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
-
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 -
Link from Google.com
Hi guys I've just seen a website get a link from Google's Webmaster Snippet testing tool. Basically, they've linked to a results page for their own website test. Here's an example of what this would look like for a result on my website. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.impression.co.uk There's a meta nofollow, but I just wondered what everyone's take is on Trust, etc, passing down? (Don't worry, I'm not encouraging people to go out spamming links to results pages!) Looking forward to some interesting responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Too Many External Links A Problem
Client is thinking of adding a directory to an eCommerce site which users would find useful. It would help users find other services and vendors that are specific to the niche of products this site is selling. My only concern is it would create a number of external links to other sites. Even though they're related, would this diminish our standing with Google search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Wikipedia links - any value?
Hello everyone. We recently posted some of our research to Wikipedia as references in the "External Links" section. Our research is rigorous and has been referenced by a number of universities and libraries (an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/company-suffixes.php). Anyway, I'm wondering if these Wikipedia links have any value beyond of course adding to the Wiki page's information. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Scarce niche websites for link building
Hello! A small company from Mexico that offers cleaning services for home & businesses wants to rank on the first page of Google. The Good: Every month they give away stuff (discounts and/or a free service) and they also participate in campaigns that support non-profitable organizations & charity. So there is plenty of material for me to build some backlinks and to create some interesting content. Their competitors have 0 SEO. I have been doing my homework and none of their competitors websites that are ranking on the top 5 are doing any kind of SEO. But they have had their website for a long time and they probably have a decent amount of traffic per day. Open Site Explorer shows minimal to no websites pointing to them. Google Adwords has increased their sales. They are using virtually nothing as budget and it is helping, but they want organic SEO. The Bad: Blogs seem to be dead in Mexico. And that is one of my strongest ways to create backlinks. I usually get a blogger to write about the company I'm working for to create backlinks and works like a charm in countries were SEO is prehistoric. Usually it takes me very little effort to accomplish a website to rank very well in this kind of scenario, but I'm having trouble this time. The Something: I have been able to boost their rankings with basic SEO in a month but I'm stuck in page #2-5 on their most important keywords. The Ugly: I'm out of ideas. And their budget isn't good enough to apply paid strategies. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
How to detect a bad neighborhood links?
I have the feeling that I am suffering from negative seo, so there is a way to get a list of links that should remove in the google disavow links tool ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
What is a good, structured link building campaign?
I feel like I've tried everything up to this point. I also survived all of the recent Google updates, including the recent EMD update (my site is an EMD). Also I am in the financial sector. I blog every day, I've made some great infographics. I have a very nice website (much better than the competition's), I've done my on-page SEO. I've done the basic link building too. I've hit good business directories, good blog directories (like Technorati), and infographic directories. I've done a bit of comment linkbuilding but I don't see that being very fruitful. I also have a large twitter following + a twitter tribe that shares all of my blog posts. I can't say I've managed to build any sort of community however. My traffic has grown from 0 to anywhere from 80 to 160 visitors every day in just 3 months, and I am happy with that progress but it seems like I have plateaued. Sure I will continue creating content, but what can I do about link building? That's where the results are probably going to come from. I've read all the articles about it, took advice from LinkBuildingSchool.com... but at this point, I'm not sure how to continue. I dont want to continue going after blog comment links, I want quality. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Are URL shorteners building domain authority everytime someone uses a link from their service?
My understanding of domain authority is that the more links pointing to any page / resource on a domain, the greater the overall domain authority (and weight passed from outbound links on the domain) is. Because URL shorteners create links on their own domain that redirect to an off-domain page but link "to" an on-domain URL, are they gaining domain authority each time someone publishes a shortened link from their service? Or does Google penalize these sites specifically, or links that redirect in general? Or am I missing something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay.Neely0