Top 3 actions I should immediately take.... ?
-
Site: bussongs.com
I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of kids songs.
kididdles.com is my archnemesis. Slight edge in PVs with better ranking on many long-tail KWs (song names mainly).
What are the top 3 things I should do to knock out my competitor? I feel I've nailed the on-page stuff - I have checked all the major items and produced superior content.
The big thing that shouts out to me is that my competitor just has many more backlinks, especially from unique domains and that's lifting up everything.
Thoughts? Can't wait to hear your ideas!
-
I'll also consider non link based ranking signals:
-
Social media presence
-
Improve website engagement - stuff like bounce, clickthrough rates, site speed etc
-
Look at your link-profile via OSE and see what's missing compared to top competitors or similar websites.
Need more high quality links? Then produce content or anything that the linking websites could use and start creating relationships with them. Better yet - pick up the phone and call them!
If in doubt, you can just focus on diversifying your link-profile, avoiding the "bad" types links ofcourse.
Qasim
-
-
Before you spend time buildling a widget, I'd do some research and find out if it's something that webmasters are likely to use (and how many of them would be interested!)
My advice would be to try and identity a "need" first and then come up with something that satisfies that need (and of course give you a backlink too)
What do you know about your visitors? What type of people are they and why are they visiting your site?
Who's currently linking to you and why?
On your website you say "created to help kids, parents, and teachers recall the words and lyrics to loved children songs"
Do you provide nice and easy ways these people can print the lyrics (with your branding and link of course). Getting traffic from off-line sources is still traffic!
Do you have a mailing list? You could offer the lyrics to a song every week. Might to sustain awareness of your site and increase returning visitors.
-
Great thoughts Doug.
Of course there's no quick and easy fix with this. I've dedicated very little to link building, so that's a clear area where I need to devote time now. And you're right - I need to understand the reasons why those links exist and replicate that high-level strategy rather than just chasing to get the same links.
I was considering building a widget that'd allow webmasters to embed lyrics on their site and then I could create a backlink within the display. I'd love to think of an incentive for link-building, but struggling so far to come up with creative ideas.
-
I think the obvious answer is that you need to build links. Can you think of any way you can give your visitors and incentive to link back to you? Getting your visitors to do your link building for you would be ideal!
Have you taken a look at not just the number of backlinks your competitor has, but where they are getting their backlinks from?
You can then try to get links from the same places (take a good look at why people are linking to your competitor though!)
Also try to get a feel for the kinds of sites, and the reasons why people are backlinking and then try to cast your net to capture all sites that match this profile.
Hope this helps.
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
-
My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.
My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO. Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd1 -
Why is our pagerank is still only 3/10?
Hi, Our site https://soundbetter.com has been live for 2 years now, and as of yet we haven't yet been able to get our PageRank above 3/10. We have thousands of unique pages and plenty of original contextual content, we avoid duplicate content best we can, follow google's best practices for site structure, deal with any issues that come up in webmaster tools, have schema.org markup, avoid link spamming, have inbound links from authority sites (though OSE doesn't show most of them for some reason), lots of social shares to our pages and the domain has been owned by us for 12 years. Any thoughts on why we would still have a PR of 3? Thanks for helping
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Does having a video rich snippet keep your result from being top 5 in Google?
It makes sense to me that Google wouldn't want a rich result above the fold in a SERP that would compete with their PLA's. All my videos are on my product pages, so the queries that produce them always have PLAs in the SERPs. I've been run a few tests on this and it seems as though these snippets keep my result below the fold on the SERP (position 5-10). Thoughts on this? Experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieWilliams0 -
Is it ok to add rel=CANONICAL into the desktop version on top of the rel="alternate" Tag (Mobile vs Desktop version)
Hi mozzers, We launched a mobile site a couples months ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL:m.example.com The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I resolved by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. The problem here is that I still also got Dups from that got generated by the CMS. ?device=mobile ?device=desktop One of the options to resolve those is to add canonicals on the desktop versions as well on top of the rel=alternate tag we just implemented. So my question here: is it dangerous to add rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags on the desktop version of the site or not? will it disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Why have I disappeared from 1st page to outside top 100 results?
I have been #2 in Google for "plenty more fish" for about 8 years and have now disappeared. I've been told that I have no manual spam action against my domain www.plentymorefish.net. Can anyone suggest why I have disappeared and how I might rectify this? My guess is something to do with the Panda update Sept 27th - EMD (Exact Match Domain), although I don't understand why Google have left a competitors site #1 as this also has exact match domain. Maybe they've just picked one exact match domain to display and have not chosen mine as the .com has a better overall SEO score. Appreciate any assitance. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Domain Name Registration - 3 Options - which one?
Hello SEOZ 🙂 I'm thinking about registering a domain for a project, the Keyword I want to rank for consists of two words. Somethink like this: "joomla training" But the domain I want to register f.e. joomla-training.com ist registered already. I have 3 options that I consider, what's the best? Register another TD: joomla-training**.net** instead of .com Ad a letter : joomla-trainings.net Switch words: training-joomla.com Write the Keywords without a hypen: joomlatraining.com What should I do now? Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | krseo0 -
Hitting the top of Google Places!
Hi there, I am quite confused about how to get a good rankings on Google Places? It will be much appreciated to get an answers from PROs on following questions: On which websites I need to submit my details in order to rank well? Are there any rules which my website need to follow in order to rank well in GP? **Which techniques are you implementing in order to find proper websites influencing on Google Places? ** If there any 3rd party websites which helps to do so? Could Google Adwords have an impact on my presence in Google Places? Any major mistakes I should to avoid?**** Your detailed answers will help a lot, I am really upset about my knowledge about GP. Cheers, Russel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smokin_ace0