Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Competitive Research

Uncover new and exciting ways to conduct competitive analysis


  • Hi everyone, I'm wondering whether someone can enlighten me as to how a particular page / domain is ranking for a term that the page appears to be in no way optimised to receive traffic to. The search engine is Google Australia and the Search Term (albiet low volume) is "Bunbury Builders" the top organic result is the homepage for "Content Living" www.contentliving.com.au/ There is one single mention of Bunbury on the page (as a phone number in the footer of the page). I've disabled javascript, css, and spoofed my user agent as Googlebot and I can't see anything suspect going on here at all. I also ran the domain through open site explorer and I couldn't find a single anchor text reference to bunbury directing visitors back to this domain. We haven't yet begun targeting this term, but I was curious to see (for my own education as much as anything else) how they were achieving this ranking position. Any feedback would be appreciated.

    | NaomiC
    0

  • My client just launched a german version of their site: English Version:
    www.domain.com/en/.... Germain Version:
    www.domain.com/de/.... Is there a best practice to get the new section of the site indexed in www.google.de? Are you able to submit a different sitemap to each Google domain? How do you go about doing keyword research, its got to be different search trends than google.com, right? A am complete beginner when it comes to international SEO so any advice would be greatly appreciated! Regards - Kyle

    | kchandler
    1

  • Hello, What is the best system/tool to estimate traffic to a site, something more accurate than Alexa rank.  This is of course assuming that one does not have access to the site's Google Analytics data, Thanks, Carl

    | CarlLarson
    0

  • kindly i need to know in comparing site i can only see the HTTP there no place to insert an HTTPS site.

    | Moia
    0

  • 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, h837v

    | processia
    0

  • I just god the approval from Yahoo Directory Listing today. How should I expect ranking increase just with that on google, yahoo and bing in the next couple of days  ?

    | processia
    0

  • Hi everyone, I'm checking out some competition for a webshop and i found a website which was quite high in Google for a searchterm, when checking it's backlinks why it was that high in google (His Content was rubbish, so it wasn't that). I only found out that it has loads of linkdirectory links, does this mean it still matters these kind of links, or does it mean the competition is just rubbish? Regards, yannick

    | iwebdevnl
    0

  • Here is an interesting situation. Overnight SEOMoz is now reporting about 1.1 million new backlinks to my site. The links look like they were added in March of 2011 and they are all on porn sites and link back to me with the words like "Indian Sex", "Sex Bathe", and "insex." This appears to be yet another attack on my site and it looks like it happened right before the April Panda update that hosed me. As an example of one of the pages you can look at seapotentialdifference.com/inurlife/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3081 and look for the link for Indian Sex. They linked to my forum and not the home page. At the same time SEOMoz discovered these links my DA dropped from 62 to 58. I'm wondering if anyone thinks these issues are connected. More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this? For some reason the PA and DA of the porn site pages is above 70. This will probably be an ongoing battle for me since I am a journalist that covers the debt relief world and scammers don't like for me to expose them in an effort to protect consumers.

    | rockpaper
    0

  • Hi all, I've been asked if I want to exchange links with http://www.myteetimesonline.com/  and I'm tempted but fearful that its link profile looks spammy. What do you guys think? I'm basically starting from scratch with my own site http://www.golfgear4you.com and have a Page Rank 0 and Domain authority 32. The guys that want to link to me are Page Rank 3 but Domain authority 35. Their content would be of interest to my site's users and vice versa but my biggest concern is their link profile looks awful because the sites that link to them don't appear to be very relevant. I've done a lot of reading on this and have found the resources on this site to be a goldmine. The generally message is avoid easy links to spammy sites because they could hurt credibility. I just want to check I've actually learnt something and my instincts about this site are correct. i.e leave it alone!! Thanks, Andy

    | getzen56
    0

  • Hi i am trying to work out what is the best when it comes to domain names. What i mean is, should you go short or should you try and fit in what you need. So as follows. say i need a domain name that i wanted to buy which i have done research and found that these two words together are good keywords. please note that this is an example the two keywords are manchester airport and the next two keywords are cheap flights should i get a domain name that say manchesterairportcheapflights or should i have a shorter domain name like manchester cheap flights or another example say i wanted a domain name that fitted the following two keywords in manchester hotels budget accomodation should i just get a domain name that says manchester hotels or should it get the following manchesterhotelsbudgetaccomodation I am looking at buying a number of domain names and i am trying to find out if shorter is better or if a longer domain name is better

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • I'm going to sit in on a BrightEdge demo tomorrow, to see if the SEO services they offer might be right for a client of mine. Just wondering -- Does anyone have experience using BrightEdge SEO services? If so, what is your opinion? Any particular question I should be sure to ask the sales rep during the demo? Thanks so much for any thoughts/suggestions. -- Jim

    | jimmartin_zoho.com
    0

  • Generally I'll look at data for specific geographical searches and incorporate the data from the other keywords, then track the metrics.  I think there is likely a more efficient system but I'm not sure where to start.

    | DoriC
    0

  • I need a tool that does the following: Find exact matches for keywords in content of sites and report keyword density by URL.  Then identify the value generated by a particular keyword.

    | MotionPoint
    0

  • I use traditional methods for keyword discovery, but occured to me that perhaps competitive keyword software should be applied to competitor's sites for further possibilitites. Any opinions or experience using this strategy? I know it used primarily for PPC, but value for SEO KW discovery? Any personal recommendations on which programs considered most effective? Thanks. Alan

    | ahw
    0

  • Hi, I have this one page designed to rank for a spesific word i google (sweden). The page has a flawless moz grade A on-page. While my competator ranks for their subdomain, also grade A. I rank 6 he ranks 2 in google. Would I be doing a misstake if i 301 directed it to mu subdomain. In visitor perspective it would be a better landig page aswell. I dont want to lose my rank though. Best practice, anyone?

    | SuperlativB
    1

  • I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question.  Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company.  They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website.  Domain1 and Domain2.  I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US.  Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany.  So we split it using GeoDNS.  Any international traffic goes to their server.  Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US.  So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools.  They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still.  We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name.  Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name.  I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated.  Thanks!

    | KathleenLTG
    0

  • 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.

    | marketingdepartment.ch
    0

  • SEO Moz reported that various keywords I was tracking were not in the top 50 results on Yahoo or Bing, yet when I did a Yahoo or Bing search for those keywords (from multiple computers and not logged into any Yahoo or MSN/Bing account) I found the keywords easily.  What's the scoop?

    | Cybernautic
    0

  • Are there any tools that will let you see your competitor's bounce rates?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • I rank decently on local search for some of my keywords but find that the traffic coming to my site is not from those keywords. I also find that they never convert to sales queries. Is someone able to help me out with that? Thanks My domain is www.hykano.com

    | Skwtayler
    0

  • Is there tool that can do the same as Bing's "linkfromdomain:" feature? Using Bing for it is fine, but I'd like to triangulate the data. I have tried both SEOmoz tools and LinkResearchTools, but none of them can give me the variable. Xenu might be an option, but it takes too much time to crawl the entire website when we have to check several hundreds. Suggestions? Thanks! Thomas

    | ThomasHgenhaven
    0

  • Wondering why none of my links are showing in my dashboard altho many were accepted 3 months ago? many Thanks, Zoe.

    | zozzer
    0

  • I receive a busy message each time I try.  This has been out of commission the last several times I've tried it.

    | cmiller
    0

  • This is just a general discussion on your thoughts on this - maybe some tests have been done, but I haven't found any. Suppose I have document X If I put document X on high authority website A - It comes in SE position 1 for Keyword Z If I put document X on low authority website B - It comes in SE position 10 for Keyword Z What happens (if anything) if I put document X on website A and include a canonical tag to point to document X on website B. What SE position would document Z on website B now come for Keyword Z ??

    | James77
    0

  • I'm analyzing my clients and competitor back links and are noticing alot of up and down fluxuations. For example last month we had 1400 back links, last week 1350 back links, and today 1450 back links. Also, one competitor went from 25,000 to 2,700 in the space of a few weeks. My question is how can I explain to the client that their back links are going down when they are paying for a back link building service (100 back links per month). Thank you for your time.

    | SharpKiwi
    0

  • Moz tool bar works sometimes and not others ???  I am signed into pro

    | waynelongsales
    0

  • Hi, I am attempting to put together a set of procedures to undertake when optimizing Google Places pages.  Does anyone have a good list of metrics and methods for determining them in order to build profiles of competitors' Places pages? Thanks

    | networkelites
    0

  • Is there particular place to get quality links?

    | 1step2heaven12
    0

  • Hi everyone, I'm trying to understand some searchresults, when searching in the netherlands for 'online casino':
    http://www.google.nl/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=online+casino&pws=0 You'll see as position 3 result this website: http://bit.ly/qhRsUT, it's obviously that this site is there because of blackhat. But how did it come there such high for a keyword with high competition? I don't see anything wrong in the website? It's not like Google did something wrong, because it happened already a few times for this keyword with different domains from that owner. Regards, Yannick

    | iwebdevnl
    0

  • I'm trying to judge how much incremental value we'd see from 301'ing an old domain vs. revitalizing the old domain's content. My gut feeling is that most of the links to the two sites are from the same set of websites so it wouldn't add much value to 301 the old domain. I've seen the opposite of this done with Competitive Link Analysis (e.g  show links that you don't have that your competitor does have). Is there a tool available that can take 2 or more sites and tell me for instance - 72% of the inbound links or linking root domains are the same?

    | Jeff_DomainTools
    0

  • Hi, I am new to seomoz and i was very much impressed with the stuff here in seomoz. The tools here in seomoz are very helpful to me . And i was doing good with the help of seomoz. But due to recent google's algo panda 2.0 update. I was bit confused about new ranking factors that google has released. I can see here in seomoz also that page level link metrics has good importance than backlinks now. Earlier google algo gives main importance to backlinks now i can see in the list it went to bottom. Can you help in explaining these things, on which things i need to concentrate on and does backlinks really count now?? Many people stopped concentrating on backlinks now and are going for facebook likes and tweets. Here is the good example that i can see: www.hotfilesearch.com which is a flle search engine. He was one of the competitor for me . He ranked very good in a short span of time, all he did was he bought some really good paid links and within 6 moths he was on top. Now i can see he was dropping out every link he has. But though he was ranking pretty good on the web. I really in need of your suggestions to optimize my site. Awaiitng for your reply.. Regards Dheeraj

    | achillies000
    0

  • We are creating a national real estate website which will contain 2mil+ listings. Our aim is to compete with the National leaders in the field. We are trying to lock down a url structure and it basically comes down to if we should put a major keyword in the url structure or not. The structure would have regional keywords naturally. Its the addition of a more descriptive key word which is in question. Our domain name has no keywords in it. For the sake of this example, we would be targeting "city real estate"... oursite.com/real-estate/state/city/ or oursite.com/state/city/ Here is what the big sites use as an example: http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/New-York-NY/ http://www.trulia.com/NY/New_York/ http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/New_York-New_York/ http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/New-York Id love to not have to throw keywords in there and be as clean as possible but i also dont want to shoot myself in the foot. The big boys do add additional keywords in the url, does that mean we should? Id much rather be a leader than a follower but again, I dont want to mess this up from the start and these guys have probably tested this (or have they?). Input would be greatly appreciated.

    | cobbsfriedman
    0

  • I recently had a discussion with a fellow SEO on the importance of older domains. The guy said he uses a lot of auctions to dig out old domains and use them to setup sites. I considered this as a potential way of generating incoming links. He did mention he had been punished with the google Panda update. What are peoples opinions on this as a way of generating incoming links. A domain may cost around $10 plus the hosting could be found quite cheap -  it seems a good idea ? Plus if you get lucky and perhaps get a domain with existing authority it could really be a good investment. In research I do come across these sites quite a lot a basic wordpress install with pages added linking into other sites. They type that have no contact details and you have to find the whois info to gain any contact with the webmaster.

    | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • Are there any free tools to learn traffic data (especially organic traffic data) from a site or blog?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Hello all . I have my website which is www.eswaran.com ranked @ 6 on 1st page for the keyword Ceylon tea on www.google.lk . I have a another page of the same site ranked on 3rd page as well . What im looking forward to know is if its possible to gain double listing on 1st page on google.lk what should I do at the moment ? Also Im looking forward to know if there are any onpage issues of these both pages as well . Thank you guys .

    | Osanda
    0

  • I'm wondering if anyone else out there has noticed that ripoffreport.com has vanished in Google's index today (8-9-2011). Any input is appreciated.

    | Domino50
    0

  • I compared my site home page against my competitor homepage with Open Site Explorer and I found that according Open Site Explorer I have only 3 backlinks where in MajesticSEO I have more than 100 backlinks in 'Historic' data and more 90 in '30 days fresh data'. Why there is no even close correlation between MajesticSEO data and Open Site Explorer? How SEOMoz count backlinks?

    | eladlvy
    0

  • I'm very new to SEO, but know just enough to be dangerous. I've run my first full KWD report and formatted the results per  Jordan Judson's blog post. Now I'd like to compare how related pages on my site compare to these results. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to accomplish this task. Any guidance would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Steve

    | SteveMaguire
    0

  • I need a tool that will input a list of URLs and produce a spreadsheet with link metrics for all sites including PageRank, Domain Authority, Page Authority, Social data, etc..i know that OSE will do this for 5 sites at a time but I need to compare more. At lest 50 at a time... I bought Buzzstream thinking this would work, but it doesn't. does anybody have any good advice? Thanks!!

    | znotes
    0

  • Has anyone on here worked for, or simply know of a high authority winery website? I may have the opportunity to do some work for a vineyard/winery. Obviously there are certain universal seo tactics that I will use on the site, however my knowledge of wine is limited, so I would like some suggestions for, well deigned and seo optimized sites to study and learn from. Any suggestions?

    | NerdsOnCall
    0

  • Hi, A lot of keywords I have looked into say 'moderately competitive' at around 35% - 45%. But what else would you look at in the table to decide whether or not the keyword term is achievable and how do you decide this maybe its the root domain backlinks and maybe you would only touch it if it had less then 30. Basically what other elements do you look at when deciding whether to pursue? This might also include some research in Google itself (although most the data you would want is in the tool, well I think anyway! Cheers

    | activitysuper
    0

  • Hey guys, I am new to SEOMoz and have setup my first campaign, so far very impressed with what is possible. However I am trying to find out how much traffic a website is getting, as I know that people can be high up on certain keywords but are not actually generating any traffic from them. Can anyone help? Also I have a potential client who is ranking really high on alexa because of its american traffic, yet when I asked them they get very few bookings from americans.  How can I view the UK ranking of the site? Thanks Andy

    | iprosoftware
    0

  • Most of my analysis revolves around looking at rankings for specific keyword phrases that I've identified as important/relevant.  But it'd be nice to be able to look at a domain and get a sense for how much organic traffic they get overall.  If they're not ranking for the keywords I'm researching but have a lot of organic traffic that would be a nice signal to me that they are probably targeting other phrases more or have a big brand presence or something. Any suggestions? Thanks! Jeff Gibson

    | jeff.gibson
    0

  • Hi, Got a question about the keyword difficulty tool, I'm new to seomoz so might be a silly question but here goes. Q: It takes the top 10 results from Google under a certain search query, the results displayed gives a rough breakdown of what power the page on the search results has along with the root domain. It looks like it rewards the best out of the bunch for each section with a tick, so 1 tick per column for the best performer. Now I would have thought if one of the websites in the top 10 had all 4 ticks it would rank at the top of the list but this is not the case. What else would come into play to make others which have no ticks rank higher then one which has all. Sorry if this sounds really confusing.

    | activitysuper
    0

  • İ have published over 3000 unique articles to  pr3 drupal site over the past 3 months, yet only get about 20-30 visitors a day from google to my new 3000 articles. i have spent over 10 000usd for those articles, all range between 400-800 words and all pass copyscape. 90 percent of the articles are indexed and site pr3 site. the site is alltopics.com  why do i not receive traffic?

    | rxesiv
    0

  • Hi, I'm really struggling to see how these guys are number one on google (from the UK) when searching for "picture framers york" Their SEOMOZ on page grading for the term is an F, so on site SEO is minimal if any. Their backlinks are almost nonexistant, take a look at the competition report (attached) through market samurai.  Everything I thought I understand about SEO is currently being turned on its head because with the information available, they shouldn't be there. I thought maybe its the proximity to 'York' center, but they aren't that close to be honest. So any advice greatly appreciated as to why they are #1 so I know what it is I can do as an SEO. Thanks, Dave samurai.png

    | davebrown1975
    0

  • The difficulty percentage on several keywords is identical for Google.com and Google.com.au and I am wondering why?

    | davidangotti
    0

  • A site I'm researching on open-site explorer has a #2 link with page authority of 52 and Domain authority of 97, and that link is the site's twitter page.  No other sites I've researched have had their twitter page show up in it's link rankings like this, can someone explain?

    | TheSquareFoot
    0

  • I came across www.soundandvision.com and did a Link Analysis on them.... http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.soundandvision.com/a!links I noticed that the top links they have are from Google directories or Google IP's. How has this happened? I am listed in Dmoz in the UK does this mean I have automatically appeared around the world. Dmoz is pretty strict about rejecting links how can a company be listed so much? Is this a good practise? Cheers

    | JohnW-UK
    1

  • I've just downloaded the Moz toolbar for chrome and noticed that some website I'm visting have a dollar figure range next to the Bold/Strong section.  What exactly is this? If you go to http://www.tincup.com and use to the toolbar you'll see what I mean. Thanks, JMM

    | blogging4jobs
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.