Detailed ranking question for the pros
-
Hi Community,
We've been struggling with the search engine ranking of our SEO optimised homepage for a number of months. I'm going to provide an overview of the page stats in hope that somebody might have a suggestion as to what the problem might be or where we should be focusing our efforts. I have also provided the stats of our main competitor as I have no idea why they are ranking so high based on the stats provided:
URL in question: https://mysite.com
- On Page Grade for our targeted keyword: A
- Domain authority: 36
- Page authority: 45
- Root Doman Links: 57
- Total Links: 634
- SE Ranking: #17
Competitor URL in question: https://competitorsite.com
- On Page Grade for same targeted keyword: A
- Domain authority: 32
- Page authority: 43
- Root Doman Links: 28
- Total Links: 919
- SE Ranking: #1
Another strange this about our homepage is that a second tier page on our site is actually ranking higher in the search ranking for the Targeted Keyword (#9), even though this page has not been optimised and has an On Page Grade of F.
Does anybody have any suggestions of what we might be overlooking or what the issue here might be?
-JF
-
Thanks Netrepid - that might be a last resort in order to just boost up the internal page, but at this stage I'm trying to get to the bottom of why the homepage is ranking so poorly and why the internal page is ranking better. Once we understand what the issues here are then we can probably put together a better plan to optimise and fix both of the pages.
-
Hi Sheena,
I'd like to post a direct link but I've been told that it opens you up to getting a lot of contact from agencies/freelancers looking for new biz (not a bad thing though!). Also, I recognise that some competitors may have their eye on the forum so we'd just prefer to keep it private at this stage - at least until we figure out the issues!
Would it be OK if I PMed you with info in case you might be able to see any glaring issues on the site upfront?
-
Cheers AMHC,
I took a look at the trust flow and I see that our competitor does have a slightly higher trust flow than us. However, the trust flow of our internal page (which ranks higher than our homepage) is 17 whereas our homepage is 23. Taking into the fact that the On Page Grade and the back link profile for our internal page is much lower than the homepage, it's really confusing as to why it might be ranking higher. Any other thoughts on that?
-
I say optimize the internal page to an 'A', put a keyword rich text link from the homepage to that internal page in content, and get some co-citations for either your homepage or your internal page to match the link profile of that top ranking page.
And when that's done, add a reciprocal link from that internal page back to the homepage and see if you can get that bumped up in the SERPs, too.
Might work, might not. But it's worth a shot.
-
Sheena is spot on. Google has over 200 ranking factors. A tool that I like is Majestic SEO and it's trust flow metric. Quite often, when I can't figure our why a site is outranking us, they have a higher TF than we do. I rely on Moz's DA/PA and Majestic's CF/TF, and they are usually pretty accurate when used together.
Here's one other factor - DA/PA/CF/TF needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Majestic and Moz have their own Bots, and don't crawl and index nearly as thoroughly as Google does, and they also crawl more slowly. I've seen some studies that show that Majestic and Moz only pick up 1/3 of your actual backlinks. If your competitor has some awesome links that were missed by Moz and Majestic missed, this could also be the answer.
-
There are a thousand possibilities as to why they're outranking your site. I know everyone tries to keep their sites private in here, but for such a specific inquiry, we really need to see the pages in question. Kind of a 'help us help you' situation.
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
-
Technical URL SEO question
Hi All, We sell a product on our site which is displayed in cubic metres, from an SEO perspective is it ok to have /3m³ in the URL or should I use 3m3. Thanks All
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Website ranking on Google dropping for unknown reason while rankings are improving on Bing. Please help!
one of my websites www.resumeble.com is showing a constant drop in rankings. Earlier the website was ranking for major keywords like resume writing services etc. I used Ahrefs site audit to find issues. According to Ahrefs there was a huge issue of duplicate pages, which is now resolved by proper canonical tag insertion. The site is built on Angular. Fetch report in Google shows perfect code and Sitemap is also perfect. Manual action reporting in webmaster shows no warning. Please suggest what steps should I take to fix this issue.
Technical SEO | | mayyaa40 -
Terrible branded ranking
I am at lost. My website has been live for about 3 months. Typing my name or my direct page title into google puts me on page 15. My site is indexed by google, a site:mywebsitename search - produces 202 results. My on page SEO isn't amazing buy it isn't terrible either. The website has 35+, 500 words+ reviews and a few incoming links from some occasional link building. 0 duplicate content. The website is animexcess.com
Technical SEO | | WebsiteEditor
My thoughts on what might be causing the problem, i am hoping that someone with a bit more SEO knowledge than myself can point me in the right direction. During development, i had duplicate content up on the site as placeholder while i wrote my own - All duplicate content has been removed for about 3 months now, but can this still be affecting me ranking? and to this extent? The entire website is in a sub-directory with 301 redirects - can this be affecting my ranking to this extent? The domain had a prior owner. Waybackmachine tells me that the domain had a page up in 2007. I bought it in 2010. If the prior owner built up a bad rep on this domain can is still be the cause for poor ranking 6 years later? I cannot file a reconsideration request since there are no manual actions taken against my site in WMT, any way around this? Its only been three months. I know 3 months isn't a very long time in the google ranking world but my my 2 week old, built in 1 week, secondary website is ranking on page 1 for some pretty solid terms, so i don't think 3 months is to short a time to expect a bit of results. My website is being crawled daily.
Any advice on how to move forward with fixing my website ranking will be much obliged. Thank you.0 -
Rel Canonical question
Hi: I got a report indication 17 rel canonical notices. What does this mean in simple language and how do i go about fixing things?
Technical SEO | | Shaaps0 -
Keyword density question.
For instance, if the keyword I'm targeting on a specific page is "New Orleans", the Keyword is everywhere it's supposed to be, title, meta, content, internal links, etc, .... So when I check my most relative key words with different tools, it always breaks the word up like: new - 12 times 2.3% orleans - 12 times 2.3% Should I try to fix this? or is this normal? and does google view this as 1 keyword when evaluating my site?
Technical SEO | | Nola5040 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped
Hi All, One of my website http://www.greenhomepest.com/ were ranking on Google first page for the keywords as mentioned below: pest control in Scottsdale
Technical SEO | | RuchiPardal
pest control in Mesa
pest control in Gilbert
pest control in Tempe
pest control in Peoria
pest control in Queen Creek
pest control in Glendale
pest control phoenix
pest control arizona
pest control az
pest control phoenix az
Pest Control in Chandler But some days before all keywords are disappeared from top 100.I tried to find out the reason but not succeed. Can you please help me to find out the exact reason behind this??0 -
Summarize your question.Sitemap blocking or not blocking that is the question?
Hi from wet & overcast wetherby UK 😞 Ones question is this... " Is the sitemap plus boxes blocking bots ie they cant pass on this page http://www.langleys.com/Site-Map.aspx " Its just the + boxes that concern me, i remeber reading somewherte javascript nav can be toxic. Is there a way to test javascript nav set ups and see if they block bots or not? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0