Aggregator/comparitor site outranking us
-
Hi
I would like to know if anyone has experience with trying to outrank an aggregator/comparitor website. We are being beat by one that also includes our range of products in their comparisons and I was wondering if there was a smart way around this?
-
Hi Lida,
This is a great question and surprisingly not one that I've seen before too much.
I've been on both sides of this question before. Once as a small business in the hospitality industry trying to outrank Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) on non-brand keywords, and also once where I was running my own startup which was an aggregator/marketplace.
Having given a little bit of experience here, I can tell you that aggregators tend to focus in on fat keywords, which creates tons of opportunity for an individual business to focus on long tail keywords. As a smaller business, I had literally no chance to outrank an OTA on generic keywords. Heck, even trying to outrank them on my own brand-reviews keywords was a challenge. Instead of competing with the OTAs head-on in the fat keywords, I spent quite a bit of time to put together a list of long tail keywords that were ultra relevant to my business. Once I had that, I began optimizing and creating content targeted at these long tail keywords and I saw results almost instantly. The big benefit of targeting long tail keywords ignored by the aggregators is that there is little competition on these keywords, hence you're able to hit them fast, rank and move on to the next keyword to focus on. That was my strategy as a small business.
During my time in my startup, where I was the aggregator, it finally made sense to me exactly why the OTAs focused in on the fat keywords. As a small business, I had maybe 100 or 200 pages indexed. As an aggreagator, I had over 2000 pages indexed in the first month. I had almost no way of optimizing that huge amount of pages for the most relevant keywords for each of them. I chose to focus in on the more powerful 'category' pages which targeted the fatter keywords. I can say though, if I had the time and the resources, I would have done a much more thorough job and eventually gone through that entire index and done the keyword research properly before optimizing each and every page. If that had happened, there was no way I was going to be out-ranked by one of the smaller sites I was aggregating.
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
-
Optimizing a URL/menu structure
Hi Mozzers, I'm working on Content Strategy at my job, and I'm close to making some recommendations on short/long-term direction. While I'm there, I want to tackle the URL/menu structure (correct term?), which is a bit of a mess as pages have been created without any consideration for it over time. For ease, let's just say we have 3 main subdirectories of the site (Section A-C), and let's also say that section A also has 3 important subdirectories. From a UX perspective at least, we want a page to look like: example.com/sectionA/subsectionAA/page1 but currently it's example.com/page1 We have dozens and dozens of these examples. To complicate matters a little further, Sections B and C have been earmarked to be consolidated into a new section (D), as they're currently confusing and overlapping, and create roadblocks in user journeys. So a page that is, say: example.com/sectionB/page2 may well want to be: example.com/sectionD/subsectionDA/page2 I'm comfortable enough with technically doing this, as I'm experienced enough in Drupal and have an agency on hand too, BUT - I don't know if there are any SEO pitfalls I need to be wary of when I'm doing this, beyond resubmitting sitemaps, and the trickle-down effects of redirects. Any advice, wise forum? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | joberts0 -
Optimising for multi sites selling same products
Hi Everyone I work for a company that sell aluminium joinery under 3 brands which are, ostensibly, competitors. With regards to optimising the websites, for keywords, should I be trying to optimise them for the same keywords, or should I use different keyword variations of each?
On-Page Optimization | | APLNZ110 -
If I host same video on my site which my manufacturer hosted on his site will be consider as duplicate?
Hello All, My manufacturer hosted video's on his site now if I host same video on my ecommerce site will it be consider as duplicate? any penalty ? Any suggestion pls? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pragnesh96390 -
Word count and ranking/traffic
Hello All, Recently, a client of ours enlisted another firm to redesign their website, www.thepodhotel.com. The new site went live on February 20th. Since that date, we have seen a 30% drop in Google Organic traffic, year-over-year. Even a cursory glance at the site will tell you that there was quite a bit left on the table, from an SEO point of view. However, my question pertains to word count. The word count on the new site is quite a bit lower than the old site. How much value do you feel this has on rankings? Do you feel that, among the many other items that need to be addressed, we should be focusing on creating more copy? I appreciate all of your input. Frank
On-Page Optimization | | FrankSweeney0 -
On site SEO review please
I'd appreciate it its anyone could take the time to review my on site SEO and suggest improvements. it's an adult dating site at http://www.local-sex-search. All pages can be found at http://www.local-sex-search.com/sitemap
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Is it necessary to optimize every page of a site
I recently took over the SEO work for a website that has a limited budget. I'd like to use the resources to get as much as I can for a few pages on the site (keyword research, on-page optimization). Are there pitfalls to not optimizing every page on a site? If so, what are they?
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee340 -
Related keywords in title/H1 tag
Hi, I am trying to improve our rankings for pages with photos/images. For the title is it benificial to include keywords that are almost identical in nature? For example: "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" In Google trends photos and images are both commonly used words so including both seems like it would help. When I search for each one separately in Google (Brad Pitt Photos vs Brad Pitt Images) different sites are returned (except for the ones that include both image and photos keywords). I had read that Google knows that Images and Photos mean the same thing, but the search results do vary. I know stuffing all related combinations isn't good, but selective phrases seem to make a difference. Just want to verify if this makes sense. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | NicB10