SEO having different effects for different sites
-
Hi,
I hope this isn't a dumb question, but I was asked by a local company to have a look at their website and make any suggestions on how to strengthen and improve their rankings. After time spent researching their competitors, and analysing their own website I was able to determine that they are actually in a good position. The have a well structured site that follows the basic search rules, they add new relevant content regularly and are working on their social strategy. Most of their pages are rated A within Moz, and they spend a lot of time tweaking the site.
When I presented this to them, they asked why there are sites that rank above them that don't seem to take as much care over their website. For example, one of their main competitors doesn't engage in any social networking, and rarely adds content to their site. I was just wondering if anyone could shed any light on why this happens?
I appreciate there's probably no simple answer, but it would be great to hear some different input.
Many thanks
-
Many thanks for your answer! I've been reading a number of articles recently about the updates to Google's algorithm. Some people say that link building is a dying art, as Google is focussing on more naturally shared content, where as others say that it's worth spending time on. Is it just that no one really knows?
-
Without knowing the URL or the competitors, obviously we have to guess. My money is on they probably have a weaker domain authority and less authoritative links than their competitors. If you want to share the url, I can give you more details, but that's my guess.
-
There are any number of reasons this could be happening. Perhaps they have more high authority links or maybe your site has a lot of links that don't pass much value. Their site could be older and getting a slight boost from that. They don't have social media accounts but they could still have been shared more on social media than your site. The level of traffic, bounce rate and exit % could be better than your site and Google could be seeing them as more relevant for those target terms because of it. Even though they don't update as often, their content could be considered more authoritative. Considering we don't know everything that makes up the ranking algorithm (& its constantly changing) and only really have concepts of the correlation between things, there's no way to definitively state that Tactic X is always the reason one site is higher in rankings for a specific search term than another site.
-
Does the other website have stronger authority links? Its more than likely this issue or maybe a 301?
One of my sites with a DA/PA of 30 out ranks a DA/PA 50 site by having a few really strong high authority links. It also has no social media and I only update the content once a month.
Getting a few authoritative links PA/DA 80+ does wonders. Or it could be shuffling from Google this past weekend.
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 site dropped by April 2018 Google update about content relevance: How to recover?
Hi all, After Google's confirmed core update in April 2018, we dropped globally and couldn't able to recover later. We found the update is about the content relevance as officially stated by Google later. We wonder how we are not related in-terms of content being ranking for same keywords over years. And we are expecting to find a solution to this. Are there any standard ways to measure the content relevancy? Please suggest! Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does Coverage impact on SEO
Does the coverage issues on google search console ( Google Webmaster) has an impact on SEO ( CTR or impressions). How much of a difference or impact will fixing these have on Search results and average
Algorithm Updates | | Rishardg0 -
Thoughts on Google's Autocomplete hurting organic SEO?
A client sent over an article about how Google's Autocomplete eliminates your chance for clicks. Saying that if your competitor is higher than you, the user will bypass the page one organic rank and click on a specific business from the autocomplete which in turn presents an entire page one result for that business. So in a sense they are wondering why they're doing organic SEO if potential customers are just going to bypass the page one organic results. I would love to hear thoughts from like minded people on this as I have to start proving my case with articles, facts, data, and research.
Algorithm Updates | | MERGE-Chicago0 -
Why does my site dissappeare from the top 50?
Hellow I am having some problems with my site www.kondomanija.si. It was ranked on the first page for my main KW kondomi (in www.google.si, Slovenia) but now it is not in the top 10 pages. And this has happened before, it drops out of the top 10 pages and in a cople of moths it is back for a short time (till it drops out again). It think the site has a week link profile... Could this be the reason? Does anybody know what is going on?
Algorithm Updates | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Ranking Drop After Switching Sites
I have a client who's rankings dropped after switching to out site. We know that rankings can drop a little after switching, but we are concerned that hers are still low. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the links to her site remained the same. Thanks Holly
Algorithm Updates | | hwade1 -
Why if PR and DA are higher is this site lower in SERPS
Hi there Why if PR and DA are higher is this site lower in SERPS. Example: https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=samsung+SF-4200+cartridge&oq=samsung+SF-4200+cartridge&gs_l=hp.3...13009.13824.2.14464.2.2.0.0.0.0.72.143.2.2.0.eiatsh..0.0.l4idQl3RGWc&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=69f1c60047c60e0c&biw=1045&bih=580 Pos 1 www.inkfactory.com/ink-cartridges/samsung/sf4200-series PR:1 DA:48 Pos 3 www.internet-ink.co.uk › SAMSUNG INK PR:25 DA:60 I though is you had top DA and PR you should out rank those below you?
Algorithm Updates | | smashseo0 -
Can you help with a few high-level mobile SEO questions?
Rolling out a mobile site for a client and I'm not positive about the following: Do these mobile pages need to be optimized with the same / similar page titles? If we have a product page on the regular site with an optimized title like "Men's Sweaters, Shirts and Ties - Company XYZ", should the mobile version's page have the same title? What if the dev team simply named it "Company XYZ Clothes" and missed the targeted keywords? Does it matter? Along the lines of question 1, isn't there truly just one index and your regular desktop browser version will be used for all ranking factors on both desktop and mobile SERPs? If that regular page indeed ranks well for "men's sweaters" and that term is searched on a mobile device, the visitor will be detected and served up the mobile page version, regardless of its meta tags and authority (say it's on a subdomain, m.example/.com/mens-department/ ), correct? Are meta descriptions necessary for the mobile version? Will the GoogleBot Mobile recognize them or will just the regular version work? Looks like mobile meta descriptions have about 30 less characters. Thanks in advance. Any advice is appreciated. AK
Algorithm Updates | | akim260 -
What are the good strategies using satellite sites in SEO??
Hello to everybody, We'are thinking about launching a massive amount of satellite websites in order to promote our website. Is it really efficient in terms of link building? Or is the ROI really small due to the amount of time and money needed to create and manage these websites? Thanks a lot!!! Update: Thanks to all of you for all these interesting answers!
Algorithm Updates | | sarenausa1