What is my site missing for improved ranking - Pls Help
-
Hi
I would really appreciate any advice or guidance on what my site needs to move onto the 1st page as I am at a loss on what else is required?
On a search for chartered accountants swansea according to the SEOMOZ campaign ranking report the site www.harrisbassett.co.uk is down in 27 position for this keyphrase in Google.
However when looking over the ranking analysis my site has a stronger authority, more root domains, more domain authority and linking root domains than 4 out of the top 5 listings. Also the onpage analysis of some of the top 10 results is very poor, with no blogs, social features etc
I have been building links based from competitor analysis which should be more than what is shown in the ranking report, but is my site missing any kep ingredients that would propel it up onto the 1st page - as the keyword difficulty is only 25% so I am struggling to work out what key elements/improvements are required for this final push.
-
1. Please redirect all non-www traffic to it's www equivalent.
2. Please redirect the http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/index.html page to the / page.
-
Ok thanks - what do I need to ask them to do so that the main page is http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk and not the other 3 variations you mention
-
The best solution by far is the .htaccess solution. The canonical tag still leaves you open to others using and linking to the wrong page.
As far as your host, if they are a "real" hosting company, they will have the knowledge to change the htaccess file and probably have done so for hundreds if not many thousands of sites. If they cannot make this change quickly and easily, I would consider changing hosts. Any quality host offers 24/7 telephone or at least ticket support. If I requested this change for any client of mine it would be made in 24 hours at worst, and often much faster.
-
or can it be done with the canonical tag? as my host is a local company and not sure if they would do that or at least not very quickly
If so how would you implement this to solve the 4 pages into 1 scenario I have.
Alternatively I have access to the FTP of the site so if any experts in the forum can help with a .htaccess file that will solve the problem I would be very grateful.
-
My preference would be to ask your host to make that change. Most small sites use managed hosting, and almost every web host is willing to make that change for their customers.
If you make the change yourself and the slightest mistake is made, your website can be taken offline, your SEO compromised or your web security compromised. Additionally, the order of statements within the .htaccess file can alter the results.
-
Ryan
Many thanks - I applied some of your great advice last time which helped so I am hoping this will also do that
With the multiple homepages is it possible you could supply the relevant .htaccess file required so the search engines know it should point to http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk and not any of the other 3 addresses you mention
Thanks once more for your time and excellent help
-
I completely agree with Ryan here.
When I started (@ the furniture market.co.uk) our home page was attempting to rank for loads of key words, I created sub pages.. long story short... Just yesterday in the Rank Tracker report I have guided a brand new sub page "glass-coffee-tables" to number 1 for that search term on Google.co.uk, against Argos, Amazon, John Lewis, M&S.. It can be done. (10 months later & all white hat)
Concentrate on 'On Page' basics before you go off page.
-
The feedback I previously shared in your prior Q&A still applies.
I see your site presently ranked as the 14th result in Google.co.uk for "chartered accountants swansea".
You have a small site with 17 pages. The recommended approach would be to have your home page rank for your brand name "Harris Bassett" and an internal page to be created which specifically targets the keyword you wish to rank for "Chartered Accountants Swansea".
The process would be as follows:
1. Create a page titled "Chartered Accountants Swansea"
2. Use a H1 tag on the page "Chartered Accountant Swansea"
3. The content on the page should be specifically designed to support the page's topic.
4. There should not be other pages on your site discussing this topic or, if they do, then use anchor text to link back to the main page for the topic.
5. Earn links from other sites to the page using anchor text.
Your site has a variety of issues which I believe I shared with you previously when you presented this same issue.
1. Your home page is presently available under at least 4 unique URLs
http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/index.html
http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/
http://harrisbassett.co.uk/index.html
You need to fix this problem for your site on your ranking will suffer. Choose one version of your URL you like and 301 redirect the other versions to the desired URL.
2. Presently your home page title is "Chartered Accountants Swansea | Harris Bassett Swansea". You also have another page on your site, http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accountant-swansea.html. The page title is "Harris Bassett | Swansea Accountant". While it is a different phrase, there are strong similarities, especially for such a small site.
The problem is raised because you use the term "chartered" on the latter page, and you do not use any link to refer back to your home page.
3. Your home page is also diluted by focusing multiple terms. The page is further diluted by discussing multiple topics not related to "Chartered Accountants Swansea" such as Taxation, Outsourcing, Financing and Grants.
I know you are looking at your site and comparing it to some other sites with the feeling you should rank better. You are right, you should rank better but that wont happen until you fix the issues with your site. The rankings as they stand seem perfectly valid to me. Yes, you mentioned a few of the 200+ factors which determine a page's rankings where your site performs better, but the above items should be addressed so you can cash in on those metrics.
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 to improve my DA number?
My website’s ranking, content as well as data are very good, but the DA number is low. Is this normal? Can someone tell me how MOZ evaluate a website's domain authority? Or what kind of adjustment can improve the DA ranking? How often does MOZ adjust a website's DA?
Link Building | | Jane0909870 -
Links From Unrelated Sites
Ok, I know this has kind of been answered, but... I have a website that helps people find lawyers. I also have a lot of friends who are musiciansand singer songwriters. I could get these bands to link back to my page. Should I do this?
Link Building | | RafeTLouis0 -
Major Dip in Keyword Rank - Why?
Last week my ranking for "keyword A" was relatively high at 16. Since then it's dropped a staggering 31 spots. It's certainly the most important keyword we can rank for so seeing it go -31 spots is rather frightening. I have a couple of theories: We haven't included it in our blog content as anchor text but once in the past 2 or so weeks since the last crawl was done by moz on oct. 21. The lack of recent links with the anchor text of "keyword A" pointing back to the blog is causing it to lose it's rapport. I've been adding most of our blog posts to Reddit and we've been getting almost double the traffic from Reddit alone. But with that comes a much higher bounce rate (~80%). Could posting and having visitors bounce from our blog posts cause the ranking to go down? I would love to get your thoughts on this issue. Thanks,
Link Building | | smf434340 -
Does more product pages mean better rankings?
We've recently been told that one of reasons why our site doesnt rank as well as a particular competitors because they have much more product pages than us. We can see that they have better quality links, which we are working on improving, which we sort of understand can be helping them beat us, but we didn't think that they would be ranked higher just because of more products. They also do not have much interesting blog / content on site. So should our limited resources be focused on getting better links, better content, or increasing our depth of product range? Thanks all.
Link Building | | onwardsandupwards0 -
Need help for SEO
After Penguin 5 what are the major changes in onpage that is necessary and what are the best techniques for link building?
Link Building | | Chirag7530 -
The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
My blog was hit by Google Panda on July 21. My rankings dropped dramatically overnight. Nothing I do is helping. In fact, the day my guest post was published on one of the biggest blogs in my niche (DA over 70) my Google impressions dropped to an all time low and then got worse. (250 impressions and 12 clicks) You can see the first drop and the second drop in these screenshots and yes Google Webmasters and Google Analytics match. http://tinypic.com/r/2dvtvlj/5 http://tinypic.com/r/4u83t4/5 I am getting more fans, subscribers, traffic etc but my Google traffic just gets worse. I would really like to get some organic traffic! But I have no idea why this is happening. I checked manual actions and there is nothing. I cleaned up crawl errors and duplicate content. I get several backlinks a week within my niche from high authority sites. I just don't get it and I am very discouraged. What should I do?
Link Building | | 2bloggers0 -
Creating your own blog for back linking to your site
Our competitor seems to be linked to a blog that they have created themselves. From an SEO perspective is it worthwhile creating a blog that is related to your particular industry and then only including links back to your site. Also is there any way to upload ,articles etc automatically to the blog to cut down on the people hours involved in updating content?
Link Building | | Hardley10 -
A few questions I need help with and would appreciate any help.
I am currently building links to our website via estalished blogs ect (2+ years old), As far as I understand even if they are unrelated to what we do (print) as long as the post is about print the link should offer some value is this correct? Other questions I have which I would greatly appreciate advice in are as follows........ (1) Do charity websites or company websites with link pages ( about5-10 other links) or links / logo's on the front page offer value even on unrelated sites? (2) What happens if 80% of the link building I am doing comes from blogs? (3) If I have links that are clearly spam that have been built to our site can they be damaging our potential to rank and how can I remove them as I have tried to contact the relevant parties but fear pressing the button on the google tool may harm our site should I? (4) If I have a page that genuinely has a lot of mentions of a keyword (not so much the money keyword but part such as wanting to rank for pool table but end up with the different versions of keywords having table mentioned 5 - 10% of the time). Thank you for your time.
Link Building | | BobAnderson0