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Thanks again to both of you for the pointers.

I just need to get stuck into this now I think. Even delving into just a coupled of the points raised by you has thrown up severel potentially very important areas for me to look to improve.

As a starting point I am going to stop obsessing over those heading SEO metrics that seem to have taken over my life.

Lou

Hi Alan,

Thaks very much for offering your thoughts on this. Really useful comments.

You're right in that I had very much over simplified my analysis of the issue. I just wanted to throw a few factors out there in order to encourage a response like yours - packed full of useful next steps for me to evalaute this further.

On of the points you raised was 'crawl efficeincy; and on further investigation I noticed that we have an awful lot of pagination on our website which users use to browse through our articles (we have 10's of thousands). However the competitor site tends to have all results on one page along with a 'show more' button. Might this be a good place to start? Looking at the cache dates of some of the results in Google, it certainly looks like the competitor pages are being crawled more often.

I also noticed from Google webmaster tools that our internal links report shows that we are giving great prominence to many of our category landing pages, rather than the article pages themselves. Does this sound like an area worh investigating?

5000 or so average crawl errors probably also isn't helping. Particularly given that we seem to only get around 6000 or so page crawled per day. Again, I;m guessing this is worth a lot of attention.

Duplicate page titles also seem to be an issue, so there is certainly lots for me to look at here.

Thanks again

Lou

Hi,

We are trying to outrank a competitor of ours on Google for around 100 terms that we are both clearly targetting. Our competitor currently 'wins' in the SERPS around 70% of the time, often ranking in the top 3 positions.

The problem is, we are absolutely convinced that all onsite and offsite SEO metrics we are monitoring would suggest that our content should almost always place higher than theirs.

Here is what I know:

• All pages on both websites are rated 'A' by the Moz on-page-grader tool for the phrases we are targetting, with virtually no tech issues to be addressed on either site
• Our domain authority is 10 points higher than theirs
• Neither of us have external links to the relevant pages on our sites (although we are working on some for ours)
• Our Page Authority is considerably higher on average - often by 10 points or more
• We have considerably more linking route domains, from better sites. Also many more total external links
• The HTML title and H1 headings of our pages contain the target phrases at the beginning - our competitors are the same. Although they often ONLY include the target phrases in their title, wheras in our title they might only take up 1/3 of the total characters
• We have images optimised for the target phrases on our pages. As do they.
• We use the target phrases roughly the same number of times in our copy text, as do they

I have totally run out of ideas now for further optimising our site/pages to consistently rank better for these target phrases, although maybe these are a couple of factors that could be having an impact on the rankings:

• The structure of their website is perhaps optimised more for these target phrases - our site is much bigger, so perhaps our 100 pages are given less relevance on our site than their 100 pages? - but surely our stronger page authority would suggest otherwise?
• Perhaps Google is using page engagement statistics to determine that their site is 'betteer' than ours in terms of user appeal and engagment?

Can anyone think of something that I might have missed? Is there another major ranking factor I have perhaps neglected in my research?

I know link building strategies are a good way to approach this in the long run, but we are currently just concerned about why we are not already ranking better when clearly they are not undertaking any link building strategies of their own.

Any help or pointers here would be enormously appreciated.

Thanks

Lou

Hi Bryan,

Thank you very much for your feedback. We are actually already doing (or plan to do) each of the 4 points you suggested in your post. So good to see we are on the right track!

However my question was more about how we should technically place the charts/graphs on our website from an SEO perspective.

For example one option would be just to post an image of a graph on the website and add:

alt = Graph showing Economic Growth in Dubai over the past 10 years
Title = Graph showing Economic Growth in Dubai over the past 10 years

But I'm wondering if there are some more tricks to effectively tell Google that the image we have posted contains actual information? For example are their some appropriate rich snippets we can add to the page to tell Google what type of content we are displaying?

I know there are snippets for displaying addresses and cotnact details, for example.

Thanks again

Lou

Hi,

Our business has an enormous amount of data at our disposal, which we have traditionally only ever printed in our offline publications.

I am aware however that much of this information would be of great use to people searching for the topics we cover online, so it strikes me that there must be a way to represent our data, tables and graphs online to maximise the visibility of the information.

For example rather than simply including an image of a graph on a web page and editing the alt text to something like "Saudi Arabia economic growth 1995-2016", is there a way to publish this data online that will give search engines and users some good contextual information about what we are trying to show?

Would certain rich snippets for example do the trick?

Any help or pointers that could be provided would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Lou