Why is this site ranking higher?
-
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here:
https://lewescountycars.co.uk/
But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us:
https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/
As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done?
Thanks in advance - Gerard.
-
Many thanks to both of you for your very helpful responses. I'll get to work on improving things as suggested.
-
Hi Gerard,
Google sometimes does weird things that is very difficult to understand. I've seen and compared both sites and yours at Seo Onpage is much better, because the other one is very poor at content and number of pages.
The only 2 things that can make sense are the domain name (your competitor's domain name includes "taxis") and the backlink profile, so like you cant do nothing about the first thing, I recommend you to replicate the links they created that you don't have:
https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/overview?site=www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk&target=domain
Maybe that helps.
Good luck!
-
Hi Gerard
Oops - yes I was looking at the top one - but it is valid that the top one has so many backlinks and I think that this is what you should be aiming for so if you looked at a citation burst first you could easily add 30+ good backlinks which will help you. I have updated my first answer.
I would consider putting your phone number in the SEO Meta title for the home page.
Google measures Click Through Rate (CTR) and I can imagine that their click-through is higher than yours because someone sees the result and calls them. You could easily leapfrog them I think.
1. Add phone number
2. Get lots of good backlinks
3. Try not to keyword stuff the page - you have 232 mentions of the word Lewes in the html which is a lot! they have 98 which is still a lot but fewer than you - keyword stuffing can harm a page.Good luck with everything and apologies for the mix-up - it was actually good though as you can see the value of a lot of backlinks!
Regards Nigel
-
Hi Nigel
Many thanks for your response.
I think you have the sites mixed up - I was referring to https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk not lewestaxis.co.uk, as the site that is somehow ranking above https://lewescountycars.co.uk
-
Hi Gerard
I have looked at the URL and backlink profile for starters. So these are my observations:
1. https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ was registered in 2012 yours in 2008 - Looking at Moz their Domain Authority is 10 and yours is 14 so little difference
2. You both have very few backlinks 7 vs 8
3. Lewstowntaxis is quite skinny and your is better defined. Plus you rank for around 4x the number of keywords they do.
4. You've got better GMB reviews than them too!
If it was me I would.
Work on your local backlinks from Yelp, Yell and Thompson to local news sites - get those links! - this is not difficult. You can use Moz local or Bright Local is good - you can do a 35 site citation burst for $100 https://www.brightlocal.com/take-contol-of-your-citations/
Get more reviews on GMB - talk about yourself and add photos, links & posts
https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038063?hl=en-GB
Set up Google maps and embed one in your site - 'How to Find Us'
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6139433?hl=enThat really is just for starters and the best things you can do to bump your site upwards.
I hope that helps,
Regards Nigel
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 Long To Recover Rankings After Multi-Day Site Outage?
Hi, A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact). This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage. Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion). The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago. My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take? On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be? I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past. Thanks
Technical SEO | | smaavie0 -
Reducing Alexa Ranking
I have a site mexat, it's current Alexa Rank is 4,497. So, I want to reduce alexa for this site upto 1500 in One Month. I have done following activities- Install Alexa toolbar on my computer. 2)Put Alexa Header code in Source code of my site. 3)I have a big traffic on daily basis upto 1500 visitors. 4)I am posting Blogs, Social Bookmarking, web 2.0 Profile Creation on daily basis. But I didn't get good result. So please share me some Useful Strategy for this project.
Technical SEO | | afycon0 -
Sudden decline in ranking
Hi SEO People, Rankings for one of my search keywords has declined over the last two weeks from place 2-4 down to 13-15 on Google NZ. It had sat at the place 2-4 level for months. Nothing has changed on any of the sites above/below ours, and nor have any changes been made to our site. All our other, similar, keyword rankings have either stayed unchanged or improved. Does anyone have any bright ideas?
Technical SEO | | chris.elevate0 -
Not ranking on Google
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com. I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site. 1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? 2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Sudden drop in rankings
Hi there, I've been working on this site for three or four months (it was a brand new site), and we were seeing some really great improvements in rankings. I've concentrated on writing lots of good quality content and building a network of links through blogging and social networks. Then, last weekend (6th October), we got completely wiped off of the results. We went from rankings 2,3 and 4 for our target terms to not being in the top 100. I assumed we'd been given a penalty from Google as we'd been SEOing too hard and removed a reciprocal links page we had and asked Google to reconsider. I just got a message back saying there hasn't been any manual penalty, so it's just down to the algorithm. I'm running am SEOMoz analysis, but so far it's just coming up with things like page titles too long and too many links on pages, which I can fix, but don't seem like something that would completely destroy us so abruptly. I think we really have the most and best content on the subject of becoming a model, which has taken a great deal of effort to put tgether, so this is crushing. If anybody can shed any light, I'll be extremely grateful, and I'd be interested to knwo if anyone else has experienced anything similar. Thanks in advance! URL: www.modellingadvice. info Kat
Technical SEO | | Katja1230 -
Certain product ranking higher than category (ecommerce)
Hi all, I'm a bit stumped on a SERP. The product is ranking higher than the actual category. Is there anyway to fix this? When I type in "category111", I get the product link instead of a link to the general category. It would be "productname category111" and link would point to product not category. Hope that makes since! TIA
Technical SEO | | William.Lau0 -
What to do if my site was De-indexed?
Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com
Technical SEO | | Jegghead1 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0