Our site being outranked by competitors with lower "moz" scores - due to on-page SEO?
-
Howdy,
Our SEO efforts are doing well, but for a few keywords it seems we cannot budge one of the competitors sitting in spot #1. Through some competitive analysis I've noticed that our website has a much higher mozRank with regards to both page and domain compared to the current #1 spot.
My question is what kind of factors could be the issue as to why we are still being outranked. Is it simply a case of poor on-page SEO at this point or should I be taking the mozRanks with a grain of salt.
-
Definately a good point by costume
-
I am having the EXACT same issue with several of the sites I manage. One thing I found is that the "Social Signals" (i.e. Tweets, Likes, +1) for our competitors are almost twice ours. You many want to compare social signals.
-
MozRank and domain level MozTrust are great indicators for how a site 'should' perform, however you need to bear in mind that google's index is much, much larger than linkscape and therefore, MozRank is only an indicator. There could be lots of sites that google know about but that are not in linkscape that may explain your competitor's advantage.
Google also have other ranking factors and may be disregarding some of your site's links for example because they don't recognise them as good sources.
Aside from this there are many factors including the content which you mentioned. You'll need to produce high quality content now that Panda is on the scene.
-
Things to also consider are user metrics, how a user responds to your site, such as bounce rate and non measurable factors such as trust.
-
mozRank is a great indicator how you fare against your competitors in terms of external links and it's rank is based on the link quality of the links. Google's SERP algorithm goes way beyond at just looking at the external links and I recall Matt Cutts saying that there are over 200 factors in the algorithm.
-
mozRank, DA, and PA are just measurements. Generally having higher scores for all three are a good indicator that you should rank higher...however in my own experience it took months for this site
Seattle Painting to take over the number one spot from http://www.seattlepainting.com/ for the keyword "seattle painting" despite the fact that all three metrics favored the first site; in a very lopsided way. I believe Google grandfathers in a site if it has historically remained in the top spot....a "grandfather effect"
Be patient, build good links, create compelling 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
-
I can see competitors ranking for certain long-tail keywords but cannot find them on web pages. What am I missing?
Hi there. I'm pretty new to SEO and I've been doing a fair bit of training but there is one aspect I have yet to grasp. When I carry out keyword research, I get all these results and I understand the metrics. What I'm not getting is, when a competitor is ranking highly for say "where can I buy fresh turkeys", I assume that that phrase must appear somewhere on the page, but it doesn't. I realise I'm just not thinking about this in the right way. Can anyone offer clarification, please? Kind regards, Bruce
Competitive Research | | BruceBarbour0 -
Competitors ranking in top three with worse SEO
Ok I am at a loss. Our client is trying to rank for keywords like "dental assistant programs utah", but they are still on the bottom of page 1/top of page 2. The guys in the top 3 have terrible SEO. No links, newer domains, etc. I looked into it extensively and learned about the "honeymoon period" people talk about but we are long past that. I've looked through webmaster tools to see if there are any issues, and I can't find a thing. Anyone have an idea of what we could be doing wrong that is making us be put down so far on the page? Before I got here the SEO guys were doing older tactics which I think was starting to hurt them with penguin and what not so I tried my best to delete the crap content and clean everything up on the website. thanks for all your help! I really appreciate it.
Competitive Research | | boyackp0 -
Site Architecture for a Services Company
Hey everyone, I'm doing the keyword research for a new virtual assistant services website that I am building. Being that there's almost a limitless number of services that a customer can outsource to a virtual assistant, I have a lot of service keyword options. Here's the problem: I don't know how to layout my services in a scalable fashion so that I can continue to add onto the services list (each with their own unique and helpful page) after the website is published. I have two options: 1. Create a service page with categories, each with links to the individual services. Like on my competitor: http://www.virtualemployee.com/services but with links to pages focused on the individual service keyword (ex. virtual receptionist services). 2. Don't have a services page, but include the services as blog posts like on my competitor's website: http://www.virtualstafffinder.com/blog. Obviously, the blog would be much more "scalable" in the terms of adding more services. It also reduces a lot of clutter on my website. However, it's not categorized like the average service or e-commerce website. Not sure if this is necessarily a bad thing. What do you think? Your help would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | Stryde0 -
Tracking competitors in search engines
Hi Mozzers, I'm using Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) to track my site and a number of competitors in Google - seeing how rankings and brand visibility change from week to week. I didn't set this up from scratch and I'm worrying with all of the recent algorithm changes that I might well be tracking the wrong competitors. Is there a tool or methodology I can use to find the biggest players in the market? I'm in the travel market so there's lots of choice and I track the large sites but want to be sure I'm aware of smaller/mid-sized sites gaining visibility without me tracking them via a platform like AWR. Many thanks!
Competitive Research | | panini0 -
How do i improve my site's google ranking against my competitors?
the searches that i would like to improve my ranking on are
Competitive Research | | oswaldjr
st kitts real estate
nevis real estate
st kitts and nevis real estate. my website is www.sknlistings.com0 -
Page Linking Root Domains vs Root Domain Linking Root Domains
Hi all, I am new on seomoz and I am not getting which is the difference between "Page Linking Root Domains" and "Root Domain Linking Root Domains". Could anyone please give me a clear explanation? An example would be excellent. Thank you Christine.
Competitive Research | | Cristina-Candin0 -
Crazy SEO question (maybe I'm missing something?)
OK - so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story: A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for. She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow" He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site. He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight... Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site. Thanks for your help, Mozzers!
Competitive Research | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
I was using OSE and noticed all the backlinks to one of our competitors is there other domain name, which is the EXACT SAME website. You can enter both url's and they display the same content. They are not useing any canonical tags either. Why are they not penalized for duplicate content? And for using there own website for backlinks ? We try to do everything right, but still cannot beat them. Any thoughts on this?
Competitive Research | | hfranz0