Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Large Competitor closed, how to capitalize in search. Any ideas?
-
Hey Mozzers,
One of our biggest competitors closed down on January 1st, 2020 in several US cities. They did stay open in some areas just FYI. The competitor's website is www.execucar.com. This is a very large company that has a presence in almost all US major airports. It's a private car service just like Uber but for wealthy individuals.
For example. when you search " lax car service" they are #3 on Google or "car service to lax" they're #2 still.
What can we do to get more of their traffic and actual business? Has anyone done something like this before or knows quick and easy tactics to get their clients? We have a local landing page: https://dcacar.com/lax-car-service that ranks 9 through 11 for those same keywords.
Thanks for your thoughts and time.
Davit
-
Hi Miriam,
Hope you're doing well. Thanks for always answering my questions.
Yes, they closed at LAX Los Angeles and many other US cities as well. But they still rank for that location and rank very well. It has been almost 2 months since they stopped their operation at LAX. And to answer your 2nd question yes, we do serve LAX we're not ranking as well as we would like but I was hoping to try to capitalize on this opportunity.
One thing to mention that is important is this. Their website does not mention that they no longer serve these locations, in fact their city page still lists these pages as being served. But if you try to get a quote online or even call the phone number you will get a response that we no longer serve this location.
The company was sold to a venture capital firm which decided to close some of the unprofitable cities. I reached out to the venture firm to see if it possible to buy their local phone number, customer email list etc but they are not interested in selling those. So I was wondering what else can I do to get their customers. They have been in business for almost 20 years and they do have a large number of customer lists etc.
-
Hi Davit!
Some questions:
Are you saying that this business closed its location that services LAX, but they are still ranking for it?
Or, are you saying they still have a location open there?
Do you serve LAX?
Please, let me know. Thanks!
-
Same happened with https://www.devicesprice.com/ I have hired to worker who help me in case but I am also wondering to get good idea.
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
-
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
Website Snippet Update in Search Console?
I have a company that I started working with that has an outdated and inaccurate snippet coming up. See the link below. They changed their name from DK on Pittsburgh Sports to just DK Pittsburgh Sports several years ago, but the snippet is still putting the old info, including outdated and incorrect description. I'm not seeing that title or description anywhere on the site or a schema plugin. How can we get it updated? I have updated titles, etc. for the home page, and done a Fetch to get re-indexed. Does Snippet have a different type of refresh that I can submit or edit? Thanks in advance https://g.co/kgs/qZAnAC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
When doing a site search my homepage comes up second. Does that matter?
When I do a site: search the homepage comes up second. Does this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?
By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djingel10 -
Is linking to search results bad for SEO?
If we have pages on our site that link to search results is that a bad thing? Should we set the links to "nofollow"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Do search engines understand special/foreign characters?
We carry a few brands that have special foreign characters, e.g., Kühl, Lolë, but do search engines recognize special unicode characters? Obviously we would want to spend more energy optimizing keywords that potential customers can type with a keyboard, but is it worthwhile to throw in some encoded keywords and anchor text for people that copy-paste these words into a search? Do search engines typically equate special characters to their closest English equivalent, or are "Kuhl", "Kühl" and "Kühl" three entirely different terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TahoeMountain400