Link building strategy
-
Hello Moz Community,
For the last couple of months we have been trying to improve our ranking in Google UK for the keyword "church candles"
http://www.wattsandco.com/church-supplies/church-candles.html
We’ve been contacting relevant interiors/lifestyle blogs to feature our candles including anchor text linking back to our page. Our anchor text has been predominately our brand (Watts & Co) but also other key search terms (Watts and Co church candles, Watts and Co pillar candles).
We have been tracking our ranking for the keyword “Church candles” using the Moz “ Rank Tracker” and we started on position 15 in Google UK. We went up to 12 briefly before moving down every week to 15, 17, 19 and 22. We checked today and we have moved back up slightly to 19.
Our progress seems to be a bit slow and inconsistent. We wanted to reach out for any advice on how we can move up? If there was any way we can improve our strategy?
Here’s the links we have built so far:
http://nostalgiecat.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/what-autumn-means-to-me.html
http://blog.pollyrowan.com/2015/10/5-small-ways-to-decorate-your-home-that.html
http://www.happyhomebird.com/2015/10/watts-co-candles-for-cosy-autumn-home.html
http://www.frolic-blog.com/2015/10/beeswax-candles-for-fall/
http://hisforhomeblog.com/lighting/watts-co-church-candles/#axzz3qhqN1wzA
http://lorilangille.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/sponsored-post-watts-and-co.html
http://www.californiahomedesign.com/product-finds/waxing-poetic-must-have-candles
Thanks so much!
-
It's best to either do redirects to pages that are essentially the same - did the blue candle have it's color renamed to robin's egg and thus got a new SKU/page? - or to build a creative 404 page that helps customers find the most common thing they look for on your site and putting a search box to help them. Here's an article about creative 404s for inspiration.
-
One of the hardest things about SEO is having the patience to wait for results! Keep building your high quality links and you should see some results soon.
You may want to revise your page title tag as well, you mention candles in it 3 times, i would mention candles twice max although im sure some would argue with me, it just looks a little spammy.
As another suggestion you could also have some introductory text on the page describing the candles, what makes them unique? why should people buy your candles and not other candles? This may help with ranking but will also add value for users.
-
No, all of these 404's are from links within your site. You need to explore which pages have the 404 because they now have broken links, redirect all to the home page is a really messy way to deal with these. Do you use a crawler? If not I suggest screaming frog, the paid version is great, but the free version will give you an idea how useful the tool is there is just a limit to how many pages you can crawl.
-
Thank you thats really helpful. Should we re-direct all 404 links to our homepage: http://www.wattsandco.com/ ? Thanks
-
7 Backlinks isn't really a lot, but I'm sure they are all high quality, keep at it, backlink building is a long game.
The first red flag that your site sets off for us is that in your robots.txt (see: http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt) you reference a sitemap that is not your domain http://www.wallpapered.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml. Update that to reference the proper sitemap http://www.wattsandco.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.
Also we would suggest dealing with your 404's we started crawling your site, 35% done and already seeing 91 404ing links.
You might want to consider exploring using Moz Local, although we have found the majority of converting traffic come from Bing Places, Apple Maps, Google My Business and Facebook business listings, the rest of the listings in Moz Local serve as great backlinks.
I hope that helps, good 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
-
Anchor Test (do follow link)
Hi, I am new to SEO, may I know how many anchor text with a do-follow link I should aim for a 500-1000 words guest post? also, what is the percentage of different type of anchor text per post, e.g. ( 20% Branded, 20% Exact-match, 20% Naked link and more? I know that quality is more important, but is there any magic number and the percentage I should really aim for? Kind regards CHRIS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KINSHUN0 -
Value of EDU Links?
Greetings: We are considering hiring a firm specializes in developing .EDU links. Is the ROI on EDU links better than non EDU backlinks from reputable domains? Will obtaining EDU links results in greater domain authority and improved ranking for search engine results? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
OSE provides Spam analysis for website link profile, Do Moz have a tool to check the link quality before placing a link? How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
For those of you that used LINK DETOX.
Did you go ahead and remove all the TOXIC and HIGH RISK links? Just the toxic? Were you successful with the tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link from archived article.
A strong news site has an "archived.domainname" folder, where they have older articles listed. I can get a link on a page where there is a 4 year old article, which will be in this archived sub-domain. My questions: Will Google view a link from a 4 year old article as less valuable. Will Google notice the article is 4 years old and find it odd why the page all of a sudden has a link to my site, and thus devalue such link the sub-domain "archived" does that tell Google it is old and a link will be less valuable thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Natural Link Profile, low and high value links, really?
I cant really get my head around this one. I've read a few times when building links make sure you pick up so low value links as well. So here is an example (and lets say each link takes half hour to get): I got 5 hours of link building and this is what I have managed to get with the time. 1. 10 high value links all with PA/DA 50-60+ 2. 5 high value links with PA/DA 50-60+ AND another 5 low value links with PA/DA 10-. Surely #1 beats #2 hands down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Is this a good strategy?
Okay, so let's say I have a landing page or an ecommerce website with limited content. If I start a blog and write quality posts that have anchor text linking back to my homepage, then bookmark the hell out of those blog posts, post to twitter, cite the post on Q&A websites, etc . . . would that be an effective strategy beyond the normal stuff like directory submisson and blog comments?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanHenry0