Information Overload! Please can someone help me simply, with this specific example?

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hi Guys

I am asking a lot of questions lately, so I am very grateful of the community support.  Hopefully I can start giving back soon.

I am getting myself tied up in knots with SEO on my site.  I have read so many articles, and many contradictory opinions that I can't workout which path to go down.  So could you look at this specific example and give me a brutally honest kick in the right direction?

If you do a search on google (UK) for "Vogue Magazine Subscription" you will see one of our main competitors in position 7,8,9 for Teen Vogue, Luomo Vogue and Italian Vogue.  We come in at position 4 page 2 (UniqueMagazines).

Why is it that our competitor ranks higher than us, for what is really an unrelated search?  I mean, yes Teen Vogue, Italian and Luomo are relevant to those keywords, but surely our page is more relevant?

Is it because the competitor has a slightly higher domain authority?  We are working on generating content to drive back links, and so get authority.

I have looked into so much, generating content, updating internal link architecture, creating back links.  What in this specific example should I be looking at?

I have analysed our back link profile, it's ok.  I did some work on internal links, as our site ranked first for Italian Vogue, which seemed to be due to more links internally pointing at the italian version.

What metrics should I be looking at to determine what makes our competitor rank higher?

Many thanks if you can help

Paul

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hmm, a bit worried you had some errors.  Thanks for pointing this out.  I can check our error logs around the time period you were looking and see what I can identify.

I will be starting on the Q&A content soon, just working through some check lists and audits first.

Right, best  get these errors checked out.

Thanks for your help

Paul

[modulusman]

Paul,

Glad my comment was of at least some use...

As far as the errors.  What I ran into when I checked out your site (and again this was only briefly) were actual page errors (I think 2-3 out of about 6 or 8 clicks on specific products) where the window opened but in the little description box there was error text instead of content.  I wish I could tell you what category or specific items I clicked so that you could just go in and fix them...  Sorry for that.   I'll make sure to remember to jot things like that down in the future.

As far as the extra content goes, are you permitted to display articles or excerpts from any of the issues?  Amazon gives away pages, and most subscription based services give away at least a taste before they make you subscribe.

As far as a universal question, I wish I could help.  But I can honestly say that I've never typed anything like that into a search engine.  I don't know what that's worth...  But I have seen competing sites in my little corner that appeared to have this sort of formula filled in for locations and still seemed to rank well.  The content didn't even appear to be unique from page to page, and honestly that sort of angered me given all of the crap we hear about duplicate content.    If you do find some sort of answer to that let me know, I'd be interested to hear how to pull off something like that.

Someone told me something almost right after I started looking into SEO to put the "business stuff" aside for a bit and focus on being useful to someone.  Provide information, answer questions, give your self something to fall back on if you're not the cheapest or the best at what you do.  It opens up an entirely new (additional) gateway for people to get to you and your product.

So I'll leave it at that.

[TheUniqueSEO]

Thanks Alan

I am working through a number of audits/check lists now to basically identify as much info as I can and go from there.

Incidentally, I have started to read some of your posts on search engine journal.  Very interesting stuff.  Thanks for taking the time to help me with my issues, and my understanding of the issues

It is very much appreciated

Thanks

Paul

[AlanBleiweiss]

Since Google specifically rolled out an "above the fold" update, this is among the considerations.  You could consider using CSS to show only a small portion of the content above the fold with a mouse-action to expand that content for those wanting to read it. If it's above the fold in the code that's what matters.

When I say sub-pages I mean unique, high quality content tightly focused to the primary topic with only slight sub-topic variation (to keep topical relationships strong).  So yes, Q&A could possibly fit that concept.

Your other tasks you've listed are all valid concepts.  I just can't sit here and confidently say with certainty you're focusing properly without knowing other issues the site might have going on.

bottom line here - you're thinking is, now that we've had dialogue, on track.  How far you go to understanding all the possible issues will determine how much value you get out of the actions you take though - that's so critical I can't not mention it again.

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hey Modulusman

Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem.  I think what I really needed was a fresh perspective which is what You and Alan have done.

I was wondering when you say you found quite a few errors, what do you mean? Duplicate content, duplicate titles, poor content, spelling mistakes?

I like your suggestion about writing content about things other than buying magazines.  I just need to identify what that content would be

As I mentioned to Alan above we have identified a way to get more quality content, about some longer tail keywords, is to write Q&A about the magazines.  So for example "Can I buy vogue for delivery to the USA?" we can answer  that question and write some nice content around that.

What I struggle with though is that question could be used for any magazine, i.e. "Can I buy Magazine X for delivery to the USA?"  Basically change the magazine name, and country, and you could spin out hundreds of questions.  But that to me is too much duplicate content.  How many times can you uniquely answer the question "can I buy magazine X to be delivered to country Y".

I think I have a fairly clear plan of action, but I still have some big questions or uncertainties which I need to address, this one mentioned here about Q&A content being a biggie.

Again thanks for your time, and if you could point me in the direction of the errors you mentioned I would be most greatful.

Thanks

Paul

[TheUniqueSEO]

Thanks again Alan

What you are saying reinforces the decisions I have come to.  I was just doubting myself with so many different view points and contradictory articles.

With regards to audits, I have performed a few over the past few weeks.  I have crawled the site with many tools to identify issues.  I have looked at the internal link structure.

I have been wrestling with the quality content issue in my mind, and the decision I have come to is to create a magazine subscription Q&A where we will write quality content about specific questions our customers have.  So for example taking Vogue magazine, we would write answers to questions about Vogue magazine.  Is this what you refer to as sub-pages which add depth to the topic?  This is what I understand you to mean.

Your point about content above the fold is interesting.  From a user experience point of view we took the decision to put the call to actions above the fold.  This means the content is below these call to actions (add to basket buttons).  What you are saying is because the mentioned competitor has content above the fold, this could be something that helps them.  I would be very hesitant to push our call to action down the page, potentially below the fold.  Especially as to test this would mean making that change and leaving it for several weeks for google to recrawl the site.  As you say this is just one of many things, but this is the sort of issue I wrestle with mentally.

Regarding back links, I do know that this competitor did some work around 2 years ago and had an SEO firm "obtain" a huge number of back links.  This killed them completely for 6-8 months, as the links were of poor quality.  They had to hire a new SEO firm to build new links.  So yes their quantity of links is huge, but there's a lot there which caused them some serious issues for a while.

So our strategy anyway is to

• add more quality content,
• develop sub pages around the top X products to add depth to those products/magazines,
• continued development of back links into the product pages not just the home page,
• identify the top ranked pages on our site and link those to top 2 products to channel rank to sub pages

Does this look like a sensible path to you?

Thanks

Paul

[modulusman]

Hey guys,

I am far from an expert at this stuff, and my site is far from a powerhouse example of all of the correct things to do....   But I started from scratch with a site that wasn't built with SEO in mind.  In fact, it was built by a designer who didn't believe in SEO, and then I was given and accepted advice from the same designer about how to drive traffic to my site.  So I've come around from an opposite end of the spectrum and turned a downward spiral into an upward climb.  I'm probably not qualified to attempt to answer this question, but I can see that you're still frustrated, and I've definitely been there.

The first thing I did was take away all of the negatives that I could find.  I used every tool possible (especially here) and compared results to find and remove all factors that could have been negatively contributing to my rankings.  All of the cliche stuff that you hear about constantly... Duplicate content, meta crap, titles etc...

Then I tried to optimize for keywords...  and after screwing that up about 10 times, I started to realize that it was perspective that was messing things up for me.  I'm in sort of a unique niche, and it turned out that almost NOBODY was searching for the things I was focusing on, or at least not in the way that I had been thinking.  So I had to switch perspective, and try to figure out how people were getting to my site and sites like mine.  It turned out to be a bit different than what I was looking at and subsequently trying to project and monitor.

I sifted through your site (quickly) and noticed quite a few errors come up when it came to descriptions of specific items, and some of the content in the ones that did come up was a bit weak. The site looks great, and it's easy enough to navigate.

If this was me...  I would work on a strategy that involved getting people to the site for reasons other than buying a magazine.  I know I'm saying this wrong...  So I'll try to rephrase...  If there are 10 people..  One of those people might get on a computer with the intention of buying a magazine subscription.  However on most days all 10 of them will surf the internet for the answers to a question, or for information that might be in those magazines.   I don't know how possible it would be for you to approach things in this way, but it seemed to me that you were asking for more of an opinion based answer than a big long technical answer.  Also it seems that 10 chances to convert is better than 1 (and I've heard arguments against this) if done well, and the user gains something from visiting your site.

I may not be right, but I need some coffee...  So this is as far as I'm gonna go.

[AlanBleiweiss]

There's another issue. Never contract an SEO firm for ongoing work until and unless you first get a proper audit.  Sites that just dive in are, in my personal opinion, irresponsible and can severely harm a site's long term potential, and cost a site owner a fortune with either no positive results, or worse, further penalties.

Consider every aspect of SEO (several checklists exist, including one of my own) all about "refined quality".  So for example, as previously mentioned, content on your page compared to your competitor.  The volume and higher up placement of content on their page vs. yours is an example of higher quality from the perspective of Google's system. That system is designed to say "which of these pages is more authoritative on this topic" and "which of these offers more value to the visitor".

Even though they have exponentially more links  to their site than you do, their link to root domain ratio is not very good - too many links coming fro two few sites.  So from a quality perspective (just based on that one consideration, as you work on building links, be sure you get links spread across more domains so the ratio is not as severe.

What other signals can you send that "this page is more trustworthy"?  You can get links from off-site pointing to that page.  Your competitor has none.  Advantage? you!

You can feature a paragraph on your home page pointing to that page.  Signal? Hey - here's an important internal page on our site.  Or a series of blog articles targeting that and other various pages you want to boost internal signals on.

You can get social media exposure pointing to that page.

You can add two sub-pages to that page after you work on the content specific to that page.  That will triple your on-site signaling that "this topic has much more depth on this site than that competitor"...

And within any one of those, or as relates to all the other major SEO considerations, it's all about the quality of the implementation.  Just getting a bunch more content isn't enough if it's not high quality content.  Just getting more links spread over enough domains isn't enough if they're not relevant links from trusted sites.

But you also need to look at page speed considerations, and what crawl issues Google sees in Google webmaster tools - both of those are site-wide considerations signaling possible low trust or bad user experience that Google cares about and also influences individual page/topic evaluation.

If you've got exponentially more pages already, are there too many pages with "thin" content or "perceived" thin content across the site?  Another signal that says "overall, this site is not as valuable to site visitors" and can definitely impact the individual rankings in ways you need to recognize could be more important than any specific page's considerations...

The list goes on and on.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm not about to perform a comprehensive audit at this point, however just to give you a clearer understanding of the challenges:

Your competitors page for Teen Vogue has more descriptive paragraph based content.  Much of that content is above the fold whereas your page has less content and it's further down on the page.

Is that the issue? Maybe.

However that page on their site has over 140 links pointing to it internally. Yours, according to OpenSiteExplorer, has 3 internal links pointing to it.

Their site (www sub-domain) has over 23,000 external followed links pointing to their domain, yours has 1,175.

That's just three very important factors.  Except I can't advocate "do this one thing" for you to magically see your page rank higher than theirs. And it's not right to tell you "you have to get more content, move it higher on the page, link more internally and then go out and get another 22,000 inbound links.  Because that's also not a guarantee you'll move up in rankings given all the other factors in SEO.

One concept - given that they have so many more inbound links, for example, is their site is likely to have a much more trusted brand presence.  It could take you years to "catch up" from that regard.

And while I would suggest building out much more content depth on that single topical focus will go a long way toward combating their far superior link volume, again, there could be other more important signals that need to be addressed as well.

This is why it's not so easy to just give you a "quick" answer.

[TheUniqueSEO]

Thanks Alan

I think we are coming from the same angle.

I started this question asking how I go about doing an audit/analysis which would then give me some sort of roadmap down which I can go, even just a general direction.  I was hoping I might get some pointers on what to analyse, but maybe I was going the wrong way about it by giving a specific example with a specific competitor.

I guess I am on my own to figure this out, as no one out there really seems to have any clear advice for someone like me, other than entering into a contract with an SEO firm and pay £1000s a month, and let them do the same trial and error work I could do myself.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me

Paul

[AlanBleiweiss]

"It can't just be a case of "throw 100 different things at the wall and see what sticks"?"

This is exactly my point.  You are rolling the dice by throwing one, two, five or 100 things at the wall and seeing what sticks.  An audit examines the high level consideration points (my audits look at over 90 high level factors) then how they relate to each other.

In that process, a skilled auditor can identify issues that have more of an impact than others.  The end result is a focused list of specific tasks prioritized for maximum long term value.

While I happen to be someone who specializes in audits, this is not why I advocate them. I do so because you specifically should not have to continually throw things at the wall, praying to the Google gods in hopes that something will stick. It's extremely inefficient and frustrating.  Just as trying to evaluate a single competitor for one or a few phrases.  In that scenario, you are continually having to play leap-frog with them and others.

In a proper audit scenario, with long term across-the-board sustainability in mind, it's not as much about what one specific competitor is doing. It's about getting a much more vast range of value on a much stronger foundation.

And too just because I do audits for a living I don't post this info here to get new business. I come here to help others grasp concepts most people fail to understand or consider.  Many people can do audits - some even for free.  The key though is an audit becomes a long term road-map. It becomes invaluable in your arsenal and helps cut through the online noise.

When an audit is done properly, it does not focus on any one set or sub-set of phrases - it's a holistic evaluation of the site's critical considerations.  Sure, you can start working on aspects of the site specific to one set or sub-set of topics when you do the implementation work. However it's almost always a case where there are site-wide issues that are an underlying cause to a site's problems.

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hi Alan

Thanks for your response.  To be honest it has confused me more than help.

I understand SEO is about a lot of different factors, but in certain cases there has to be certain things that can be looked at?  It can't just be a case of "throw 100 different things at the wall and see what sticks"?

There must be a way to perform some sort of analysis, and at least get a steer on the route to go down.

I am not sure what you mean about "You refer to a single competitor, yet you fail to even discuss the fact that you're five positions lower in rankings than they are".  I thought when I said "one of our main competitors in position 7,8,9 for Teen Vogue, Luomo Vogue and Italian Vogue.  We come in at position 4 page 2 (UniqueMagazines).".  Surely I was saying there that they are position 6,7,8 and we are position 14?  Isn't that what you are saying?

What I was trying to say is I didn't expect to fix one thing and all would become good in the world.  I know there are various factors.  What I was asking is if I take our website as a whole it would be a daunting task determining where to start.  Is it possible to take some specific cases, i.e. top 20 products, and analyse those to identify some opportunities.  But what would I analyse?  There are over 200 factors that go into a google serp.  Are you suggesting I analyse and target all 200?  (Given that not all the factors are known).

Thanks

Paul

[AlanBleiweiss]

Others on this forum may want to be kind to you and offer you some shiny objects.

I'm going to take a different route here.  There are no shiny objects in SEO.  It's confusing when first learning the art of SEO because real SEO, sustainable SEO is a complex multi-layered process involving hundreds of individual primary factors, and when those are cross-related, that translates into thousands of sub-factors.

Domain Authority or Page Authority or PageRank by themselves are NOT going to necessarily be better on one site that outranks another for any single phrase or group of phrases.  These MAY be, however a site could have a great Domain Authority and effortlessly be outranked by another site with a lower Domain Authority given the right leverage focused on some sub-set of topical focus.

You refer to a single competitor, yet you fail to even discuss the fact that you're five positions lower in rankings than they are, not just one position lower.  Then there's the fact that there are six other entries above even theirs.  (and that's even possibly not the case for someone else if you're seeing personalized results).

In a competitive market, your site is never evaluated against just one competitor within search algorithms. It's evaluated against all of them and indirect "perceived" competition as well.

While I would love to site here and suggest "fix this one thing" or "focus on this area here", as you yourself have stated, you've tried many things.

The only real answer is to do a comprehensive audit on your site to see what the totality of critical issues might be and where the majority of opportunities most likely exist for improvement.

Anyone else offering a shiny object is rolling the dice with your site's success potential.