How can we compete ???
-
Hi Guys,
We are new to MOZ and just getting some data on one of our projects Shottle Hall
This is a wedding venue in Derbyshire and as you can imagine it's quite a competitive niche.
We have been working with them to help build website content and build natural links.
However we are against a lot of sites that have obviously had lots of "questionable" SEO work done in the past and these sites are still ranking above Shottle Hall
One competitor has lots of links from very low quality blogs - that they have obviously made themselves
http://derbyshire-attractions.blogspot.co.uk/
Another site is ranking well and is buying banner links that pass page rank
http://whimsicalwonderlandweddings.com/
This really makes me think should we be doing these tactics ??
We are told by Google that this is not the way to rank but I am very disheartened by these facts!!
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks so much for adding some more really great suggestions to this post.
The NAP consistency is something I will look into ASAP
Kind Regards
James
-
Hey Karl, Ninja
One quick clarification here from my original post - when I say local I mean folks searching in and about Derbyshire. Important clarification as quite rightly as we want to target everyone looking for a wedding venue in that location.
Your Google+ Local page is actually really nice but a few things jump out at me.
1. Potential issue with page name using 'Wedding Venue' - this is a violation and whilst some folks get away with this it's uneccessary and something I would try changing
2. The rel=publisher tag is not set so I would implement that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1708844?hl=en
3. Reviews - we could always use more reviews from real (and happy) visitors
4. NAP Consistency - from the quickest of looks I see some NAP consistency issues. Different names for the hotel (Shottle Hall Country House Hotel), different phone numbers, address variations. Getting your NAP really consistent is one of the easiest jobs to help overall and will impact in a positive way and remove some negative effects. This ties back into the use of the name on the profile page as 'Shottle Hall Wedding Venue' and 'Shottle Hall Country House Hotel' elsewhere (as they could be two different things entirely).
5. Sites like hitched.co.uk are highly visible and if profiles are well configured they should drive lots of targeted leads. Think beyond the link / citation and consider this a potential source of revenue and ensure you are measuring so can assess the ROI - wedding venues charge a pretty penny so if these sites generated one confirmed sale per month at £1000 PA they are likely providing a strong return on investment and an additional channel.
6. PPC - yep, it's brutal out there but again, it's just another channel and if you can measure it and it does not bite into leads from other channels then in many competitive industries it can be somewhat essential. Even if you only use it for some display / retargeting after organic visits to keep pushing the venue PPC is worth exploring (and measuring).
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Thanks for the reply
it's a good point about the disavowed links I had not thought of this
Blogger outreach is something we are keen to look at further, however many wedding bloggers will only offer sponsored content or side bar adverts.
Other websites seem to be paying for these do-follow links but I was keen to try and avoid anything that may lead to a future penalty ??
It's annoying that others seems to be doing this and getting away with it!!
Kind Regards
James
-
Thanks for the reply Marcus,
We are increasing our PPC at the moment as we can measure this and it seems to be quite effective so far.
Our site was always ranking first position of Google Maps but has recently dropped so got to try and figure out why ??
The strange thing is we now have a vanity URL on Google+ and out of most of the other local venues we are really the only ones active on Google+ ??
Regarding hitched.co.uk we came off a few of the big directories a few years back as they just just kept pushing the prices up and at last they were trying to get us to pay over £1,000 per year for a listing!! and I assumed as these were no-follow probably not worth the money ??
We have a website refresh planned soon and I am hoping to add some more video content and of course we plan to keep producing high quality blog content.
Thanks agin for your input and advice I was feeling a bit disheartened earlier
-
I would stick to the local SEO strategy but think about contacting influential bloggers from around the area, maybe look at Yorkshire and even Lancashire because people will be willing to drive a couple of hours to a nice hotel. I know you won't be able to target those location keywords onsite but in terms of your outreach, it may be better for you as people in Derbyshire won't necessarily be looking for a hotel there.
Whatever you do, don't go down the black hat road, Google is far too smart for that now and you WILL get penalised. I'm assuming you have done a backlink analysis on the competitors to see what links they have, well don't forget they could have disavowed these links and they would still show up in OSE etc so don't believe everything you see when it comes to backlink analysis.
I'm not a huge advocate of PPC, even with the (not provided) problems we are having, but you it would be interesting to test a PPC campaign out to see the response and you can use these results to help you in your SEO campaign.
-
Hey Blue Ninja
I have had a quick look and it appears that you do well for 'wedding hall derbyshire' so you are doing something right there. Alternatively, if I search for 'wedding venue derbyshire' which is likely the more popular term I don't see the Shottle Hall site but I do see some localised results and a four pack of listings from Google Maps.
That localisation looks like an opportunity to me and one that you can certainly compete in. From the quickest of reviews the sites returned are not really doing anything from a Local SEO perspective and they have not claimed their profiles, encoraged any reviews etc (which would indicate they were going after local search).
How do you compete?
- Well carry on keeping it clean. You have no evidence these bad links are working and if they are they won't for much longer
- Try and add some local SEO into your approach to drive more visibility with local users
- Ensure you are well listed on important industry verticals like hitched.co.uk as they can drive a lot of visibility (and will kick back into your local SEO)
- Consider some GEO targeted PPC to pick up some leads from paid search
- Round out your strategy a bit - try to build social followers, build solid evergreen locally focused content, engage with your social audience, consider some retargeting adverts, social adverts etc
I think there is plenty you could do here with some options being something that can start working straight away (social, hitched.co.uk & PPC / remarketing) and others that will take a little more time (organic & local listings).
Hope that helps!
MarcusP.S. UK based?
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
-
1st Ecommerce site got penalized, can we start a 2nd one?
Hello, A client's first site got penalized by Goolge Penguin. It has recovered through cleaning up backlinks, but not to where it was before. It is 2nd and 3rd for several money keywords, but is far less successful than before penalization. We are starting a second site. Here's the important steps to mention The new site shows up first for it's domain name, and it has 30 pages indexed. It shows up NOWHERE for our leading search term. Out other site has a blog post that is 3rd for that search term. We are using new categories and new organization. We are using a different cart solution We are adding all unique content The home pages and some of the product pages are very thorough. We are adding comprehensive products like nothing else in the industry (10X) We plan on adding a very comprehensive blog, but haven't started yet. We've added the top 100 products so far. Our other store has 500. There's a lot of spam in the industry, so sites are slow to rank. Our category descriptions are 500 words Again, all unique content. No major errors in Moz Campaign tools Just a few categories so far, we're going to add many more. Same Google Analytics account as our other site It looks like we should eventually be on page 3 for our major search term. Again, we're nowhere for anything right now. ... Have you seen that Google will not rank a second site because it's from the same company and Google Analytics account, or does Google let you rank 2 sites in the same industry? We are hoping it's just slow to rank. If you can rank 2 sites, what are your best recommendations to help show up? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What can I put on a 404 page?
When it comes to SEO what can I put on a 404 page? I want to add content that actually makes the page useful so visitors will more likely stay on the website. Most pages just have a big image of 404 and a couple sentences saying what happened. I am wondering if Google would like if there was blog suggestions or navigational functions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoeyGedgaud0 -
Can I leave off HTTP/HTTPS in a canonical tag?
We are working on moving our site to HTTPS and I was asked by my dev team if it is required to declare HTTP or HTTPS in the canonical tag? I know that relative URL's are acceptable but cannot find anything about HTTP/HTTPS. Example of what they would like to do Has anyone done this? Any reason to not leave off the protocol?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
Can a hidden menu damage a website page?
Website (A) - has a landing page offering courses Website (B) - ( A different organisation) has a link to Website A. The goal landing page when you click on he link takes you to Website A's Courses page which is already a popular page with visitors who search for or come directly into Website A. Owners of Website A want to ADD an Extra Menu Item to the MENU BAR on their Courses page to offer some specific courses to visitors who come from Website (B) to Website (A) - BUT the additional MENU ITEM is ONLY TO BE DISPLAYED if you come from having clicked on the link at Website (B). This link both parties are intending to track However, if you come to the Courses landing page on Website (A) directly from a search engine or directly typing in the URL address of the landing page - you will not see this EXTRA Menu Item with its link to courses, it only appears should you visit Website (A) having come from Website (B). The above approach is making me twitch as to what the programmer wants to do as to me this looks like a form of 'cloaking'. What I am not understanding that Website (A) URL ADDRESS landing page is demonstrating outwardly to Google a Menu Bar that appears normal, but I come to the same URL ADDRESS from Website (B) and I end up seeing an ADDITIONAL MENU ITEM How will Google look at this LANDING PAGE? Surely it must see the CODING INSTRUCTIONS sitting there behind this page to assist it in serving up in effect TWO VERSIONS of the page when actually the URL itself does not change. What should I advise the developer as I don't want the landing page of Website (A) which is doing fine right now, end up with some sort of penalty from the search engines through this exercise. Many thanks in advance of answers from the community.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ICTADVIS0 -
Links from automated translations can damage the source?
I've a website dataprix.net composed by automated translations in diferent languages from original contents from another website, dataprix.com. Is good for dataprix.com to be linked by the contents of dataprix.net as the source of translated content, or could be considered by Google as a lot of low quality links and result on penalties for dataprix.com?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xiruca0 -
SERPs recovery? When can I believe it?
Here's a happy story: Some of you folks with sharp memories may remember my questions and worry over the last 3+ months regarding our fall into the abyss on Google after great positions for over a decade (we've always been fine in Bing and Yahoo). And our company name URL was still #1 so no site-wide penalty. Well......I've been working hard on fixing this in a smart way with all the ingredients I've been learning about. Thank you to SEOMozers for all the help!! There's still plenty to do, especially in the link earning department, but I've come really far from where I was in the Fall. Anyway. I am here right now to report what may be true to life fantastic news. I was starting to suspect an improvement last week, but it proved to be wrong. Then, I saw another sign yesterday but couldn't trust it. Today, my latest SEOMoz report is showing me the following for the several keywords we lost position down to "not in the top 50" for. keyword 1: up 44 points to #6keyword 2: no change still at #4
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gfiedel
keyword 3: up 46 points to # 4
keyword 4: up 43 points to #7
keyword 5: up 46 points to #4
keyword 6: up 2 points to #2 What I'm wondering is if this is real. ;o). I'm pinching myself. I realize that it could be one of those sliding readjustment things and we'll drop back down, but we are not a new site. It seems that even if that is the case, it still must illustrate something good. Some kind of elimination of possibilities for why the drop occurred in the first place. I did a few things in this past week that may have put it over the tipping point. One of which was signing up for adwords a week ago. I'm happy to give details if anyone is interested. A few specific questions: 1. What might this be showing me?
2. We have about a 45% number of anchor text footer links in client sites (we're a web dev co) one or two of which are numbering in the hundreds have keywords in them and are continuing to generate more links due to ecomm and large databases. I was gearing up to remove them or get them moved out of the footer so there's only one, but now I'm afraid to touch anything. Most of the footer links are just our company name or "site design". Any suggestions? 3. any other bits of advice for this situation are appreciated. I don't want to blow it now! Thanks!0 -
My site has disapeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?
my site has disappeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why? It used to rank around 4 for the search "austin wedding venues" and it still ranks number three for this search on Bing. I haven't done any SEO work on it in a while so i don't think i did anything to make Google mad but now it doesn't even rank anywhere in the top 160 results. Here's the link: http://austinweddingvenues.org Thanks in advance Mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100