What sould I focus on to get over the top of my competors ?
-
Ok, I've been on this site for approximately one week now. There is a lot of good information but quite honestly, I don't know where to shoot at first in getting a better ranking against my competitors
I have done pretty much everything on my web site to optimize, but I don't get at all the ranking close to my competition. They don't have as much content as we have other than they have been doing SEO for much longer time.
I have worked a lot on the content optimization of our site, I get pretty much good result on some of the keywords, registered my site to google, bing , yahoo, I'm using the site map, configured the robot.txt, on-page metatag, URL canonical, clean-ur, H1 H2 tags, etc etc. Ho, And I just got today the approval of Yahoo Directory Listing. It's not sill showing up, but I guess it will come.
You will find attached the output of 2 of my competitors and Us. They both rank very well on the keyword we are interested. Where should I start ? I know the Links Juice i important, but how can I workout my strategy to defeat them.
Any help would be appreciated.
Best regards,
-
Hi
I have a quick question. Why do you have no internal links? Something is weird there, are those metrics for your homepage? Maybe you should check that you don't have "nofollows" on your links.
Also, your slice of the pie for external nofollowed links is bigger in proportion than competitors. You may want to focus on getting more followed links. Nofollowed links aren't bad and its good to have some too.
-Dan
EDIT: I see Ryan has pointed out the internal link situation - and again, I would check to be sure they are not nofollowed either in the robots meta tag or in your anchor tags.
-
Thanks for your advise, i'll take a look at this.
-
Thank you very much for your advises. I actually started to do internal links today. I'll see what it does. In terms of blogging, yes we do have this blogging capabilities, but quite honestly, for any of our 90 employes, it's kind of hard to keep the momentum of generating up-to-date contents, they are working an average of 50-60 hours a week. We are a professional services company for large corporation, we are doing B2B and our customers don't really spend time looking for information like some companies would do in other area or in a B2C model.
So, in term of continuous generate new contents I am kind of limited. I can probably take content from other sources but I supposed it's not well recognize by search-engine.
Best Regards,
-
Based on what you're saying, you've done a lot of on-page optimization, which is good. But the thing to remember is that on-page optimization, while important, is usually not enough by itself to deliver rankings. If you've done the on-page work, it's time to do off-site optimization, which means linkbuilding.
Here's what I would suggest:
- Identify the page on your site that you want to see rank for your keyword. Try to point links directly to that page where possible.
- There's some low-hanging fruit internally. Notice you have no internal links? I think internal links have a lot of unsung value - basically, you pass link credit back and forth to yourself. You say you have lots of content? Start pointing links from your pages to one another.
- Do you have a blog on your site? If not, slap one up and start blogging.
- You know the keyword you're chasing. Select blogs in that vertical and offer to do some guest blogging.
Remember: On-page optimization is the floor, not the ceiling. It gets your site to a minimum level of acceptability, but on-page alone isn't enough.
-
Hi Marc.
Based on the information you shared, your competitor has a small but clear advantage over you with respect to links. The answer most SEOs would provide to your question is focus on a link campaign.
I take a different approach which has been very successful. When I begin working with a site, my 100% focus is the on page factors starting with the home page. You have not shared your site URL nor that of your competitors so I can only offer general information.
For purposes of this example let's say you are selling Vitamin Z (mythical product). I would work to ensure your site was the best Vitamin Z site that exists, i.e. make it a world-class site. How?
1. Trust factors. Look at the bottom of the vzw.com site. I would establish a trust symbol block which included McAfee or Verisign, TRUSTe, BBB, Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode along with any industry related symbols. For Vitamin Z an industry leading natural product seal would be helpful.
2. Social engagement. If your site has a login feature, then ensure your login is integrated to allow users to join with their accounts from facebook, twitter, google+, etc.
3. More social engagement. Prominently display (i.e. not in the footer) social sharing options from fb, twitter and google+ at a minimum. These sharing widgets should appear next to any article or product.
4. Allow User Generated Content. Web 2.0 is all about creating conversations with visitors. Allow visitors to create content by accepting comments were appropriate on articles. You can look to integrate a forums, or allow user created articles as well.
5. Expert content. Engage specialists, doctors and other experts for your industry. Ask for their feedback, their assistance in educating the public, etc. You can write the article and ask experts to review it. WebMD often uses this approach.
6. Review your navigation. This critical step is often overlooked. Your navigation should smoothly and logically present your site's content. Determine how easy it is to locate content. Ask others who are not familiar with your site for feedback. Can they immediately locate the information? Or do they stumble around trying to find it?
7. Provide a search function. This feature usually requires a database or CMS. Users like this feature, along with an HTML sitemap.
8. Provide a clear Call-To-Action. When a visitor lands on your site, how clear is your message? Is there a large, bright red ORDER NOW button? Does your CTA button compete for attention with other messages?
9. Add video content. It may be expensive to produce, but it is very marketable and can share your message in a way that words cannot. It also opens up YouTube and other channels for your site.
10. Integrate current events into your site. Using the Vitamin Z example, anytime Vitamin Z is mentioned in any news article either directly or indirectly, you should include that content on your site. Ensure your site is the world's number one source of all information on Vitamin Z.
11. Crisp, clear web design. We live in a world strongly influenced by appearance. Looks count. Some sites pay thousands for web design, and it's worth it! Create a design that is so smooth and great looking that web design sites link to it as an example of a great looking site.
The initial focus of this work is the site's home page. Once completed, it is relatively easy to integrate the changes throughout the site. There are other steps to take, and we can talk about meta tags and site linking, but the initial SEO focus I recommend is begin at the beginning, your site's home page. All your remaining work builds upon the solid foundation you create.
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
-
What's a good way to get started with competitive research?
Hi all, SEO noob here. I'm doing an audit for a firm that makes specialized accounting software. It's a relatively new firm, with a barebones website. My client has identified three direct business competitors. In addition, I see indirect competitors (such as product reviews) on the SERP for a relevant keyword phrase. I want to provide actionable advice for my client. What information should I present? I'd like to help my client understand: Why my client's competitors are outperforming them on the SERPs What my client needs to do to overtake their competitors What information should I present to my client? Thanks, all.
Competitive Research | | AndyKubrin0 -
Is anyone else getting this search result?
One of our blog posts (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/celebrities-dresses-skirts-wind/) used to rank well for "windy skirt", but we're not ranking anymore. When I search for "windy skirt", all the top 10 results are Youtube videos. Is anyone else seeing this? gs1eVsn
Competitive Research | | Jantaro0 -
Why has my authority article gone from P1 to below the top 50? Along with the rest of my site...
My site has run into some serious and unexplained SEO issues over the last 6 months, i.e: I wrote the content at http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/flat-roof-insulation/ about 3-4 years ago, and ever since it's competed for position with the huge PLC websites and hovered around the top 3 spots in google.co.uk. However, since May this year things have declined rapidly and now isn't even in the top 50 for [flat roof insulation]! Why?? I am aware that this content has been pretty heavily plagiarised since day 1, with some other sites making the effort the 'rehash' my wording and others just blatantly copying. At the same time it's also been relatively well linked to (for a very boring subject) since day 1. Over the same period (since May) the site has suffered a huge decline in traffic and rankings, as can be seen here http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Capture.png, but I find the huge drop harder to justify for a relevant article than for the homepage/site in general. What strikes me about the above is the two step changes in traffic volume; one in early June and the other in late October. I am vaguely aware of the penguin update etc, but it seems to me like I've been manually banished somehow? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Competitive Research | | Biota0 -
Why is my website not in the top 3 if our Moz statistics are better?
Hi, We've been using Moz, for our E-commerce sites, for some time now and are improving all of our statistics, be it on-page for specific keywords or general crawl errors, but I've not been seeing a lot of change in our rankings... (we've moved from place 7 to 6 on our main keyword). I'm thinking of looking at our backlinks, through Link Detox, after we finish our Moz optimisation to see if anything weird is going on with that. Are there any other areas I should be looking at? any other clues as to why we're not ranking higher than our competitors. Even if our Moz statistics are better and our Market Samurai values are similar? Thank you very much! Alexander
Competitive Research | | WebmasterAlex1 -
Open Site Explorer is not showing dmT. Where do I go to get this metric.
Just trying to understand the video I watched on Link Building w/ Open Site Explorer. I'm not seeing the dmT metric in the live version. Has it been replaced by something else. Or is there someplace else I need to look for it?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
I don't get it
Hi...I'm new here....not a professional SEO at all....just been teaching myself as much as I can about SEO on my own as I'm a small business owner desperately trying to make something out of herself. Could use your thoughts on this...please forgive me if this isn't your usual type of question you get here: so...I've been going through all the suggestions for on page optimisation and researching competitors links given through this lovely SEO Moz pro account . One competitor in particular....has spammed A LOT of sites...I think she's hired some company to do it for her. There's article submissions that don't even sound like they are written by someone who speaks English and very low quality sites for back links including some with adult content...however she's got thousands of these links so she ranks extremely high on all keywords. All her pages have very high keyword density and could be accused of keyword stuffing big time. I put her website through the SEOmoz grader....she's got a C and I've got an A. She's completely catered her site to Google not the customer and its obvious. But other competitors in my product have started doing the same thing as this gal and low and behold their sites are popping up in google searches also. Beginning to feel frustrated with my hours of efforts and wondering how I can compete with people like this when I'm trying to be a good girl with Google and focus on creating a great site. My hits per day are increasing slowly, my Alexa rank (hoping this matters) is improving rapidly and you can actually find me on the google search when I couldn't before (I'm page 10 now yay) so I don't feel like a total failure but still am wondering if hitting page 1 for my keywords will happen this lifetime. Why does Google seem to reward people who go against all these countless books and resources on SEO I'm reading? Could use any thoughts/suggestions you might have on this matter. Thanks for your help. x
Competitive Research | | ldnwickless0 -
How to estimate what traffic you should be getting?
Hey guys i have a question in regards to targetting seo results. A lot of my customers will me SME and most have visitors of under 50 per day. My question is how do you judge the amount of traffic a website of a small local business should be getting? For instance i have a site that gets average 22 visits per day, i would love to know how much their competitors get per day so i can know what targets to strive for. I feel that is 22 is ten times more than the compeitors website then the amount of seo time needed is less than if it is 10 times behind what competitors get. Thoughts?
Competitive Research | | buntrosgali0 -
What's the best SEO practice to get conversion rate up?
If you want to get conversion rate up what is the best method to do so?
Competitive Research | | blackrino0