What if your content is way better than competitors?
-
Do you have any suggestions if you are being outranked by competitors even though your page has way better content and better links?
-
I hope not. If you try it let us know how it works. I think that they should give a bonus for anything that is "kickass".
-
You think Google would penalize for using the word "kickass"?
-
The German in me favors free beer - especially Sam Adams.
If you don't have a brand to leverage (and even if you do) use value propositions and calls to action.
I don't know if our brands are famous or not, but we're 2nd and 3rd generation family brands and we leverage the name for all its worth. Plus, our name offers connotations that our url does not.
Now we're not just in-state but nationwide. Makes us feel good when a customer from Wisconsin sent us this yesterday:
"I am truly impressed with your services. I will be ordering more items very soon. I will be also be suggesting your site to my horse community. Thank you for communicating so well! "
Hopefully, his horse friends won't think he's crazy for referring them to a lumber.com site.
-
I almost never place the brand in the title tag. Because my brands are not FamousBrands. Instead I offer a value proposition like "free beer"... which one would you click?
-
I place the main keywords on the left and the kickass price on the right.
-
While waiting for EGOL, I'll throw this in. I've wondered the same thing as you and have a hard time using that Title real estate for much other than keywords and brand.
So I compromise and put the promo language at the front of my meta descriptions in CAPITAL LETTERS.
-
Mighty Mouse uses more than free beer to steal peanuts! Great tidbits!
Charles - to your point I give a thumbs up to EGOL's post.
I have compared the sites of competitors outranking us and and often times I cannot find a single common thread among them as to why they are ranking so well except for strong PA/DA.
Their site appearance, layout, navigation, user friendliness, promotions and depth of content may not be that great, but they're pulling rank.
If your PA/DA is comparable, then you've got underlying issues.
-
Do you typically put those type of titles in the beginning of the title tag or end? From what I have been told and read "best practice" is to have your best keywords in the beginning of the title tags, however they also say the title tag should have a call to action of some sort.
However who knows these days
-
When I am at #2 and the publisher is #1, placing a kickass price (lower than MSRP) in the title tag pulls in a lot of their sales.
"Fast Shipping" does well in B2B.
"Video" does well in informatinoal.
A huge number works well in some product and info pages.... "350 Brass Widgets"
-
"Free Beer" is very compelling. How's your conversion rate on those titles?
-
If your content is way better and you have better links (and a few months have passed) then these sites are probably beating you on their authority or your site has a lack of respect from Google.
If the sites above me are enormously authoritative then I tweak my title tags with something like.... "Free Beer!"... or a kickass price.... use your imagination. The goal is to elicit clickthroughs in the SERPs.
If they are not enormously authoritative then I would be wondering if I have a problem that is holding my site back... such as bad links, duplicate content, etc. If that is not true then you can wait or promote the page.
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 competitor's sneaky link building technique
Hi, I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page. If you view her page source and type "/about" for example, it shows five examples of the text linking to her "about" page. But four of them can't be located on the web page (they are hidden). How does she do this? She basically has four duplicate links that are counted for SEO but can't be seen on the webpage. address: http:// camilla peffer.com. au/ Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | SleekCopy0 -
Expiring Domains by Content
I use sites such as expireddomains.com and Snap Name sin searching for expired domains. All these sites let you do a keyword search based on the domain name, but does anyone know a site that lets you search by the CONTENT of the site rather than just the name? Thanks, Kevin
Competitive Research | | Ebtec0 -
How to approach link building/content in my weight loss coaching niche in a large scale way
Hello, I run a weight loss coaching business, bobweikel.com that is in it's early stages. I'm still working on making it graphically appealing I want to increase my number of national clients - it's coaching done over the phone or skype. I'm needing help analyzing my niche, specifically keywords, article content topics, link building tactics. I want to put a lot of time into it. Eventually I want to scale it up and hire other weight loss coaches and even SEO help. How do I get this dream going through gaining national clients online? There's not much traffic locally. I'm enough of an authority that, with enough time, I can create kickass content on the topics of weight loss and also the topic of NLP (NLP is the type of coaching I do, but it's little known) I'd like to add 5 best-of-the-web articles and a blog. Looking for advice. Would like to dream big. Tools I normally use (though I'm open to anything): OSE, Link Prospector, Excel Pivot Tables, Buzzstream, iPhone 5S video camera with tripod, youtube video embed, keyword discovery
Competitive Research | | BobGW0 -
Screaming Frog for competitor research
Hi guys, Does somebody experienced an issue with Screaming Frog spider while trying to crawl a website? It's weird since no error message appears and at the same time the crawler cannot crawl anything. There is no restriction in the robots.txt. Has someone encountered such an issue? Thank you. Cheers
Competitive Research | | lgrozeva0 -
Competitor reporting
We are in the process of creating customer profiles, conducting in-depth keyword/competitor research, fleshing out a content strategy, addressing old content, meta data etc, and researching sites (particular industry news sites) relevant to our industry who could be sources of authoritative backlinks. Once we receive approval from the powers that be, we'll start putting our strategy in motion. However, we are looking at SEO efforts as a long-term plan the entire organization understands is necessary. If our strategy is sound, I would think we'll start seeing results and some competitors will begin to take notice (and action.) So here is my question: How easy is it for a competitor to "report" a small/medium size business as breaking Google's rules i.e. could a competitor claim we are scraping their content (or content off of any site for that matter) and anonymously email Google? I think the answer to that question is "yes." How closely would Google look into the claim? We have zero plans on doing anything shady or underhanded but I was wondering if it is a simple process for a competitor to impact our efforts this way? Thanks for any insight.
Competitive Research | | SEOSponge0 -
Ecommerce Duplicate Content
Hello Everyone I would like to launch an ecommerce website. Most of the competitors in the same market are using some duplicate content for their product description What should I do? Use the same duplicate content knowing that everyone else is doing the same or rewrite it. Will I get penalized by Google if I use duplicate content? If I don’t will I get a better ranking that my competitors? Thanks for your help Joel
Competitive Research | | slv_link0 -
Can i see the keywords my competitors are optimizing seo for?
Ideally, I would get a list of the keywords my competitors are targeting.
Competitive Research | | sajalsahay0 -
Is it possible to see how many visitors a competitor has received for any given keyword over a set time period?
Is it possible to see how many visitors a competitor has received for any given keyword over a set time period via either Organic / Paid means? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jaycfc1230070