Why is a low ranking site outperforming a higher one?
-
Hi,
I've got a question here that is more about learning than about rectifying this specific situation, as it is a low traffic (low dollar) situation. I would appreciate your help.
Thanks,
Ken
The targeted long-tail is: carrollton ga internet marketing
The targeted site is: http://www.kennethlewis.com/
Yet, when I run the keyword search I get this other site of mine, which is older, but has much worse metrics. http://www.breemawellness.com/ On this site, all I did was put a in-text link on it and added the keywords to my title tags.
Open Site Explorer shows these metrics:
KennethLewis.com 34, 23, 18, 98
vs. BreemaWellness 27, 15, 7, 10.
Both are on the same server.
Note:
-Until two months ago the KennethLewis.com was only partially about Internet Marketing- mildly so, actually- and it was a 2-3 page iWeb not-optimized site. But BreemaWellness has never been about Internet Marketing, and those words were just added two months ago for the first time.
-KennethLewis.com gets regular content changes, to the blog. BreemaWellness.com almost never gets touched.
Thoughts?
-
Links are what you want in SEO, they are probably the strongest ranking factor (at least for the time being), but the easiest way to get those is to visible create content that people want to create links around. This is the reason that content is so important.
If you are doing all your linkbuilding manually, by yourself, you have a long road ahead of you.
Google has indexed your page, so it's been crawled but it only has the one link pointing at it and as I said that's not providing any particular context.
I don't think that anyone is going to disagree with the concept that knowing more about SEO is an advantage, but it's not a game winner.
Your situation will all be solved by sorting out that slider and getting some more links with the right anchor text pointing at KennethLewis, specifically at the page we're discussing.
-
I obviously haven't optimized KennethLewis.com for the given term, but the term is all over the site on multiple pages. As for the Breema site, it is mentioned just on the homepage of a site that otherwise has no relevance to the keywords.
I thought Google would know better, and wouldn't give much weight to the addition to the homepage of a different topic (Breema in this case). I put it on there clearly for SEO purposes, and find it strange that Google is taking the bait so easily.
**What happened to all I've read about Google looking site-wide for relevance, and not just on one page? ** How can an Internet Marketing website appear lower in an Internet Marketing search than one with a radically different topic and three usages of the keyword on one page?
In my eyes this reveals that it is not content/relevance that is important, but rather one's ability to play the SEO game, which is exactly what Google says it wants to avoid. Right?
Just trying to wrap my head around this.
-
Yes, maybe I was a little blunt there, sorry about that, it wasn't how I intended it.
Nothing wrong with a sales page as the front page if your clients are mostly direct and you expect that to remain the case.
With that said if they have gone to the trouble of typing in your URL, they are expressing quite a lot of interest already, so it's unlikely that they'll begrudge clicking through to a sales page if you make it an obvious and desirable option.
-
"cars, hunger, and statistics" LOL
Yes, it is true that I used the index page as a sales place for potential clients, and significantly overlooked SEO. Hypocritical, I must say of myself.
Thanks guys for pointing out the obvious. It is funny how much easier it is for me to see other site's issues then my own.
Any other thoughts, anyone?
-
It's a bit tricky to give you anything firm, because in very broad terms these things are down to the volume of links pointing at a site, and both the sites in question are low on links (if you were to get a few reasonable external links pointing at KennethLewis.com I think you'd see a rapid change). But going on the data we have I think this is a mix of site structure, content and page title.
Breema has reasonable content relevant to the query you've mentioned on the front page. It's in plain text there is really no messing around, it's nice and simple. On the other hand the page on KennethLewis is somewhat buried behind a slider containing none of your quoted keywords (and it's the last slide as well).
Moving on to the titles Search engines will read in the region of 70 characters of your title, anything more than that and you are likely to be losing the later words in it. In the case of the page Google is ranking the word "marketing" gets cut off halfway. Breema on the other hand has Georgia mentioned twice and Internet Marketing all covered within those 70 characters and this is going to have an impact.
If you were to create even a few text links to that page from other pages on the site using your quoted keywords I think you would see an improvement, it would be even better if you got the text on your slider sorted, right now it's all about cars, hunger and statistics rather than internet marketing.
Links are the key, get a few reasonable external links with the right anchor text and you'll see some results.
Hope that helps.
-
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your query. Based on a very cursory review, http://www.kennethlewis.com/ isn't optimized for any georgia or carrollton terms. On the other hand, http://www.breemawellness.com/ contains several optimizations for those terms (i.e. title tag, internal links, etc).
Like I said, perhaps I am misunderstanding at what you're driving...
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
-
Why is my page ranking lower when my moz stats are higher?
There are several keywords that I search for and I notice we rank lower than a couple of competitors. When I use the mozbar and view the stats, I see that are PA and DA are higher and in some instances the ones who rank higher don't even show all the keywords in their meta descriptions. If this is the case, how are they still ranking higher?
Moz Pro | | Smart_Start0 -
Local SEO does not rank well
Hello everybody, before 3 months i began seo in gialia.net.gr. Its an eshop based on symfony framework. We started with on-page seo optimization and after making links in directories, forums and article directories. After 2 months we saw rankings for niche keywords (γυαλια ηλιου, γυαλια ηλιου προσφορες) at 5th and 8th page of google.gr. Now, the rankings does down and i cannot unserstand the reason. I checked old backlinks with opensite explorer, and found some spam backlinks links (3/10). Is this the reason that seo not going well? I am very dissapointed and i would like to tell me you opinion about what is going wrong with that site. My customer owns one more domain, fotispapoulias.gr and i am thinking to move all the site that is running on gialia.net.gr to fotispapoulias.gr (301 redirect to all links). The fotispapoulias.gr ranks better in the same niche keywords without seo. Is it good idea? Will achieve better rankings or not? Thanks
Moz Pro | | simplewebsol0 -
What is the Best Local Ranking Tool?
I'm trying to track down a tool that will provide localized rankings within Google Maps/Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local as well as major local directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. Additionally, I'm looking for the results to provide the address being displayed in the ranking. Any suggestions?
Moz Pro | | JonClark150 -
Big changes in site titles
So as I pour though some of the diagnostics data for over 100,000 pages of my site I see thousands of page title that "could" be changed. Could this cause some lost traffic for a while due to the big changes?
Moz Pro | | dvduval0 -
SEO moz poor rankings reporting
How are we supposed to send ranking reports to clients if the rankings are constantly reporting false metrics This is not the first time this has happened, but the rankings are WAAAAAAY off. What is the point of reporting rankings that are not accurate? What is the possible cause of this. Is there a solution? What is SEOmoz doing to improve their ranking programs. Our client actually ranked #2 for "northern Virginia HVAC contractors" when moz had us not in the top 50! How are we supposed to bank on information that is so consistently unreliable? northernvirginiahvaccontractors.png northernvirginiahvaccontractorsrank.png
Moz Pro | | imageworks-2612900 -
Mobile ranking
Is it now possible or do you plan on making it possible to see your mobile ranking in the Ranking Report?
Moz Pro | | peterkaad0 -
Best way to rank an E-commerce site fast? [GOOGLE]
Does anyone have experience in ranking E-commerce sites? I'm trying to rank 1000+ subcategorys and 300+ products. All less than 1k Exacts some are just 20ish some go up to 1k. I've used Traffic Travis all keywords are ranked as [Easy] along with the tools here. My competition have 0 backlinks to there sites. Some sites have PR1-4 (only 2-3 per SERP rest are 0 so should be quite easy. However I'm up against Amazon and Google shopping for the products. Anyways what would you guys recommend me do?
Moz Pro | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
If my keywords aren't driving any traffic to my site, why am I still ranking for them?
In several of our campaigns we have watched our keywords steadily climb the rankings without ever registering so much as a blip in the traffic data column. If these keywords aren't driving any traffic to our site, how are we still ranking for them?
Moz Pro | | MackenzieFogelson0