Rankings lower than expected
-
It's an age old question, "why is my site lower in the ranking than theirs"
But in this case, I'm really not sure!... and we perform the SEO on both sites in question.
The problem site is www.esp-machinery.co.uk
We are looking for ranking for phrases such as Used Machine Tools, Grinding Machines, Drilling Machines, Used Lathes etc.
We aren't getting it as high as we have already with another customer of ours:
We perform the SEO on both these sites, yet we've put far more work into the ESP one, and still not getting very far.
There are more linking domains to ESP than BW, in truth the BW site has a higher mozrank, but by only a single point.
We did not build the ESP site, whereas we built the BW one.
There have been some URL problems with the ESP site, but we have hopefully improved things enough working with their original developer to be on the right track now.
Any advice most welcome.
-
Hi Baptiste... yes, we failed to get him to even have one /category/ in there... I do not know why he couldn't do this.....!
-
I've read several article about keyword posiiton in the url, my thoughts on this is simple : put it close to the left if you don't have a good reason to put it farther.
In your case, having /category/category/ is useless. At least remove one category, right now /category/ is a duplicate of the home. Even if you remove one category, you should put a breadcrumb on the site to make /category/ indexable, and usefull.
My final advice is to have the category slugs in the root, ie : /lathes/. But this means having a good developer which is not the case I guess.
-
Hi Baptiste, thanks for putting the time in to look for me, much appreciated.
The ESP site is built in a way which we don't like, but we've tried to get those URLs sorted with their developer. Previously they weren't even showing as static style URLs. with every category page showing as category.php?=......
I read up on root URLs vs. folders within folders URLs, and the suggestion was that it didn't make a difference?
Thanks for the tip on the top nav... although not sure hot I'm going to fix that - I guess some clever CSS perhaps!
-
Two quick things I noticed :
On ESP, your top menu, which are the first links of the page, are not about machines. The effect can be seen in the site: request : http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.esp-machinery.co.uk&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla
official&client=firefox-a
You should put the most important menus here : machines ! BW does this.
Second thing : /category/category/sheet-metal-work-machines on ESP vs /sheetmetal-machines.asp on BW. ESP keywords are far from the root whereas BW has a page in the root with the good keywords.
There is several other improvements possible, especially for long tail ranking. For example, you don't have a single item page linked in a category : http://www.esp-machinery.co.uk/category/category/sheet-metal-work-machines. Optimised text on this page is missing too.
-
HI Alan, the content is very similar, they should both have their own unique content, but the navigation is structured very similarly.
They are different sites, so there are differences, but it's certainly not like comparing chalk and cheese.
-
What about the content of each site, how do they differ?
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
-
Is page speed important to improve SEO ranking?
I saw on a SEO Agency's site (https://burstdgtl.com/search-engine-optimization/) that page speed apparently affects Google ranking. Is this true? And if it is, how do I improve it, do I need an agency?
On-Page Optimization | | jasparcj0 -
Do sites with more pages rank better?
If a site has more pages and also has good internal linking, then logically it would rank better. Is this the case? Should I be building big (but high quality) sites?
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Losing Page Rank
Hello Moz I launched a re-design of our site over the summer and we jumped in organic search for some keywords. Recently one of our landing pages is being hammered by Google last we we lost one position this week we lost 5 positions. Although, when I check the on-page grade Moz gives it an A is there a check sheet anyone has that I could go through to see if I have any common problems. Ryan
On-Page Optimization | | ryanparrish0 -
Lost all comments on our blog...will it hurt rankings?
We recently installed Facebook comments into our blog and now we lost all of our old comments. Does this have any affect on SEO? Will this hurt our rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TMI.com0 -
Title Tags: Does having the singular and plural version of the keyword hurt the ranking?
I'm wondering if there is a duplication issue with having a singular AND plural version of a keyword in the Title Tag. For example: Wood Desk - Wood Desks| Furniture Store Would this help or hurt my ranking for this URL? I can’t find a concrete answer for this under Moz’s “Title Tag SEO Best Practices Page.” Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0 -
Does reading grade level affect rankings? What level should I write for?
Search engines measure the reading level of your page. But how does it affect ranking? Should I be aiming more for a low or high Flesch–Kincaid grade level?
On-Page Optimization | | stevenw0 -
Does microformats improve my ranking?
Hi, does Mircofromats like schema.org improve my ranking? If so, just because my products are listed in google/products? Regard
On-Page Optimization | | censeo0 -
Dropped rankings due to too many links, help needed
We have just re-designed our site and added a big drop-down navigation menu to help users get straight to the category/sub-category they are looking for, take a look at http://www.discountfiresupplies.co.uk to see what I mean. Since doing so our rankings have dropped which we've been told may be because there are now so many links on (particularly) the home page diluting the rankings of that page. We've been advised that if we hide the drop-down menus using "style='display: none'" until they are required that the search engines will ignore them which we have now done but is this correct or will they still be indexed? And if so do you have any other suggestions? Thanks, Tariq
On-Page Optimization | | tjhossy0