Why is this site beating mine? I can't work it out!
-
I feel my site is not to bad. Needs more work and could be better but what site could not, However i'm bamboozled by some of the sites that are out ranking me on key terms.
e.g. Horse Rugs
http://www.fasttackdirect.co.uk/products-1-122/Horse_Clothing/HORSE_RUG_SALE.html ranking 8th
http://www.centralsaddlery.co.uk/horse/horse-rugs/ not ranking in first 10 pages
I dont expect my site (the later) to rank well as its not up there with the bigger players in our industry yet however I can't see why a page like the one i mentioned is ranking so well when as far as i can see its not as well optimized and has very little content.
This is not me ranting about it or whining about why i'm not top etc. I just can't work it out and would love sombody to explain the reasons for this? The only thing i can think of is that they have more category with the words "Horse Rugs" in them. Other than that i'm stumped!
Ideas on a postcard please!
-
Thats why its good practice to compete on price but not go nuts as if you do its just a race to see who is out of business first,
I agree. Lots of these people can not do math. They don't know what their profit margin is.
-
They do but as with all retail.
But if you are for instance an Apple reseller and you buy and iPhone for say £100 and they sell them for £500, you will get away with say 10% variation on MSRP but if you think im happy making £50 profit ill sell them for £150 and make a killing it will not take long for Apple to get shot of you as you are devaluing the brand it for everyone else.
Thats why its good practice to compete on price but not go nuts as if you do its just a race to see who is out of business first. A sale in my opinion should only be when the new version comes out or you need to cash the dead stock up. The problem these days is in the tough times that we are in, people are desperate and will sell things with very low margin just to survive. Its more like a game of last man standing, if you can pay your staff less and run a mega lean business you can win.
-
As myself and the other top 3 sell quality big name brands (big in the UK horse world anyway) we can't really do the SALE SALE SALE selling style ...
Why can't your supplier provide an MSRP and MAP structure that allows for sale prices?
-
I understand what you are saying.
One of my retail sites sells a line of products that range in price from $79 to $279. I sell them with little or no discount. I sell the quality brands.
But Amazon and a couple other e-retailers sell a cheap, plastic, model for $49 that breaks right away that I would not think of selling to my customers.
They outrank me. They probably sell more. But that does not change my mind. I am not selling that crap because I don't want the phone ringing. Does not bother them to sell it because you can't call them on the phone. It's really hard to get in touch with them.
-
Its not a thing I spend many work hours on, its more just a thing that interests me.
Interesting answer.
As myself and the other top 3 sell quality big name brands (big in the UK horse world anyway) we can't really do the SALE SALE SALE selling style as you will get dropped as a stockist if you do. But then again just because you sell the good stuff doesn't mean you are making more money.
-
I'll be honest and say that I spend zero time on this type of analysis for my own sites. Why? To understand why they are ranking you have to look at an awful lot of factors. Too much time. Not worth the return. I am out to beat people with informative content and then entice the huge traffic produced into Adsense or to sales pages on my own site that compete with adsense because they are promoted with house ads on the Google DoubleClick ad server.
I looked at the top three that you listed. If I was going to pick any site to run as my own, based simply on the design of the horse rugs page my choice would be ..... Fast Track Direct. I am betting that site converts like crazy.
-
Other than the constant sale and the title tag we have most of the same components just in a different style. Sale info, Free Delivery are all on our site. I think the sale could be more in your face. Is it just the more subdued style on my site that you think is letting it down?
On another note this is the top 3 for the term Horse Rugs, who would you say is the best and why? Other than the fact that the top rank is always the best.
1st - http://www.derbyhouse.co.uk/Equestrian/Horse/Horse+Rugs/
2nd - http://www.rideaway.co.uk/horses-rugs/
3rd - http://www.robinsonsequestrian.com/horse-clothing/rugs.html
I find it very interesting trying to work out why each site wins for a specific term. I don't know enough yet to be able to pin point what I think its causing what. Really enjoying learning though.
-
I see where you're coming from but no I avoid site like that at every turn.
I think that you should try what you don't like about the competitor's site and see what happens.
-
I see where you're coming from but no I avoid site like that at every turn. It may just be me but i find the style crass and the site ugly. but then again my taste is not what im selling so im happy to take your comments on board.
On that note what would you change on my own site?
i like the email and phone number at the top however our site is responsive and putting them in the header causes spacing issues on smaller screens. I could just drop them on mobile etc.
-
I remember reading a post by either Rand or Dr. Peter (can't remember which) that said they did a poll of top SEO's and speed was around 10%. However, if I were you, I'd pay more attention to the points EGOL made.
Best,
Ruben
-
The competitor has an excellent page, IMO. EXCELLENT.
I will bet big money that the competitor has an asskicking click-through-rate and conversion rate. I bet lots of people return to this site by domain queries and brand search.
HIGH CTR
Look at his title tag... **Horse Rug Sale | Discount Horse Rugs | Clearance Horse Rugs **the only thing that would make it better is "free beer while you shop". People love a sale, love a discount. They will click this in the SERPs.
HIGH CONVERSION / LOW BOUNCE RATE / HIGH TIME-ON-SITE
Then, when you land on this page... Look at those red ribbons for discount prices, and look at those yellow ribbons for free shipping.
Look at his top banner... with the subtle "Free Delivery"... also trust marks on the left
VISIBLE TELEPHONE NUMBER / EMAIL
Their phone number and email are at top of site. Kickass.
DEAL OF THE DAY
This is a great idea. Look at the banner at bottom of page. I bet that brings lots of people backk to this site. They might type the domain into google, or into chrome. Deal of the day will make lots of people request your site by name.
Can you see why people might really like their page, make purchases and return?
-
I found similar results on MOZ pro and in almost all metrics we win yet google does not agree.
Page speed could be the issue. i have been aware for about a year that our site is slow. We are working on this however our current CMs is working way beyond what it was designed for and is struggling. we have a new system under construction which should solve the issue however its still 6 months away.
How much of an issue is page speed? Could it be keeping my site down in a big way?
-
I ran your site through OSE, but that wasn't helpful. You actually have more linking domains, higher DA and higher PA. However - and I doubt this is the main reason, but it is a reason - why that pages outdoes yours is speed. I ran the two pages through pingdom, and his loaded in 1.42 seconds, whereas yours took 3.24 to load.
Good luck!
Ruben
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
-
Google adding text to SERP title which isn't relevant
Hi guys, I have a site with around 300 articles on it and these articles came from three old domains which were migrated during a Wordpress domain migration almost four months back. There The problem I'm having is that for quite a lot of the articles in the SERP, Google is adding '- Maine Coons' to the end of the title. One of our old domains was related to this breed of cat so at least in Google's eyes it must have something to do with this I guess. I've attached a screenshot that shows one such example. What's odd is a lot of the new content that has been created also has this suffix added and it doesn't show in any other search engine. So, it doesn't appear in other search engines and it's not coming from the article itself (proved also via developer tools inspecting the code). So, Google is adding it but as you can see in this example (there are many more) it has absolutely no relevance to the post. Has anyone seen this behavior or have any idea how to fix it? I've tried all kinds of things and have even hired SEO 'experts' that haven't been able to see any problems. Any clues? Thanks, Matt K71Y3P9
Technical SEO | | mattpettitt0 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Google has deindexed 40% of my site because it's having problems crawling it
Hi Last week i got my fifth email saying 'Google can't access your site'. The first one i got in early November. Since then my site has gone from almost 80k pages indexed to less than 45k pages and the number is lowering even though we post daily about 100 new articles (it's a online newspaper). The site i'm talking about is http://www.gazetaexpress.com/ We have to deal with DDoS attacks most of the time, so our server guy has implemented a firewall to protect the site from these attacks. We suspect that it's the firewall that is blocking google bots to crawl and index our site. But then things get more interesting, some parts of the site are being crawled regularly and some others not at all. If the firewall was to stop google bots from crawling the site, why some parts of the site are being crawled with no problems and others aren't? In the screenshot attached to this post you will see how Google Webmasters is reporting these errors. In this link, it says that if 'Error' status happens again you should contact Google Webmaster support because something is preventing Google to fetch the site. I used the Feedback form in Google Webmasters to report this error about two months ago but haven't heard from them. Did i use the wrong form to contact them, if yes how can i reach them and tell about my problem? If you need more details feel free to ask. I will appreciate any help. Thank you in advance C43svbv.png?1
Technical SEO | | Bajram.Kurtishaj1 -
Data Highlighter doesn't show page
We have an event related website http://www.sbo.nl so i wanted to use data highlighter because most of our event pages are the same. But data highlighter doesn't show those pages, I will see only an empty page. For example http://www.sbo.nl/veiligheid/brandveiligheid-gebouwen/ Does someone of you understand what is going on. Data highlighter does show the homepage. I am thinking it is maybe because of tabbed browsing, or the chat function in that page. Hope someone can help. You can see a screenshot of Data Highlighter http://www.clipular.com/c?6659030=2X2gQv4O8_9RzcZ1Hk_7xGtCPYo&f=d40975c80bdd11dc357f050cafa73a80 I hope someone can help because i am lost 🙂 Cheers Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!
We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none). In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research... And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found. His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse" We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat. We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened. Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on... Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...
Technical SEO | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Can You 301 Unwanted Links to Another Site?
I am trying to clean up my link profile, and have noticed that a I have a lot of crappy inbound links linking to some of my old pages. And those old pages have since been 301'ed to current pages. My question is, is it worth trying to 301 those old pages, and thus those crappy links, to another website? Would this do anything to clean up my link profile?
Technical SEO | | red6marketing0 -
How much of an issue is it if a site is somehow connected to a site that was penalized by Google?
I am working with someone that is about to launch a new site, and one of the sites was affected by the Panda update. Does it matter if the two sites are connected? Share the same hosting provider and same Google Webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0