Breaking through strong competition domains

[a_toohill]

We are trying to rank this domain: https://citychurchbloomington.org/ for this phrase churches in bloomington in.

We recently had updated our domain name from citychurchfamily.org to citychurchbloomington.org because 1) it made sense for the organization, the end-user searching, and to help our rankings.

Currently we are at position #4 on page 1 but have three sites ahead of us:

1. churchfinder - in the last year this site came out of nowhere and slowly made its way up to the top spot
2. high rock - this church had held spot #1 for many years and we've struggled to challenge it's place on the search results and are somewhat unclear why
3. sherwood oaks - this site had been in spot #2 for many years and at times we've been able to challenge it's position but its held fairly tightly at spot #2 in the past, #3 since churchfinder rose up in the last year

We've done competitive research and made some changes to our meta title, description, and h1 tag on our site but we're looking to make our next move to try and break into this top tier of results.

I'm asking the community here for any insight/suggestions into what kind of move we should be exploring or making at this stage to move up.

Sincerely,

Andrew

[julie-getonthemap]

I love Robert's advice.  I would also suggest adding some long tail keywords. Finding a church is very personal and I'd guess that lots of your prospects are searching things like "Bible based church" "church with active single group" or "church with great music".  Don't put all your emphasis on generic phrases.

[RobCairns]

Hey Andrew,

The 1st site is a no-brainer based on the term you're trying to rank for. Google will interpret anyone searching for "churches in_____" as someone who is open to finding multiple churches. As a result, Google will return a resource site over an individual location almost every time. For example, if I search for "gas stations in (city)", Google will return multiple stations rather than a specific brand of station, much less a specific location. Beating this site for this specific term is going to be next to impossible for a single location, so I would be looking for search terms that are not as broad.

For example, you might consider looking up terms for the specific denomination of your church. (i.e. "Anglican churches in bloomington in" and so on).

As for the other 2 sites - it sounds as if you have placed most of your attention on changing your site's on-page ranking factors without much attention being paid to your link profile. My bet is that your link profile is a bit smaller, less diverse or less powerful than your competitors, and that this difference is making the difference in terms of ranking behind them.

However, if you are competing for spot 3 with these minor changes, it suggests to me that their link profile isn't very powerful either, so it shouldn't take you much to get over that hurdle.

My advice, therefore, is to place more importance on generating some links to your site in order to overtake your competition.

There are tons of linkbuilding tips and strategies out there, and the Moz Blog is a pretty good resource as far as link building goes. You might start there if you want to do it yourself.

Feel free to reach out to me any time and I'll do what I can to help out.

Cheers,

Rob