Determining if our ranking is due to increased competition
-
Hello,
I'd like to give you a list of DA/PA and see if the slipping of our rank is due to competition. This if for our main keyword. Below is the top ten sites in our industry - their DA and PA for this head term.
This is for the plural form of the keyword - a product term. If I don't say differently the following are where the title has the keyword in it exactly and also these are ecommerce site listings.
Does this look like we are being outdone by competition or would you say that there might be some other cause:
1. DA 85, PA 38
2. DA 34 PA 34 (These guys are mostly paid links by the way)
3. DA 100 PA 55 (singular form of keyword and also informational site)
4. DA 91 PA 41
5. DA 23 PA 24 (The only thing I see about this one is that their backlink profile is very white hat and they have the nicest looking site in our niche)
6. DA 29 PA 31 (exact match domain)
7. DA 99 PA 1
8. DA 22 PA 34 (Guide including infographics - doesn't sell products themselves)
9. DA 96 PA 1
10 DA 26 PA 38 -- This is us with 57 total root domains sitewide and 43 root domains to the home page.
Let me know what additional information you need.
-
Too close on those numbers, especially in terms of spots 8,6,5 & 2. You're going to have to take a deeper look.
I'd start with digging into the link profiles. Find the links that your competitors have that are really high trust links--I'm talking BBB, industry accreditation sites, quality PR hits/mentions etc. Find the easy wins and try to identify the really high level links that your competitors have that you may be missing.
My second priority would be to check out your bounce rates and time on site. It may be that traffic is better served on those sites and therefore Google is giving them the nod in the rankings.
Third, I'd check out http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013. Dig in and see where your competitors are beating you in that regard step by step. Process of elimination I'm afraid....we can't really know for sure!
-
What other information can I provide that would narrow down if it's competition?
-
I would not bet five cents on any of this. I am confident that you can find rankings that will show the opposite.
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
-
Do content copycats (plagiarism) hurt original website rankings?
Hi all, Found some websites stolen our content and using the same sentences in their website pages. Does this content hurt our website rankings? Their DA is low, still we are worried about the damage about this plagiarism. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
Hi Guys QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ. 1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content. Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to **ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat ** If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well? How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make? Any insight into this would be great! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Competitor ranking well with duplicate content—what are my options?
A competitor is ranking #1 and #3 for a search term (see attached) by publishing two separate sites with the same content. They've modified the title of the page, and serve it in a different design, but are using their branded domain and a keyword-rich domain to gain multiple rankings. This has been going on for years, and I've always told myself that Google would eventually catch it with an algorithm update, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Does anyone know of other options? It doesn't seem like this falls under any of the categories that Google lists on their web spam report page—is there any other way to get bring this up with the powers that be, or is it something that I just have to live with and hope that Google figures out some day? Any advice would help. Thanks! how_to_become_a_home_inspector_-_Google_Search_2015-01-15_18-45-06.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inxilpro0 -
Competition cheating on seo
So im trying to rank for O'fallon lawn care. And my competitor bought a domain lawncareofallonmo.com and now ranks number one....there is even a link to "take me to my homepage" What is going on i thought this was so 2008 not 2014.....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | grnside10 -
Competitor Bad Practice SEO Still Ranking Well But Why ?
Moz Friends, A very close competitor have always been challenging for similar competitive keywords. We seem to have the advantage for alot of long tail keywords but on one of the higher traffic relevant keywords they seem to do well. I really struggle to understand why, particularly with the back links they use Just my thoughts and notes on the two: Our Page Better written text content (Maybe slightly written to for experienced target audience but we are working on simplifying things) Good Clear site URL structure and navigation for usability Fresh content updates Mobile optimized Reasonable page speeds Good on-page optimization Good back links from industry influences Competitor Page Negatives Site structure and URL's are inconsistent and messy Lower quality content site wide They use tried and tested on page optimization methods like Keyword spamming, Bold Keywords,Underlining Keywords (Sarcasm) Terrible back links, all directories and free article submission sites (Seriously take a look) Less focused on page optimization Not mobile optimized Most of the rest of the sites carry on the same sort of differences, Engine: www.google.co.uk Keyword: Sound level meters **Our Page: **www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/products/sound-level-meters/ **Competitor Page: **www.pulsarinstruments.com/product-information/Sound-Level-Meter.html Any feedback would be greatly appreciated please, i am really struggling to get my head around this Thanks James
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Antony_Towle1 -
Website starts ranking on Google then always drops - Targeted for Australia but most traffic from U.S - Bounce Rate at 94.49% - HELP!
Hi everyone, Thank you for your time. During the past 8 months I have been working on this website which is a .com.au . I have fully optimised the website which is targeting Brisbane in Australia and I have setup everything (Sitemaps, Geo location on WMT, Fetched as Google etc..) However the website just does not want to rank at all. I know that the previous SEO company were not too good but since then I have disavowed all unnatural links, we have moved the hosting to a new company and the website content has been updated. Only recently the Website has started ranking for it's brand name (not even in top of Google) and whenever a keyword starts ranking above the Top 50 of Google it suddenly drops again. The other issues is that even if I have setup the website to target Australia the majority of traffic comes from the U.S. Last month out of the 127 Session - 85 from United States - 29 from Australia - 3 Brazil - 2 India - 2 Italy - 1 Canada etc... Because of this the website has a Bounce rate of 95%. If you would have any advice, tips or recommendations that I could do to try and fix this it would be much appreciated. I suppose we can consider this as some kind of penalisation - potentially due to the past work and issues that occurred before the business became our client but I am not sure what more I can do to stop the wrong traffic and improve the rankings. Thanks for your help. Lyam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlphaDigital20 -
Can someone explain how a site with no DA, links or MozTrust, MozRank can rank #1 in the SERPs?
I do SEO for a legal site in the UK and one of the keywords I'm targeting is 'Criminal Defence Solicitors'. If you search this term in Google.co.uk this site comes top www.cdsolicitors.co.uk, yet in my mozbar it has 0 links, 0 DA etc, I noticed it top a few weeks ago and thought something spammy was going on; I thought if I was patient, Google would remove it, however it still hasn't. Can someone explain how it is top in the SERPs? I've never seen this before. thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TobiasM0 -
Google rankings dropped like a stone
I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesBSEO0