Why Does This Site Rank Well?
-
I noticed recently that the website of a local church (http://www.lifepointfc.com/) has climbed toward the top of the SERPS, and I cannot figure out why. The on-site SEO seems mediocre, at best, and their domain authority is 15 while their homepage authority is just 19. Does anyone see how they are working their SEO magic?
-
I just now found this conversation and I want to commend Travis for digging in.
Some other things to consider:
-
Age of the domain and also of the local campaign. If Lifepoint got an earlier 'start' on the web than Sylvania, this could have something to do with it.
-
It does not look like an industry centroid is at play here, because both churches seem fairly equally distant to what I see as the cluster for 'churches in tyler tx'
-
Could Sylvania have any negative issues like duplicate listings that could hold them back?
You might like to check out:
-
-
It's always a good idea to use more than one tool. I like PageSpeed as well, but I think Pingdom does a good job when you need to pinpoint the actual issues.
I would like to do some tests with this - nothing invasive. PM me through my Moz profile if you're interested.
-
Thanks for your response. Life Point does blog more than Sylvania and they have a more prominent social media presence, so their performance may be CTR related. As for speed, Google PageSpeed Insights scores Sylvania Church substantially higher on speed than Life Point.
-
This is pretty interesting because this isn't terribly competitive. It's easier to see the rudiments at work. The finer points seem to be more important.
A recent IMEC experiment noted that you could push a site up through CTR. There's one possibility. Maybe the congregation is more active online and uses a particular set of queries to find the site. Maybe the fact that Life Pointe posts more often gives them more possibilities of being found and thus clicked.
I haven't looked into it, but you may want to see if Life Pointe posts frequently on social channels. That may fractionally drive organic CTR.
I didn't see Life Pointe in any of the organic results for 'baptist church tyler tx'. I found Sylvania showing in the map pack. When I'm at home, my location defaults to Southlake. When I'm in the office, my default location is in Grapevine. I change my search location to Tyler, it was the same every time. However, they are page one organic for 'church tyler tx'.
I'm assuming your search was free of personalization. So that would be pretty interesting to look into as well.
At any rate, if you look at the technical side of things - the Sylvania Church site uses a lot of external JavaScript requests. While the Life Pointe site isn't exactly a gem, it's faster. So you might want to look into that, since page speed is definitely a ranking factor.
I used tools.pingdom.com and set the test location to Dallas, so one could say the test is 'agnostic'.
-
Oddly, Sylvania Church has a better Moz Local score than Life Pointe, but Life Pointe still outranks it at times. It's a strange thing...
-
I thought that until I noticed that Sylvania Church often ranks behind Life Pointe, yet also appears to have local SEO in order and a functional blog with posts approximately every few weeks. Sylvania Church has a higher domain rank and the homepage has a higher page rank than Life Pointe, but Life Pointe still outperforms Sylvania on most searches...
-
They actually have an okay offsite local presence. When it is categorized, it's categorized as a Baptist Church. Check them out in Moz Local.
They appear to have frequently posted new content on their blog starting in February 2014. Also, the keyword isn't terribly competitive.
-
Based on the keywords you gave me, I think it's actually pretty simple. I think it's because they have Google Maps integrated into some of there pages, and contact info properly integrated in the footer of every page. Overall, I would give the site a D- or lower but for those location terms, just having the map and contact info can sometimes be enough.
Either way, you should read this article if you want some really hearty local SEO teachings: http://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo
-
Thanks for your response. Two of the most potent keyword phrases are "churches in tyler tx" and "baptist churches in tyler tx."
-
I really don't see why. There doesn't seem to be much content, it always has only decent pagespeed scores and uses a lot of blocking js which hurts user experience. Every time I loaded a new page the screen went white for a second. But i think the question has to be "climbed to the top of the SERPs for what?"
Hard to find an answer without keywords to relate it to.
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
-
Ranking keywords
Is there a way to utilize our currently ranking keywords. I don't think editing the url would be a good idea. What areas of these pages should we improve? Or is it better not to do anything.
On-Page Optimization | | Timberwink0 -
Consolidating a Large Site with Duplicate Content
I will be restructuring a large website for an OEM. They provide products & services for multiple industries, and the product/service offering is identical across all industries. I was looking at the site structure and ran a crawl test, and learned they have a LOT of duplicate content out there because of the way they set up their website. They have a page in the navigation for “solution”, aka what industry you are in. Once that is selected, you are taken to a landing page, and from there, given many options to explore products, read blogs, learn about the business, and contact them. The main navigation is removed. The URL structure is set up with folders, so no matter what you select after you go to your industry, the URL will be “domain.com/industry/next-page”. The product offerings, blogs available, and contact us pages do not vary by industry, so the content that can be found on “domain.com/industry-1/product-1” is identical to the content found on “domain.com/industry-2/product-1” and so-on and so-forth. This is a large site with a fair amount of traffic because it’s a pretty substantial OEM. Most of their content, however, is competing with itself because most of the pages on their website have duplicate content. I won’t begin my work until I can dive in to their GA and have more in-depth conversations with them about what kind of activity they’re tracking and why they set up the website this way. However, I don’t know how strategic they were in this set up and I don’t think they were aware that they had duplicate content. My first thought would be to work towards consolidating the way their site is set up, so we don’t spread the link-equity of “product-1” content, and direct all industries to one page, and track conversion paths a different way. However, I’ve never dealt with a site structure of this magnitude and don’t want to risk messing up their domain authority, missing redirect or URL mapping opportunities, or ruin the fact that their site is still performing well, even though multiple pages have the same content (most of which have high page authority and search visibility). I was curious if anyone has dealt with this before and if they have any recommendations for tackling something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | cassy_rich0 -
Site Not Ranking for Key Term
Question for my fellow Mozers I have a ranking question that I cannot put my finger on. I have a site (visitplano.com) where the client wants to rank for the keyword "Plano". I can't say if the site was previously ranking for this keyword, but I looked into the basic SEO practices and found that the keyword is incorporated in: Domain Title Content There is a lack of internal linking and anchor text within the content External links - 1,558 DA - 46 PA - 55 Currently, the website does not rank for the keyword "Plano". Could someone shed some light on why they aren't ranking or what I may be missing? I would greatly appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | flcity150 -
How on earth does this rank?
Hi Everyone, Im speaking to someone about doing decent SEO, follwing the basics and not doing dodgy stuff for the short term. He is a driving instructor trying to rank for driving lessons peterborough (this is in the uk) and one of the websites coming out towards the top of serps is ian-rayner.com/index.htm. Its got no links, no social signs, has a page labelled SEO Stuff with a whole list of keywords and internal links back to his home page. It has a Domain authority of 11 and page authority of 1 !!! Is it because no one is following the basics and uncompetitive that its ranking or is he doing something other than a few keywords in the content, meta title and description, and a internal links that im missing?
On-Page Optimization | | Ant710 -
How to Recover From Unstable Site Structure History
I have a site that has suffered several phases of restructuring. Apparently its owners were unsure as to which direction to take when it came to structuring their content and URL schema and subjected the site to several rounds of poorly thought through implementations (i.e. example.com/content/page-title, example.com/page-title, example.com/"silo"/page-title, etc.), all within a 8 month period. I posted the originating question here on this Q&A Forum. I want to thank EGOL and Cody for taking a stab at it. What would be a good strategy to help a site like the one I describe above begin ranking again?
On-Page Optimization | | UplinkSpyder0 -
Blocking Pages E-Commerce Site
Hello, I am working on a site with 1,000's of product pages, some of which do not have inventory in them. Should be blocking these pages in order to reduce bouce rate? How could i manage so many pages efficiently? It would takes weeks to comb through pages to determine which have inventory and which do not. They are also time sensitive as they are live events so dates are always changing. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Will unstyled bold tags help ranking
I intend using Bold tags to add emphasis but I don't want to
On-Page Optimization | | YGF
actually show bold words
so have amended by css. are the B tags enough to help with SEO or will my amended
CSS damage the effect? Many thanks,Sinead0 -
Suggestions on plans to optimize my site? (NOOB)
I am currently trying to plan how to optimize my site based on keywords. I read and I understand site architecture and usability http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo , but I am still somewhat confused about how to target each keyword per page or when http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/splitting-keyword-targeted-.gif Let me give you an example. We build databases for SME's using 3 different technologies. One of them is MS Access. Based on PPC campaigns and keyword research some of the possible keywords might be ms access programmer ms access consultants access database experts According to the link provided, should these be separate pages? I feel if they were, our site nativigation would be cluttered and clients would not be benefiting from them at all. It might even lead to some redundant data which I believe is bad right? My feeling is to make one page and target one keyword, but I'm not sure. For example, see one of our top ranking competitors http://www.justgetproductive.com/content/access-programmer/index.php Please, look at the footer? Is that actually how I should structure my links? I hope the answer is NO! Then again, if I do just have one page targeting one keyword, what do I do about the others? Do I just try to use blog posts/articles addressing those keywords? Do I not target them at all? Thanks for any advice, please keep in mind I am just getting started. My approach is to create a plan to outline everything before I put a lot of time into it.
On-Page Optimization | | emcacace1