is content placement. Does Google care where on the homepage text content is? In other words if we had a couple paragraphs of text would Google care if that text appeared where you saw it when loading the page or if that text were located down the page where you'd have to scroll to see it?

[ChadBreezy]

Defiantly agree with the Penguin Algo.

*When you do initially build out your directory links or custom links, try to use randomization on your anchor phrases. You can do search within searchengineland.com and searchenginejournal.com for post on junk anchors and random anchor phrases.

This algo update rocked the seo industry and many of the over optimize links-anchors were diluted in seo value.

[ChadBreezy]

Hey, if you need other advice or help with analysis; I usually can point you in the right direction. Good luck!

[thinkWebstoreSEO]

That helps a lot! Thanks for your input. I'll definitely be putting your advice into practice.

[ChadBreezy]

You Heading Tags also know as your h1 and h3 tags are important for on page seo.

Especially the H1 tag. You should probably define a css class for styling because this tag can be big, bulky, and ugly; however, Google uses this as a large signal for what a web-page is about. The title tag is also the other most vital signal and it should match the h1 (I mean the keyword phrase you are targeting).

I emphasize everyday to internal departments where I work about the importance of on-page-seo. In competitive search ninches, these on page scores and organicness (if that is a word) will matter in stable rankings.

Also where you have your h1 should be above the fold (nerd jargon), right under the top nav. The h1 followed by a simple paragraph that has useful content and one or two links to direct users to targeted pages or directories.

Hope this helps.

[thinkWebstoreSEO]

These are some exceptional answers gentlemen! I think our answer may lie in content. After reading these responses and looking at our site I noticed that our homepage doesn't have any text up front and center on the homepage. thinkwebstore.com is the domain. We have some text navigation, an image of our team and a slider...it's not until the user scrolls down the page that we get to some actual text content.

I took a look at the sites that are ranking for the keyword, "website design jackson ms" and each of them has prominent text front and center. There is one site that doesn't have prominent text on their homepage, and they're ranking #1 for, "website design mississippi". What that site has that I have not gotten to yet (I just recently rebuilt our site and haven't finished our technical SEO yet) is titles for their navigation text.

Would you all mind commenting on the importance of text content placement on the page (front and center vs further down the page), and titles for navigation and how these elements relate to ranking well in SERPs.

[MarcLevy]

Some good information already from Chad, but to answer your question directly, yes the amount of unique links (c-blocks) as well as the anchor text of those links could have a large impact on ranking positions.

Without knowing more about your site, the competitors and the phrases you want to rank for it is hard to know exactly what the issues could be, but other things to consider:

• On page SEO - Are your optimised properly for the terms you think you should rank for and how do you compare to the competition?
  http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

  Above and beyond the general checks the tool above will run, do you have 'great' content in place on-page to match the search queries you want to rank for?

• Penalties and Filters - 2012 was massive for Penguin and Panda, make sure you have not been over-linking or doing anything else Google doesn't like. It could be another reason why you are not doing so well for these terms.
  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

Good Luck!

[ChadBreezy]

I would suggest using Majestic SEO to look at your website's overall trust for links coming into the website.

They have a great graph that shows the "trust flow" and "citation flow" of your link profile. The closer to the orgin point the better those links are and chances are Google will trust those links voting for your site.

There is also on-page seo too. Make sure you audit each website ranking over you in link profile and on page seo. Things like too many characters in title, meta description, meta keyword matter! On-page-content and or keyword density matter too; you don't want keyword density higher than 3% (if you're using static type of content), this too will be a make or break difference in where you sit in Google's SERP!

Also the delivery of actual content has a lot to do with were you'll sit for certain keyword phrases. The more organic and useful the page to the user; naturally your social signals will increase, organic links will increase and thus stronger more stable ranks for certain phrases keywords.

*In SEO today the best thing you can do is study what your competitors offer in content on the page and beat'em. Syndicating your content to places where people can share you're great content or product (whatever) is really the best way to direct your overall efforts!