Hi. One of our competitors is ranking ahead of us on Google. Our site has a much stronger authority and much more quality links than this competitor. Would anyone have any explanations for this? Thanks
-
Hi Guys - I've noticed recently that one of our competitors is ranking extremely well on Google, while we seem to be fluctuating, along with other competitors, for our main keywords. Our site has a much stronger authority and much more quality links than this competitor and traffic is continuously increasing each month. Would anyone have any explanations as to why we may be seeing this? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
-
Hi Barry, further to your note about volume, whilst it is good to be adding new content, short or long is not necessarily best. I would rather focus on genuine quality and answering a users intent over adding lots of content that may not serve or fulfil a users needs. Have you performed an audit on your competitors site, are they answering topics or user queries better? And what content are you serving? Are you in a niche market?
-
Hi Brett,
Thanks for your response.
In terms of content, we're sticking to a schedule of three short blogs per week and one long blog monthly, targeting our various keywords - promoting this content across our social channels and with some PR monthly. This particular competitor doesn't appear to be producing content. We've also put a big focus on our on-site and technique SEO recently, and keep on top of all issues that arise, while also having a pretty strong internal link structure with figures for this show up pretty high in comparison to this certain competitor.
We can't understand this movement.
Thanks
-
Hi barryhq, Google has in the past called the top three components of their algorithm Content, Links, and RankBrain, without naming a particular order. It sounds like you've worked hard on links, so good job! Your problem is therefore potentially related to content (ignore RankBrain, you can't really optimize for it).
So let's talk about content. When you do your keyword research, try to focus in on the searcher's intent. What tasks are they possibly trying to solve that Google is surfacing that aren't addressed on your webpage? You can learn this by studying other top results, related searches, people also ask, etc. For example, if one of the keywords you have is "best running shoes" then you know people are doing comparison shopping and including content that compares the top running shoes on your page will help you rank for that. And it's entirely possible that you'll discover in this process that your website is not a suitable match for the keywords you've targeted. I've seen this happen with clients who pick a phrase without doing the research required to make an informed decision and end up targeting something they can never rank for.
It's also possible that you have technical SEO issues, like canonicalization or poor internal link structure or cannibalization that's making it harder to rank, but assuming that your technical SEO game is on point I would recommend focusing on content.
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
-
Somone is creating a ton of links to my site!!!
Today I looked at site explorer and found over 1100 linking root domains and over 750 linking c-blocks. My site was hovering around 200 linking root domains and 150 linking c-blocks. I have not paid anyone to link to my site... Is this one of my competitors trying to create negative seo for a specific key word? I've worked very hard to never try to build links and only get links naturally by providing good content that people would want to link to. Can all hundreds of new links hurt me? What can I do? my site is www.yakangler.com | | |
Link Building | | mr_w
| | |0 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
First links for a new site?
What would be the first links you get for a new site? Yahoo and BOTW directory links? What are your favorites?
Link Building | | Mozzin0 -
Domain authority or page authority in ranking
Hi, sorry if this is an obvious one... I am doing some keyword research tool and have a few keywords I wish to ran for. Looking at the DA of the sites on the first page they are averaging 60ish, my site is 33. However, for the keywords I am targeting they seem to have PA of 1, or at best, 5. From what I can make it out appears they are ranking for the keywords because of their strong DA rather than any seo work. If I were to target these keywords and send backlinks to the individual pages and so build up a PA on my pages would this be enough to challenge the competitors or would I still be at a major disadvantage because of my lower DA? Hope that make sense? I know what I mean but hard to explain it Thanks
Link Building | | ccgale0 -
Over 47.000 inbound links from one site - can it hurt my rankings?
Im currently having some banner commercials on a relatively large Danish forum. I talked the forum owner into maing the banner "dofollow" so i could get the "juice" from the site, however im in doubt if this is good or bad for my SEO. Webmaster tools is telling me that i now have over 47.000 links from this forum. it seems like a Lot of links considering that i only have external links from about 5 other sites and the fact that my site is quite new. It seems like my site is not ranked very good yet(as mentioned in another question). I hope someone has some input 🙂 Best reguards
Link Building | | Havalina0 -
Should you guest post on a site with no quality links?
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs1 -
Forums to increase the Link Authority
I have a small question. What do you think if we use the Forums on a natural way, to place important post with a link to our website on that, it's a good source or not, to use like a piece of link building strategy, to increase the authority of domains, and hiring backlinks from more than 15 types of websites, like blogs,forums,press,guestposts,directories,etc...??? Write your idea here if you have experience on that.
Link Building | | leadsprofi0 -
Competitors with thousands of links
Looking at my competitors link results on OSE some of them have 30,000 links to their websites. They are top rank on google whereas I am page 2. I know its quality over quantity but am I ever going to compete with that number of links? Is it worth getting some low value links just to bump up numbers while continuing getting good links? thanks for any advice!
Link Building | | bridaldesigns0