Competitor outranking us despite all SEO metrics in our favour
-
Hi,
We are trying to outrank a competitor of ours on Google for around 100 terms that we are both clearly targetting. Our competitor currently 'wins' in the SERPS around 70% of the time, often ranking in the top 3 positions.
The problem is, we are absolutely convinced that all onsite and offsite SEO metrics we are monitoring would suggest that our content should almost always place higher than theirs.
Here is what I know:
- All pages on both websites are rated 'A' by the Moz on-page-grader tool for the phrases we are targetting, with virtually no tech issues to be addressed on either site
- Our domain authority is 10 points higher than theirs
- Neither of us have external links to the relevant pages on our sites (although we are working on some for ours)
- Our Page Authority is considerably higher on average - often by 10 points or more
- We have considerably more linking route domains, from better sites. Also many more total external links
- The HTML title and H1 headings of our pages contain the target phrases at the beginning - our competitors are the same. Although they often ONLY include the target phrases in their title, wheras in our title they might only take up 1/3 of the total characters
- We have images optimised for the target phrases on our pages. As do they.
- We use the target phrases roughly the same number of times in our copy text, as do they
I have totally run out of ideas now for further optimising our site/pages to consistently rank better for these target phrases, although maybe these are a couple of factors that could be having an impact on the rankings:
- The structure of their website is perhaps optimised more for these target phrases - our site is much bigger, so perhaps our 100 pages are given less relevance on our site than their 100 pages? - but surely our stronger page authority would suggest otherwise?
- Perhaps Google is using page engagement statistics to determine that their site is 'betteer' than ours in terms of user appeal and engagment?
Can anyone think of something that I might have missed? Is there another major ranking factor I have perhaps neglected in my research?
I know link building strategies are a good way to approach this in the long run, but we are currently just concerned about why we are not already ranking better when clearly they are not undertaking any link building strategies of their own.
Any help or pointers here would be enormously appreciated.
Thanks
Lou
-
Thanks again to both of you for the pointers.
I just need to get stuck into this now I think. Even delving into just a coupled of the points raised by you has thrown up severel potentially very important areas for me to look to improve.
As a starting point I am going to stop obsessing over those heading SEO metrics that seem to have taken over my life.
Lou
-
EGOL,
Thank you for emphasizing the quality (helpfulness/human value). I only briefly mentioned it in my response, yet it really does need to be a top priority.
-
Lou,
"I just wanted to throw a few factors out there in order to encourage a response like yours - packed full of useful next steps for me to evalaute this further."
THAT is priceless
Pagination:
Loading all content on one page and using a "more" button to "reveal" it, is not a best practice. Individual pages need to exist for individual sub-topic based content. This is especially true since it now appears that Google, while indexing content initially hidden to users, is likely giving less value to that hidden content than content immediately seen.
Pagination is important IF it is executed properly. If you have tens of thousands of results in paginated lists, is that one paginated group, or are they split out into separate groups based on similarity of content? If it's all just one massive group, that's likely another problem to look into, since pagination is meant to be used to say "these pages all contain links to other content where the entire group comprises very similar content around one primary topic".
Internal linking should always point more to main category page destinations than individual pieces of content. It would be unnatural from a usability perspective to link more to individual pieces of content, and thus it would be bad for SEO.
5,000 or so average crawl errors - what is causing those? Are they 404s? Were they previously valid pages? If so, those typically need to not generate 404 but instead be a direct 301 to a highly relevant live page (and where internal links within the site are updated accordingly).
So many more issues to consider...
-
Any help or pointers here would be enormously appreciated.
You are really focused on metrics. Those metrics are good for two things (my opinion, certainly minority opinion here): 1) entertainment value; 2) diverting productive time away from the real work of running a website.
Perhaps Google is using page engagement statistics to determine that their site is 'betteer' than ours in terms of user appeal and engagment?
That is right. Announced here ten years ago. Take all of the time that you spend on metrics and links and start putting it into improving the website. Have the courage to divorce yourself from these metrics for a year. Get engaged in different battles... beating their articles, beating their images, beating their deals, beating their service. Then look at your improved website and how many visitors are engaging it at a higher level.
You still have to pay attention to the technical and usability details explained by Alan, but if you are making genuine improvements in your website, that make it more competitive on the basis of content and benefits to visitors then your metrics will advance on their own.
-
Hi Alan,
Thaks very much for offering your thoughts on this. Really useful comments.
You're right in that I had very much over simplified my analysis of the issue. I just wanted to throw a few factors out there in order to encourage a response like yours - packed full of useful next steps for me to evalaute this further.
On of the points you raised was 'crawl efficeincy; and on further investigation I noticed that we have an awful lot of pagination on our website which users use to browse through our articles (we have 10's of thousands). However the competitor site tends to have all results on one page along with a 'show more' button. Might this be a good place to start? Looking at the cache dates of some of the results in Google, it certainly looks like the competitor pages are being crawled more often.
I also noticed from Google webmaster tools that our internal links report shows that we are giving great prominence to many of our category landing pages, rather than the article pages themselves. Does this sound like an area worh investigating?
5000 or so average crawl errors probably also isn't helping. Particularly given that we seem to only get around 6000 or so page crawled per day. Again, I;m guessing this is worth a lot of attention.
Duplicate page titles also seem to be an issue, so there is certainly lots for me to look at here.
Thanks again
Lou
-
You are asking some very challenging questions, and using some very limited metric comparisons to try to figure it all out. SEO is not so easy. If it was, many sites would be in a continual state of leap-frog as they out-do each other in similar ways.
Here are just a few questions / considerations to add to your process:
1. Regardless of the number of instances of one or more keywords on a page, what is the total volume of highly relevant content on a given page? How helpful is that information in answering questions your specific target visitors are needing to have answered? How helpful is it in being able to allow visitors to achieve a goal they came to your site to achieve?
2. How well organized is your content in regard to very similar pages being grouped together in both navigation and URL structure? Since my reading of your question implies the competitor site is much more "tight" in its singular focus, this is a critical factor for your site to evaluate.
3. If their site is much more 'tight' in it's singular focus, how much is dilution a factor on the other pages of your site regarding topical focus and goal intent? If there is any serious dilution happening, you'd likely need even more content within that section you are comparing, to overcome that site's strength in refined singular focus.
4. What technical issues may exist on your site that you may not have considered? Crawl efficiency, page processing speed, canonical or duplicate content confusion? There are many other questions I could list with just this one consideration. Even if the competitor site has some worse signals among these, if any of yours are problematic enough, that alone can be a contributing factor.
5. How much higher is the quality of the inbound link footprint for your competitor in comparison to your inbound links footprint? Just having more links isn't at all a valid consideration if you don't dig deep into the quality issue? If they have 10% of the inbound link volume, yet half or most of their inbound links are from very highly authoritative sites and you have less of those, that is another massive consideration.
Those are just starting point considerations.
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
-
Unsolved How to find keywords your competitors rank for but you don't?
Hi, I'm just digging through Moz pro at the moment, and really like the true competitor feature, but would like to be able to see the keywords our competitors rank for and we don't, rather than just the overlapping ones. Is this possible at all? Thanks
Moz Pro | | pm-mbc
Paul0 -
Potential spam websites with high DA linking back to us
Hey everybody, I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do? For example:
Moz Pro | | MEllsworth
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score and https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/171 -
I'm newly hired to start the SEO department at a company with 50+ websites, 30+ brands... Need help organizing this.
I was recently hired at a company with 30 brands, and many information portal sites. I'm having trouble figuring out how to squeeze 50+ sites into the 5 site limit of our Moz plan, and how to aggragate/organize all the sites into a system for the CEO. Imagine you wake up one day, and you now have 50 clients, all with heavy demands... And they all have the same CEO, who doesn't understand SEO, and expects you to explain everything to him in basic terms. The CEO wants more micromanagement, more analysis, more organization... Not quite sure how to go about it. I have woorank for some good data to act on. I setup a whole slew of google docs to track my workers and their SEO off-site tasks. I have buzzbundle and have setup nearly 100 accounts with my Social Media employee... It seems the CEO always feels that I'm not organized enough, not on top of enough etc... But its a massive job, and I was hired to literally start the entire department myself! They may be hiring an 'assistant' for me... But I'm worried the CEO feels that I'm just not on the ball enough... And with Moz, having only 5 'campaigns'/websites I can have going at a time... I'm short by at least 45 'campaigns'. Order another 10 Moz accounts?? There must be some solutions.. Thanks guys
Moz Pro | | iDingo2 -
SEO process suggestions / keyword analysis
hi all, we've done a bit of SEO over the years for our site, and are looking to pick things up this year and spend more time on SEO. first off, we are working on revising our keyword list & would like to view what keywords specific competitors are ranking for and try to target those keywords as well. is this possible via SEOmoz (similar to spyfu)? please let me know if you feel this is a good first step in picking up our SEO efforts for the new year. i've been looking at the research tools & is seems the Keyword Difficulty Tool hasn't been fully functional for the past week or so ("Our Keyword Difficulty Tool is having issues displaying AdWords API data. We are working with the AdWords API folks to get a fix soon!"). also, i noticed i can enter competitor sites in open site explorer & compare link metrics, but i don't see anywhere to compare keyword metrics. is there something i'm missing? thanks again everyone!
Moz Pro | | lsat0 -
All My Metrics Improved from Last Month but Domain Authority Decreased
Hi SEOMoz community! My site's Domain Authority has decreased from 43 to 41 since last month. I cannot figure out why. ALL my metrics (Domain MozRank, Domain MozTrust, External Followed Links, etc. have increased. See attached image. Is Domain Authority a ranking system based on your peers? Can someone better explain the Domain Authority algorithm? Thanks for any help you can offer. mozrank.png
Moz Pro | | Travis-W0 -
SEO-Experts help answer my newbie questions!
Hello! Thanks for coming to my rescue; I really appreciate it. I am a newbie at SEO and I still haven't got the full picture of everything in my mind that covers linkbuiling, on page optimization, domain names, website creating, etc. I've really pretty much all the available guides on WarriorForum and BHW without much help on the topics above since most of the information was either provided by some person who didn't know what they were talking about, the information was outdated, or I didn't know what they meant. I have so many questions that I hope some SEO-Expert could answer my newbie questions so that I won't get penalized for my two sites that I currently own. One of them was slapped by Yahoo!, Bing, AOL, and most other search engines with the exception of Google (It's only a matter of time of course). The other site I own is in the making currently without much on-page optimization. Before I start doing some on-page depletion t to my two sites so they both get de-indexed and such because of keyword stuffing, fail link building, and other factors, I wanted to cover the problems I currently have about SEO and this site. 1) Using the SEO-MOZ 'keyword analysis tool', what is the ideal percentage difficulty a newbie like me could take easily with just a few links here and there including 5 posts/pages of great content? (I usually only write 5 posts that cover 500+ words each). 2) Do I need hosting to become successful or to get more on-page optimization for my websites? I currently use Go-Daddy forwarding with masking so that when my site shows up in google the content comes from blogger. 3) What is "Self Cannibalization"? I ALWAYS get that error for both my sites when I use the 'on page optimzation tool' from SEO-MOZ. 4) Using Blogger, What exactly are labels and does using this add any SEO value to my website? 5) I've read so many damn articles about ALT text and Title text for blogger; nothing explained what I put in it though. What am I supposed to put in it that will help me with my on page optimization? (Stuff like do I use spaces or dashes, do I put my keyword in there, how many characters should I not exceed, do I put one word or two words?) 6) On my website, I 'accidentally' didn't know that copy and pasting images from paint straight to blogger would be a bad idea because in the html I saw it was f'ed up because there was literally random characters everywhere for the file name. Since my site is a tutorial site, I have over 50+ images in all my posts combined that I've copied and pasted from paint.exe to the Blogger post. Should I reupload all of them to blogger or keep it the way it is? Will I be penalized for this or nothing would happen? Is there a benefit to fixing it? 7) For a new website that is less than 1 week old, when can I start building backlinks? If I can start building backlinks now, what is the ideal number per day that I should create? 😎 Does post every single page or post of content I have on my website to other Web 2.0s like Squidoo, Wordpress, or Blog penalize my website for duplicate content or what? If I do this, does it give me any SEO benefit? 9) How much stronger is a .gov backlink than a .edu backlink? How much stronger are both of those compared to a regular extension backlink? 10) If I am building backlinks, should I link just my main home page URL or all internal URLs to? 11) I see several people that build backlinks to other websites by typing in a comment and throwing their link in there. Like question 10, should I post ALL the links to my website (Internal + Home) or just my main page link? 12) What is better; .com, .net, or .org? What about .info, .us, and .biz in terms of SEO benefit? 13) I have several pages on my site in which Google indexed them and I deleted the post. Now when I search my site on Google and I click on the link to the post, it is pretty much a 'dead link' because the post cannot be found. Does this harm my site in any way, and how can I take these dead pages off? 14) One of my sites is already indexed by Google but not Yahoo! What should I do to get my site indexed? It's already been about a week. Thanks for attempting to answers my questions. I don't have anything to give, but, I can choose 3 'good answers' for helping me!
Moz Pro | | 6786486312640 -
Do you think Seomoz is worth the monthly fee if you're not a professional SEO ?
I just want to ask the people who subscribe to Seomoz on a regular basis, I just paid for my first month subscription but to be perfectly honest I'm trying to work out whether
Moz Pro | | whitbycottages
somebody who is not rolling in cash and trying to make a living can afford to
pay the fee each month. I'm not a professional I just have two business websites and I'm learning the subject and finding it interesting. The tools do seem very good but I just wondered how people see this service on which aspect is the most important of them. I like to continue, I have been impressed the quality of the forum topics and discussions I just wonder whether I can afford to justify the fee.1 -
Analysing competitors' backlinks?
I am doing some competitor analysis and one thing that I want to know is how many links my competitors have and how many different domains link to their sites. I got some figures on this both from the SEO Moz toolbar and from Majestic SEO. My problem is that the figues are massively different. E.g. SEO Moz says 9657 links from 95 domains, Majestic says 4895 links from 1722 domains. Who do I believe? And where do each of these tools get their data from?
Moz Pro | | mascotmike0