Please help need experienced eyes

[BobAnderson]

We own discount banner printing and we are trying to rank 1 for pvc banners or vinyl banners and cannot understand for example how the below is correct, we did suffer a link penalty years ago but we fixed this and the domain has some good links (more and better quality than the sites above us) and cannot understand how we rank below most of the sites above us?

If we type on for example pvc banners we get

http://www.bannershop.co.uk/cats/pvc_banners.htm

https://www.hfe-signs.co.uk/banners.php

http://bannerprintingandroid.co.uk/pvc-banners/

http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html (our website)

And if we type in vinyl banners we get

http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/banners.aspx

http://www.bigvaluebanners.co.uk/

http://vinylbannersprinting.co.uk/

http://www.discountdisplays.co.uk/html/vinyl_banners.html

https://www.buildasign.co.uk/banners

http://www.monkey-print.com/outdoor banners/budget-outdoor-banners

http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html (Our website)

[Daniel_Morgan]

Hi Bob,

You seem to know what you're talking about and have some pretty decent rankings. I think you need to start with conducting a comprehensive competitor analysis looking at both on-site factors and off-site factors (ie, backlinks). This will help you to identify opportunities where you can really get the edge on your competitors.

Aleyda Solis did a great infographic and post about this very topic which I highly recommend - https://moz.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow.

With Vista Print being a huge company, you might be hard-pushed to rank first but I would definitely spend some time to look at their link profile as well as the other top competitors to see how they're approaching their link building strategies.

[mememax]

There's not always a clear science around that but usually a penalized site never gets back to its prior shine, or at least it will take you a lot of time, that's why is it somewhat better to have a slower growth than risk anyway a penalty.

Regarding your examples, I see that pvc banners query returns a lot of otpimized results on that query. I don't know which link you may have removed but looking at backlinks pointing to http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html
 in OSE I see that:

• one third of your referrals are spammy domains
• you are using quite alot of keyword rich anchors which are actually a good signal for link schemes to google

try to be as natural and possible and consider that you'll need to work more to get google trust than some other clean websites.