My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
-
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there.
I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12.
And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes.
It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least.
So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful.
I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess.
We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
-
I'm no expert, so you can take this with a pinch of salt...
But, to my knowledge google gives a lot of weight to domains such as .ac.uk, as these are some kind of educational website and not available to just anyone etc... not saying it is right that they rank above you, just saying that might be the reason google puts them above you.
-
Thank you! That gives me something to focus on - and the site HAS been through a lot of evolutions in recent years, so I guess we've left a lot of debris
-
Harry,
it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know what Google's algo take (or do not) into consideration.
I don't know, maybe your competitors have less links but those links may carry a higher weight, value.
I see every day websites that should rank better than other but still...
But I do get your frustration.
-
I did a quick crawl of your site and found a lot of crawling issues.
You have a lot of canonical issues, broken links, unnecessary redirects, these errors would be wasting your link juice for a start
Problems and counts
<colgroup><col width="348"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| The tag does not have an ALT attribute defined. | 2,338 |
| The page contains broken hyperlinks. | 900 |
| The page was excluded by a noindex attribute. | 591 |
| The page contains multiple canonical formats. | 548 |
| The description is missing. | 541 |
| The page contains unnecessary redirects. | 263 |
| The page contains invalid markup. | 251 |
| The URL for the hyperlink is broken. | 230 |
| The title is too long. | 111 |
| The link text is not relevant. | 99 |
| The description is empty. | 32 |
| Thetag is missing.
| 22 |
| The description is too long. | 15 |
| The URL is linked using different casing. | 14 |
| The page contains multiple title tags. | 10 |
| The title is not relevant. | 10 |
| The description is too short. | 8 |
| The page contains multipletags.
| 2 |
| The title is empty. | 1 |
| The page contains too many hyperlinks. | 1 | -
Sorry - maybe I should be clearer: the search term we're chasing is "Creative Writing Courses" which is the term that has the most traffic and the most associated revenue.
And yes, our web page has only 27 linking root domains, but the #5 competitor (solihull.ac.uk/creative_writing-52514.html) has 0 external links from 0 domains. Fewer internal links too.
Our domain as a whole has 700+ linking root domains versus just 300 for our competitor. So I'm still confused!
-
As you may know, Google's algo implies hundreds of factors. The importance of on page SEO, compared to the importance of relevant backlinks is almost neglectable.
I've seen websites without any onpage SEO ranking better just because they have a buch on relevant backlinks.
According to OpenSIteExplore, you have 2962 backlinks from only 27 root domains.
You can use the "Keyword Difficulty Report" and select Google UK.
For me, for the search term "Online Creative Writing Courses" you're on page 1, Place 2. You can also run a full report for more detailed data.
Also, you might want to check out in opensiteexplorer the anchor texts you and your competitors are using.
Best of luck!
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
-
Domain and urls aren't showing up in Google search
Hi, Moz community, I hope you are staying safe, I have been trying to search our website in Google by using the whole domain name, but it's not showing up. For example: https://www.example.com/
Competitive Research | | ksmith88
https://www.example.com/inner-page.html
Or if search brand name: Example, doesn't come up But when I try example.com, it comes up along with other pages. Neither the inner pages are being come up in the search nor the home page with https://www.example.com. I have checked with Site:example.com, it is showing all the pages, but it is weird on the other hand that it is not visible in the search, what could be the reason? Any tool to check it? I thought it was because of the latest core update from Google. But, there are many keywords in the rankings, so I am sure the website hasn't been impacted. I checked penalties or issues through many tools and even in the search console, everything is fine. Any help would be appreciated.1 -
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 -
Competitor Keyword Rankings
Is there a way within SEOMoz to uncover the keywords your competitors rank for and their respective SERPs? Thx
Competitive Research | | qiherbs.com1 -
Tool to compare which links competition has but i don't?
Is there a tool that I can use that will show me a list of my competition's links that I don't have?
Competitive Research | | ballhogjoni0 -
How to compare my pages with a Keyword Difficulty Report
I'm very new to SEO, but know just enough to be dangerous. I've run my first full KWD report and formatted the results per Jordan Judson's blog post. Now I'd like to compare how related pages on my site compare to these results. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to accomplish this task. Any guidance would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Steve
Competitive Research | | SteveMaguire0 -
Why do some websites that have hardly any backlinks, poorly optimised get placed above sites that are doing all they can with SEO?
For example take these two websites. www.rfasecurity.co.uk is a site that Iam working on and have had some success with yet snifferdogs.org.uk seems to be poorly optimised with little backlinks and still gets place higher. is it due to the key word in the domian name? The key search word is sniffer dogs New at this so any help would be appreciated regards Dave
Competitive Research | | ThePod0 -
Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
I was using OSE and noticed all the backlinks to one of our competitors is there other domain name, which is the EXACT SAME website. You can enter both url's and they display the same content. They are not useing any canonical tags either. Why are they not penalized for duplicate content? And for using there own website for backlinks ? We try to do everything right, but still cannot beat them. Any thoughts on this?
Competitive Research | | hfranz0 -
Where are the best places online to build powerful profile pages
So on SEOmoz you can create a profile page with followed links (after 200 points), just as you can do on Google Profiles. I'd like to build a strong backlink profile which features some of these highest links that my competitors will not have the time or effort to do. I'm working hard to answer questions on SEOmoz and to be a helpful part of the community, and have published some Google Knols for the Google profile building. My question is; are there any other sites that allow the same type of responsible profile building, preferably SEO related as this is my area of expertise. Thanks Aaron Solar Monster Ltd
Competitive Research | | aarondicks0