Competitive Domain Analysis
-
What is the best way to improve this in reference to my competition? My site(s) are formatted well, returning no errors or warnings. I have removed my keyword meta-tag and tested my sites against the keywords that we want to appear under. Now I need to close the gap on the competition.
-
Trust badges, live chat, and toll-free numbers won't improve your rankings but should enhance the trust a user places in your brand, thereby increasing the potential for conversion.
On-page optimization is the price of entry into the SEO competition -- it sounds like you've squared away the basics (title tag, meta description, h1 tag, used the keyword in your content, included related words and phrases). If that's the case, you're likely being outpaced in off-page factors.
Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, or ahrefs should all be capable of giving you a glimpse into whether or not you're competitive from an authority standpoint. In order to pass your competitors, you're going to have to build links. You can leverage an export from any of these tools to find the links you can duplicate (directory listings, industry-specific lists, etc). That should let you close the gap considerably (and perhaps pass them).
The "Future of Link Building" webinar referenced by Jamie is an excellent source for some additional link building approaches.
-
Wow! I had no idea that things like live chat and toll-free numbers are important. I believe I have optimized my tags (I think), I do have social and industry badges. Not sure how to answer the content piece but I believe it is most of those things to my target audience. I will look at the offsite SEO.
Thanks for the assistance.
-
There are three ares of SEO you likely wish to address: your website itself, content and offsite.
It sounds like you addressed some of the onsite areas such as code validation and removing the meta keywords tags. There are dozens of areas involved in onsite optimization. A few more areas to consider:
do you offer trust badges such as BBB, McAfee, TRUSTe, etc? Are there any industry based affiliations you should present?
are all your seo tags optimized? title, meta description, etc?
do you offer live chat? a toll-free number for visitors to contact you?
do you engage in social media? You can share your social accounts, offer visitors the opportunity to like / tweet / +1 your articles, etc. and allow for "single sign on" so visitors can sign in with their social account.
For your content, is it truly fantastic? Is it compelling? Is it authoritative and accurate? Is it written at a readability level suited for your audience?
For offsite SEO, we recommend the following webinar: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building
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
-
Moz Competitive Analysis Leaving Me Confused
I'm doing work for https://www.charlestonblackcabcompany.com While I know whey we are only at #2 for Charleston Party Bus as Google treats it as a branded keyword search and I don't know of any ways around that there are other competitors that don't make sense to me. These guys are #1 for Charleston Limo Service and we are further down the list despite having much better numbers across the board for months now with out seeing much gain. https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.charlestonlimo360.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=1&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site= I'm talking over 6 months and still these guys and some others whose competitive analysis shows us beating them across the board still has us further down the rankings for over 6 months. It seems like the competitive analysis doesn't matter at all.
Competitive Research | | mwaters19790 -
Keyword strategy for wordpress category base blog in competitive industry
Hi friends, We have a client in the movie review blog industry, which we are aware is highly competitive, but we have tons of content (over 10,000 unique posts) and a good team of reviewers for fresh content. I was wondering about any input on keyword variations for our SEO Title of our wordpress main categories, like "Movie Reviews". I was thinking a modification to "Latest Movie Reviews", but the competition is only slightly less, and still seems questionable for attaining eventual rankings. "Best Movie Reviews" is slightly higher than "Latest Movie Reviews" but the competition still seems tough. What would be a good long term strategy with these category pages, any suggestions?
Competitive Research | | JustinMurray0 -
Best competitor analysis tool comparing my links with competitor links?
Hello All, Can anyone tell me best competitor analysis tool comparing my links with competitor links? Tool which define quality of links either low quality or spammy links etc? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | devdan0 -
Use - or not for domain names
Hi there what is the best type of domain name if i have a keyword im targetting. Lets use 'very cool' as an example: www.verycool.com www.verycool.co.uk www.very-cool.com www.very-cool.co.uk I am led to believe the .co.uk would be better in a UK index. I also got told - count as a space, therefore the best one above for Google UK is www.very-cool.co.uk ?
Competitive Research | | pauledwards0 -
In my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???
in my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???
Competitive Research | | bullionguru0 -
Can you track multiple domains with the same key words and not use up your keyword limit?
I have roughly 7 domains that I am trying to monitor with the same set of keywords. Is there a way to do this without using up your keyword limit. They are the same words just different sites.
Competitive Research | | sixthcents0 -
What is the right way to due a competitive Link analysis?
Trying to use the saturation report suggestion with no luck for google.com,and looking for away to benchmark either Pagerank or page authority to figure out how many links are required to overr take competitors from diversified sources. What is the process to do this to get the best results for the client.
Competitive Research | | bmcfarlane0 -
How much weight does Google give to Exact Match Domains?
I'm building a site on a virtual host and now it's ready to go online, but i still have to choose a domain name. One of the main keywords i want to rank for is a 3-word keyword phrase with 9000+ exact match searches per month. Here's an example to better understand my question: 'Guitar training lessons' My main competitor's domain is only 5 months old but it does have the full keyword phrase in it with '4u' added at the end: www.guitartraininglessons4u.com I wanted to go with www.guitartrainingcenter.com (notice that 'lessons' is left out of the domain name) but i'm wondering if my main competitor would have a big advantage by having the full keyword phrase in his domain. How much weight does google give to sites that have the exact search query in their domain name? Does a domain still qualify as 'exact match' if a word (info) is added to it? How much harder would it be to outrank this domain as apposed to a site that doesn't have the keywords in its domain name? Thanks in advance Freek
Competitive Research | | ZeroGrav1