My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
-
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there.
I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12.
And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes.
It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least.
So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful.
I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess.
We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
-
I'm no expert, so you can take this with a pinch of salt...
But, to my knowledge google gives a lot of weight to domains such as .ac.uk, as these are some kind of educational website and not available to just anyone etc... not saying it is right that they rank above you, just saying that might be the reason google puts them above you.
-
Thank you! That gives me something to focus on - and the site HAS been through a lot of evolutions in recent years, so I guess we've left a lot of debris
-
Harry,
it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know what Google's algo take (or do not) into consideration.
I don't know, maybe your competitors have less links but those links may carry a higher weight, value.
I see every day websites that should rank better than other but still...
But I do get your frustration.
-
I did a quick crawl of your site and found a lot of crawling issues.
You have a lot of canonical issues, broken links, unnecessary redirects, these errors would be wasting your link juice for a start
Problems and counts
<colgroup><col width="348"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| The tag does not have an ALT attribute defined. | 2,338 |
| The page contains broken hyperlinks. | 900 |
| The page was excluded by a noindex attribute. | 591 |
| The page contains multiple canonical formats. | 548 |
| The description is missing. | 541 |
| The page contains unnecessary redirects. | 263 |
| The page contains invalid markup. | 251 |
| The URL for the hyperlink is broken. | 230 |
| The title is too long. | 111 |
| The link text is not relevant. | 99 |
| The description is empty. | 32 |
| Thetag is missing.
| 22 |
| The description is too long. | 15 |
| The URL is linked using different casing. | 14 |
| The page contains multiple title tags. | 10 |
| The title is not relevant. | 10 |
| The description is too short. | 8 |
| The page contains multipletags.
| 2 |
| The title is empty. | 1 |
| The page contains too many hyperlinks. | 1 | -
Sorry - maybe I should be clearer: the search term we're chasing is "Creative Writing Courses" which is the term that has the most traffic and the most associated revenue.
And yes, our web page has only 27 linking root domains, but the #5 competitor (solihull.ac.uk/creative_writing-52514.html) has 0 external links from 0 domains. Fewer internal links too.
Our domain as a whole has 700+ linking root domains versus just 300 for our competitor. So I'm still confused!
-
As you may know, Google's algo implies hundreds of factors. The importance of on page SEO, compared to the importance of relevant backlinks is almost neglectable.
I've seen websites without any onpage SEO ranking better just because they have a buch on relevant backlinks.
According to OpenSIteExplore, you have 2962 backlinks from only 27 root domains.
You can use the "Keyword Difficulty Report" and select Google UK.
For me, for the search term "Online Creative Writing Courses" you're on page 1, Place 2. You can also run a full report for more detailed data.
Also, you might want to check out in opensiteexplorer the anchor texts you and your competitors are using.
Best of luck!
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
-
How to set up a competitor URL with a language slug for a campaign
Hello, I am trying to set up a competitor with language slug for my (subfolder) website with a language slug. Let's say my website is something like: websiteholding.com/de/website
Competitive Research | | Siir
My competitor is: competitor.com/de When I go to Campaign Settings > Comptetitor Sites > type in competitor.com/de > Hit Save Competitor > Then it shows the saved competitor without the language slug as competitor.com I am not sure if this is a correct method of tracking since for my DE website I would like to track the DE page of the competitor, not their global page. Please correct me if I am wrong and help me out on possible solutions? I am quite new to SEO & Moz , so any help on the topic would be appreciated.0 -
Why competitors rank with no content & filters
We're investing a lot in on-page content and creating categories/sub categories to target relevant keywords. Although it seems competitors with high domain authorities are clearly dominating in the SERPs and the pages have NO content. They are literally filters that create landing pages. For example when you search "Kaydian Beds", Debenhams rank below the manufacturer with just a filtered page, this page has not been optimised with content to target the keywords, only the META title changes depending on the chosen filter. Link: http://www.debenhams.com/furniture/beds/kaydian Our link: https://kontenta.co.uk/brands/kaydian-beds.html This is very frustrating as quality content should beat pages with little or no content, we will spend some time and get some inbound links to the page to try boost the rankings but does anyone have any similar experiences with anything like this?
Competitive Research | | Jseddon921 -
Localized SERP Rankings - Multiple Questions...
The Google SERPs for my keywords are pretty regional. We are in the "IT Support Company" space. I've checked with friends in other parts of the country, and we don't show up in the SERPs in other parts of the country for KWs that we are ranking for locally. Questions: 1. I see both national and local players showing up in the SERPs. Is there any kind of formula for how Google decides who gets on the first page? 2. Some of my keywords trigger Google+ listings. How long does it take to show up in Google+, assuming we're optimized appropriately, and we have earned a placement? 3. For Moz's keyword ranking tool, how does it handle regional searches? Moz's tool is going to show different KW rankings than what I will see. My immediate concerns are rankings in my area (NY Metro), but we want to go national. How do we track rankings in different areas? 4. Is it possible to be on the 1st page with Google+ and Organic listings? 5. Do the Google+ 7 packs have generally better, or worse CTRs than similarly placed organic listings?
Competitive Research | | CsmBill0 -
What is a desirable range for a keyword's difficulty rating?
Hi all! I am new to the world of SEO and just getting started. As I am doing keyword research I am consistently finding difficulty ratings in the 40%-50% range. Is this considered a "par" rating or should I be looking for "a longer tail" rating? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jclayton180 -
Competitor Keyword Rankings
Is there a way within SEOMoz to uncover the keywords your competitors rank for and their respective SERPs? Thx
Competitive Research | | qiherbs.com1 -
Tracking blog, call to action and landing pages (forms) functionality?
Can you complete Mozrank with tracking functionality for blogs, call to action and landing pages (forms)?. Driek Geurtsen, Oned4marketing
Competitive Research | | Picoleta0 -
SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain
I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | KathleenLTG0 -
Site in top 3 with a 1-day old domain and no backlinks
Hi everyone, I'm trying to understand some searchresults, when searching in the netherlands for 'online casino':
Competitive Research | | iwebdevnl
http://www.google.nl/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=online+casino&pws=0 You'll see as position 3 result this website: http://bit.ly/qhRsUT, it's obviously that this site is there because of blackhat. But how did it come there such high for a keyword with high competition? I don't see anything wrong in the website? It's not like Google did something wrong, because it happened already a few times for this keyword with different domains from that owner. Regards, Yannick0