Competitor Ranks Top Keywords Without Backlinks
-
One of my competitors is ranking very well for many different competitive keywords (1k+ searches per month).
I'm trying to figure out how in the world he is ranking so well. I've signed up for MozPro and looked at his back-links. He has 1 branded site-wide back-link from a decent blog. He also has 1 contextual back-link from a decent blog. Other than these 2 back-links, the rest are garbage links unlikely to even count for anything (he has maybe 12 of these low quality back-links).
My website on the other hand has more than 15 back-links from different (high quality) websites and does not rank anywhere near this competitor. This leads me to believe that either MozPro back-link reporting is inadequate or there is foul-play on the part of my competitor.
As far as on-page SEO is considered, his website is far inferior. Therefore, I highly doubt this would play a role.
What are some reasonable approaches I can take to better understand the cause of this discrepancy. Clearly the back-link reporting has not revealed any answers.
-
Hi There,
There are lots of different factors that come into play when it comes to page rankings! (Although you are certainly on the right track here with backlinks...these are very important to have).
I would suggest that you:
- Increase the amount of pages (unique URLs) that you have and make sure that the content on each of these pages is unique
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to find out if you have any duplicate meta descriptions or title tags. These should never be duplicated on your site. You will go to Google Webmaster Tools (also called Google Search Console), then click Search Appearance, then click HTML Improvements.
- Domain Authority comes into play as well so if your competitor's site is older than yours, this would attribute to his higher ranking.
If none of these basic steps are working to solve your issue then I strongly recommend you hire a professional Internet Marketing Company (such as ourselves!) to look more deeply into this ranking issue. Blue Corona offers extensive competitor analysis' and we are confident that our team of experts will be able to find out why your competitor is ranking so well and we will do everything in our power to get you on the same playing field as them
Hope this was helpful!
-Your friends at Blue Corona
-
Difference between 12 and 15 backlinks is basically 0 when it comes to ranking. Not sure what you mean by inferior optimization, but there are hundreds of factors in play. Your competitor's domain can be older, can be the first to start targeting this keyword, can have better CTR and behavioral factors and so on, lot's of things that you can't check without accessing your competitor's GA account.
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
-
Lost Search Ranking - how to fix spammy backlinks
I have a health niche website ( grocare.com ) Recently I subscribed to ahrefs and moz and found out so many spammy backlinks to my site (which i didn't create). Someone told me this is a common competitor tactic. To create bad links for your website to drank it. My question is - in ahrefs now, there are a LOT of spammy anchors and it seems more backlinks are being created by spammy websites automatically. I have lost many rankings because of this. I tried diluting by creating more normal anchors but it doesnt seem to be working. How do I fix this ? Any help is apprecciated xVrvj1q
Competitive Research | | grocare2 -
What factors are effecting our rank?
Can anyone shed some light on why this might be? Our website has a higher DA and PA yet the competition rank higher for some keywords. Even though our on page grader is higher or marginally different. **Our Website ** DA - 13 PA - 20 Keywords - 390 Linking Domains - 24 Total Inbound - 37 Follow - 14 Competitor DA - 8 PA - 15 Keywords - 640 Linking Domains - 12 Total Inbound - 79 Follow - 65
Competitive Research | | Jesssherl1 -
How to break into a serp dominated by large companies? (but low keyword difficulty)
I'm currently doing some keyword research, and on favourable keywords such as: "weekend breaks in lake district" (320 searches per month with 39% keyword difficulty), I see that all of the first page SERPS are from larger companies (last minute, centerparcs etc) How likely will it be that I can get on that first page, assuming I am focusing my page on that particular keyword. Sparse info I know, but I didn't want to spend hours going down a dead end street. Is it simply that these larger companies are in the top 10 because there are no specific pages targeting that keyword, or do I have little chance?
Competitive Research | | Gordon_Hall1 -
Alexa Rank
Ok, I have a pretty good Alexa Ranking of 159K and have been online for less than a year. What my question is why is my Alexa Ranking so much better than all of my competitors who get way more traffic and have been online for years. The only thing that seems to be going slow is my page rank is still barely .98, while competitors are higher although they have lower Alexa Rank. What am I doing right to get good Alexa Rank?? What can I do to rais my PR and Domain Rank? Competitors for example
Competitive Research | | realmccoy1010 -
Why is our website ranked lower but beats most competitors in full SERP report?
We are analysing why our website ranks so low (currently position 8 in serp). We beat our competitors in most areas. Also we produce by far the most useful content. Do not buy links or do any other malpractice. We have been for a long time ranked in top 3 (well mostly 1-2) positions. In the last year we have seen a decline to position 8-10 and we are not sure why this is the case. Can anyone suggest what we should be focusing on? We are clueless. All the practices we used to "know" now seem obsolete. m8qIeyC,Kf1LLei#0
Competitive Research | | urkeman0 -
Keyword difficulty/research question
Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users' I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month). As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list. Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress. The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword. Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later? Thanks Carl
Competitive Research | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Different SERP results in browsers / different result pages for keyword in browser
Hi, I am making the SEO reports for a travel agency and I have the following problem. SEOmoz shows me the website is on page 1, for a keyword. Yesterday, a google search with firefox showed me the same position, while, searching from a different computer on google using firefox gave me another position. The URL shown was also different. I asked some friends to do the search - the results were the same - first page. Today, firefox shows me the second URL on the 4'th page, and the result from the first page of google does not appear, while Chrome still shows me the first URL on the first page. I have no idea why the URL that was ranking well does not appear on the first page with Firefox, and why it appears on the first page with Chrome, or why the URL that was ranking bad -meaning page 4, appears on Firefox but does not appear on Chrome. Can someone give me some advice?
Competitive Research | | Netlogiq0 -
Can i have chance to rank higher than official website in google local domains ?
Q : can i have chance to rank higher than official website in google local domains ? for example : rank higher than microsoft,kaspersky,nokia etc... in google italy or google germany or any other local domain for google
Competitive Research | | activeacts0