Competitor Out Ranks My Site
-
Hi
This is my first question on SEOMoz and I am confused how a competitor can out rank me for a local search term SEO Tamworth. I have a higher Page Authority, Domain Authority, Number of links etc..
Would this be down to the quality of the links to my site or could it be down to the structure. I score an A for SEO on the on page analysis.
Regards
James
-
Hi James,
I'm glad it helps and excites you going forward with your business.
Check your Analytics data as well - see if there are ways to quickly improve time on site, loading speed, bounce rate, average pages per visit - anything Google gives you could be an insight into what they want you to improve.
If you have any related questions, just ping me to let me know and I'll check back.
~Matt
-
Thanks Dana.
I love talking about SEO and I type fast so it helps get those thoughts out. Appreciate the comment. -
Matt what an excellent response... I am going to look at the links you've provided as well.
Yes it definitely answered my question I am going to get Google +1 onto my page ASAP as that is an easy step.
I need to look at the copy to make sure users stay on the page, I am pretty sure the page is all white hat but may be in my early days I used board line methods which could be impacting it.
I have some good results for my clients and I can get them to do me a nice little testimonial on the good work I have done on possible Google places, Qype and some others which rank well.
Thanks again... (I am actually very excited today after reading this response)
-
Matt, This was a great response. I especially like that you didn't stop at just offering links but you offered a complete answer in addition to those. That's something that makes this forum great.
-
Hi James,
I (and others) have answered this a number of times recently so I'm mainly going to link you in.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-this-site-rank-higher-than-a-seemingly-better-one
http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-t-for-the-life-of-me-figure-out-how-this-is-possible-any-ideas
The basics of it are you are looking at maybe 3 or 4 metrics of maybe 200 that affect SEO. DA and PA matter but they are heavily influenced by other factors such as domain age, page loading speed, time left on registration (surprisingly!), number and quality of anchor text vs branded text, follow vs. nofollow (not in the ways you'd necessarily expect), and again, like 175 other factors. There are always a million "could be" answers.
Let's say the other site had a PR7 SEO site before and it is now offline. Maybe they used it for the "black hat" version of their business. They've seen the light, black hat works less than ever, and they've gone all white hat. Now they 301 that domain over to the new one. You can't "see" the 301 but the effect would be massive. Maybe they have one big client who they managed to ask for and get a big link that isn't on the Moz index but it's showing up in WMT. Maybe their average visitor visits 3 times as many pages as on your site or stays for 10 minutes longer per visit. Those type of metrics make a huge difference in SEO.
I hope that helps answer your question! A huge amount of factors control SEO - social, possibly, the platform of the site, +1s on Google, local citations that may not include a live link so they aren't picked up by Moz.... see the issue in figuring this out?
~Matt
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 will ranking keywords add on my website
Its been a lot of time since I have launched my website but I am not getting any ranking keywords can you please help me about the following factor or provide some solutions my website is about selling third-party antivirus and technical service: norton.com/setup
On-Page Optimization | | Mehakayna0 -
Translated the site but traffic is not coming
Hi, We've build a lawyer directory website (www.iranianlawyers.com) which already has good Google rankings for related terms (Ex. Iranian lawyers, Iranian lawyers california, etc). About 1.5 months ago we translated the site to Farsi and published it online: www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi However we have yet to see any new traffic generated from those pages. The website has a decent back-link profile and there are no almost no competitors in our space with translated pages. Would someone please take a look at our translated pages and let me know if there are any major on-site issues that you see that we need to address? I've checked for noindex or nofollow tags but they dont seem to be an issue. Not sure if I'm missing something here. Thank you very much
On-Page Optimization | | Heydarian0 -
Help finding someone to handle crashing site/site optimization.
I need someone who can handle website/WordPress issues as they come up.For example, my site has gone down 4 times tonight, and my host can't figure it out. They also keep recommending that I optimize my site, but I don't know how. I need a go-to web person for this sort of thing. Any recommendations?
On-Page Optimization | | cbrant7770 -
How we can rank two keywords
Here is my example. I developed a property inspection app, where the keyword I try to rank is property inspection app, and property inspection software. Property Inspection Software got slightly more traffic than app. I would like to rank both of this keyword high for my main website, but there is only one title, one H1 tag I can use to have keyword, where if I use "App" there is no way to have "Software" on the title, etc. How can I deal with such a case? Any help will be appreciate.
On-Page Optimization | | terrysun0 -
Pre-launch site or not
We are going to set up a new site in four months. Historically we always set up a simple Wordpress "Pre-launch-site" with relevant texts to start ranking in the SERP. Anyone with experience of doing/not doing this and what is had led to? A site with relevant texts also should have incoming links, which needs more work.
On-Page Optimization | | fredrikahlen0 -
Ecommerce On-Site SEO: Keywords in Category Descriptions
Hello, I'm doing on-site SEO for a client's ecommerce site. Are 160 words enough for a category description? I'm using the keywords once at the top of the description, and once at the bottom of the description, with the ones at the bottom reworded so that they are the keywords with a different word order. I used to put the keywords in 3 times but it just feels like stuffing. Is twice, worded differently the second time, enough for a category description? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Site-wide keyword density
A colleague of mine was saying that he has been able to get top ranking for a high traffic term by using variations of that head term on multiple pages that are associated with the main page. For example,he would optimize a landing page for the high traffic word "Construction." He would then build pages under this landing page that are optimized for variations of this word: "Construction facts," "Industrial Construction Companies," "Construction Resource Allocator" etc. His theory is that the subpages add credibility with spiders that the root page is the best for that root page. This doesn't seem like it would work, but I'm curious as to what other people think.
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee340
