Competitive Analysis: Links & Keywords
-
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?
-
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!"
-
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?
-
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.
-
Hey, if you need other advice or help with analysis; I usually can point you in the right direction. Good luck!
-
That helps a lot! Thanks for your input. I'll definitely be putting your advice into practice.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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/newAbove 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!
-
-
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!
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
-
AMP vs Responsive Design? Mobile SEO
Hello !! We are developing a new website with responsive design. As is recommended, the idea would be to have a unique site for mobile and desktop, with same content and same url for both devices, using responsive design to adapt the layout depending on the device. My doubt in here is about the AMP pages? If my website has responsive design, perfectly optimized for mobile do I need somehow AMP pages? As far as I understand, these amp pages would be useful if I had different pages for mobile, but this is not the case. Am I correct or am I missing something? Thanks for your help :
Web Design | | AutoEurope1 -
What To Do When Improved Site Speed & Layout Result In Higher Bounce Rates & Lower Time On Site
We launched a new Bootstrap 3.0 site template 2 weeks ago. The site loads 5x faster and has a much improved layout (utilizing most common above the fold recommendations ). It's only been two weeks, but our bounce rate has increased 5-10% and our avg time on site decreased by 10-18%. Here is the page for one of our most common products so you can see the general experience: <a>http://www.jwsuretybonds.com/surety-bonds/commercial-bonds/auto_dealer_bond.htm</a> (here is the old version: <a>http://199.119.123.134/surety-bonds/commercial-bonds/auto_dealer_bond.htm</a>) We spent two months implementing the new design and working on a speedy load time. We had anticipated a drastic improvement, not mild downturn in user behavior. I'm hopeful that the Analytics metrics aren't showing the true picture on the keywords we care about (can't see anymore due to "Not Provided" listed as most keywords now. Argh!) and perhaps some of the more important/accurate user behavior metrics that we can't see are improving. We know our industry and our clients needs VERY well. We THOUGHT our new content/layout was perfect so it will be tough for us to try to make improvements at this point. We believe our best plan of action now is to add more content on each page and A/B test it along with other subtle changes. The problem is that our new content is very concise and hits on all of the primary visitor intentions, so additions of content could be redundant and making concise answers more "fluffy", which is what we tried to get away from. What do you think? Is there reason for panic? What would your plan of attack be if your "sure shot" new design didn't provide the improvements you "knew" it would? 🙂
Web Design | | TheDude0 -
Content Migration & cost of moving pages
Hope you are all having a great day! I am wondering if anyone would be able to provide general feedback. I work for a medium size company in Chicago. Currently our site is static html and we are seeking to migrate to Wordpress. After speaking with a number of website companies and receiving proposals, I am trying to understand if there is an approximate going rate or range for moving content from static html to a CMS like Wordpress? i.e. a cost per page? We don't have any dynamic content. Most of our pages are text and images. The site itself, including the blog is around 220 pages. Thanks in advance for any insight or resources!
Web Design | | SEOSponge0 -
HTML5 & the doc outline algorithm
Hi My web team are currently working on an updated site using Drupal and have asked me the following question: Is more than one H1 tag with the same value an issue for SEO with HTML5 and the doc outline algorithm? Can anyone help with this please? I appriciate any responses. Thanks in advance. Chris
Web Design | | Fasthosts0 -
How keywords per page to keep from being "spammy"?
Hi all, I am currently doing a marketing internship for a B2B company that does all sorts of out-sourced recruiting work. I have some experience with SEO, but not completely confident. My first question is, I know Google sees websites that load up on keywords as "spammy", so what is the appropriate number of keywords per page? Currently, I was thinking about this setup: 1 keyword for the URL 1 keyword per alt tag (1 per page, at most) 2 keywords per each title tag (approximately 4 pages that I am going to follow internally, not following the "about us" page). After that, I was thinking of adding 2-3 more keywords in each meta description and 2-3 in the body copy. That would equate to 6-8 keywords on each page, is this too many and should keywords be repeated (on the same page or across multiple pages)? Since this website is brand new (zero links), would it make sense to nofollow all of the internal links so that they homepage can gain ranking as quickly as possible within Google?
Web Design | | wlw20090 -
Linking root and domain authority
Hi SEOMOZ community, Can you please advise on how to increase Linking root domains and domain authority. much appreciated.
Web Design | | wahin10 -
Do these links count a duplicate content?
If you do a Google search for the following term it brings up 6 results are these considered duplicate content by Google? Also if so how do I prevent this but still offer other stories to readers of other articles? Google Search Term: site:yakangler.com Okuma helios
Web Design | | mr_w0 -
Keyword help for a beginner
Hello Everyone! I have a few simple questions about picking/using the best keywords for my website. Just to give a little background on the company, we sell branded servers (IBM, HP, DELL) workstations, storage, and related hardware and software (memory, processors, hard drives, operating systems, management software, etc...) I'm trying to pick the keywords to use on the home page but have these questions: 1. This question is a little hard for me to explain, but we would like to show up in the search results whether a user types in: Dell server(s) or IBM server(s) or HP Workstation so for the title tag can we use: DELL, IBM, HP Servers, Workstations, Storage or we need to use DELL Servers, IBM Servers, Dell Workstations, IBM Workstations, etc... Basically what I'm asking is can we combine keywords in the title tag or we need to write them out (hope this make sense) if not let me know and I'll try provide a little more detail and few more examples. 2. This question might not fall under this category of topics and might have to start a new thread but here it goes. We are re-designing our site on a new eCommerce platform using x-cart shopping cart, its a very configurable and inexpensive shopping cart however one of the drawbacks is its speed. Most users of the x-cart shopping cart software report on average of 2-4 seconds page loads, which is kind of slow. even with some heavy optimization you get about 1.5 - 2.5 seconds page load. I've heard that if you want to be higher in Google's search results speed is a big plus, being in the 0.5 second range is a huge plus. I was thinking of creating a static html home page that would include some company info, content with relevant keywords, some links to main categories... (basically kind of copy the google.com page but with a little more text) Would that be a good idea to implement? Hope this question makes sense as well or stick with the default shopping cart home page and try to optimize it as best as possible? 3. We probably have about 10 - 15 short keyword phrases that we want to concentrate on, again they would be:
Web Design | | igor.pinchevskiy
DELL Servers, HP Servers, IBM, Servers
DELL Workstations, HP Workstations, IBM Workstations,
DELL Memory, HP Memory, IBM Memory
DELL Hard Drives, HP Hard Drives, IBM Hard Drives What is the maximum or recommended quantity of keyword phrases to try to include on the home page? Is it also recommended to maybe create a separate page for each keyword phrase? Does a home page get better ranking then another page on the server just because its a home page? Hope my questions aren't too dumb and make sense. I appreciate everyone who takes their time to read through and answer my questions or guide me in the right path. Thank you,
Igor Pinchevskiy0