Can anyone explain to me why this website is top of the listings?
-
Hi folks,
Since the latest penguin update, this website: <cite class="bc">www.sterlingbuild.co.uk</cite> is now appearing top of the listings for most 'Velux' related search terms e.g. velux windows, velux, velux windows online. I say top, VELUX themselves are actually top but then Sterling Build are top of all the other retailers that sell VELUX Windows. Why? Their link profile is appalling, the website is no better than their competitors as far as I can tell, their prices are more expensive - it makes no sense?
Would be very grateful if anyone can work out why Google has decided they have the best website?
Thanks,
Luke
-
So I always enjoy doing quick reviews of sites with situations like yours because it gives me insight into some issues I have on my own sites/projects that I'm just too close to see. The "distant nature" of reviewing someone else's site is sometimes that fresh perspective you need. Anyway, upon my poking around......
DISCLAIMER, if anything I say is wrong, it's either that I'm just wrong, or I didn't spend enough time looking into it because we're all very busy peeps (I'll claim it's the later)...
(1) Your Links VS. Theirs...
No arguing that you have more links than they do, but I suspect many of your links are from low quality blogs, I saw a bunch from directories that probably don't even pass strength anymore and so on. Without doing a full look through, links are hard to gauge. I didn't look at Sterlings in any detail, but I saw a few pretty decent links even though they have peanuts compared to yours in terms of quantity. So I'd say your link profile is definitely better, and it probably does help you more than theirs does, but obviously it's not enough.(2) Your Content VS. Theirs...
This is where I think you're falling victim to being "too close". When I compare your content to theirs, I really don't see you as having better content. You have a bit more "descriptive" text than they do on product pages, but they have more "category-like" pages that has decent content on them (as do you). And to top it off, they have this "questions" section on each product page similar to a commenting system, where customers ask questions right on a product page, and Sterling staff members answer them right their on-page. So when I look at content comparisons, I see that as being a wash in terms of "quality" and they murder you in terms of quantity.(3) HTML and technical "crap"...
When I compare your source code to theirs, theirs is definately cleaner, but it appears yours may be being compressed, which could be the only difference. I don't see any huge holes in that respect. Again though, I'm only glancing. But in my experience, you have to do some pretty dumb things in terms of your code structure with errors and what not to make that hurt you, which it doesn't seem you're doing. So I call this a wash also.HOWEVER, when I'm on your main Velux Windows page, the content in your Welcome tab isn't viewable. The search engines don't care about that because it's included in your source, but I can't see past your 3rd paragraph in that area. I can see there is content below it, but the In a Loft Scenario and For Open Ceilings it gets cut off and I can't see the rest. That is likely hurting your conversions.
CONVERTING THE TRAFFIC YOU DO HAVE, IS OFTEN BETTER THAN GETTING NEW TRAFFIC, depending on the market you're in. I'm using the latest version of Chrome, but the problem is also present in IE10.
(4) Are you a CANNIBAL?
Now research this yourself, and don't put too much stock in what I'm about to say, but from a content perspective, is the way you're interlinking your so-called "helpful" content in a way that is actually hurting your ability to rank overall?The pages that you have that you say are putting you above SterlingBuild in terms of content quality, is your linking to them from every product page causing you issues?
I see almost every product page within the category I looked at links to the Protect Velux From Snow and Ice and the Velux Product Codes Explained pages. I think this is something someone else touched on in response to me and my blog issues with our site. You're telling the google machine that these pages are uber-important because every single product page you deem them to be relevant to are linking to them.
If you check the SERPS and go deep all the way into pages 5 through 15, are you seeing these Video & Article pages ranking for terms that maybe are to "general" in scope for them? If so, it could be causing a loss of strength when it comes to your product pages ability to rank on their own.
I'm not sure on how I'd fix that though, or if it's even a legit issue. it's just something I'd chew on and maybe play around with. You have to ask yourself, does linking those articles from product pages like you do actually provide the customer with insight that may push them closer to a purchase? Even if it "could" be helpful, is anyone actually ever clicking on them?
Just a bit of insight. Hope it's helpful.
-
Thanks Ted.
My usual approach with a blog like that is to try and target people/keywords that are further up the conversion/awareness funnel. Namely, People who know they have a problem or need, but don't know what the solution is. People who aren't in a position to "buy now".
Then the goal of the blog articles then are to educate the visitor, and do so in a way that offers real value / insight, so that they understand what the solution to their problem is and maybe also why our solution/product would be best for them.
You then link to the relevant product pages. Don't link from the product pages to the blog content though - you want to make sure that the product pages are clearly seen as authoritative.
Could some of the "good stuff" from your blog be moved onto ever-green "FAQ" or "buyer's guide" type pages? Might be better than burying it in a blog?
-
Hi Ted,
Okay thanks for that. Can you have a look at www.kensyard.co.uk and compare our site to sterlingbuild.co.uk. I personally think our content is a lot better than theirs and on top of the product listings and product page content we also have a whole heap of buying guides, video guides and other informative articles not to mention a far more active blog.
What I am trying to really ascertain is whether there are underlying technical issues with our site (like the canonical tag stuff you mention) that is causing issues I am not aware of?
I'd really appreciate you thoughts.
Thanks, Luke
-
Doug, our issues were that we just weren't careful enough when writing up each blog post and what we were targeting. We ended up having blog posts competing for terms that we only wanted our actual ecommerce site (and the pages within) to rank for.
Now what is also interesting, is that via the blog, we ended up ranking for a couple of odd "low hanging fruit" terms that turned into gold. So rather than 301-redirect them to a more suitable "category" page and target the category page to those terms, we just further optimized the blog post, but featured products on it and so on. We did this mostly out of fear of losing those rankings if we jacked with "the good thing".
So with the blog, it's really just a simple case of keyword cannibalization and we've been working on formulating a plan to ditch the WordPress blog and move its valuable content into the actual site. The blog does sit on the same domain as the site (site is domain.com, blog is domain.com/blog/) so we figure, we'll transition from having a blog, to having more "educational/information" pages in the site. I think this will allow us to better utilize these pages for the greater good of our site in terms of improved interlinking, using them to help improve conversions and so on.
Most of the blog is fluff anyway, and isn't really benefiting us the way we hoped, so I suspect we'll actually see a decent jump in position for various terms because the site and blog won't be competing against each other anymore.
Sorry to not be more informative on that topic, but the issues we are seeing is a very clear and textbook case of our site eating itself for dinner. Something which can very easily be fixed by simply back-tracking and by being more careful in the future.
-
HI Ted, interesting to hear about your blog causing problems with your site. Can you provide some more detail? I'd be interested to hear more about the affect it's having?
-
You're just not looking quite hard enough then. When I click on their "Shop By Brand" Velux category, that has a bit of text, well written, title and meta description are decent, then you click past that to Velux Centre-Pivot Roof Windows and once again, more content, mostly text.
You get into the actual product pages at some point, and they include a decent content set, but upon first glance you'll notice that most of that content is duplicated between "like" products. Have no worries though, because they are using the canonical tag to point all "similar" products back to a single product of that type, so that duplicate content doesn't war against itself. It looks like from every category page that includes products, they are pointing all of the products canonical tag back to what I assume is the most popular size.
So where you're seeing content that isn't great, I'm seeing enough content that is "good enough" to be considered great due to the quantity, and the organization of it. Not to mention, it seems like behind the scenes they've actually tried very hard to make sure every page is geared towards targeting specific terms. Therefore, they aren't spreading themselves thin.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, you ask, what are they doing that is so great compared to the others (like Wickes and so on), and I see them doing a lot better. But you can't just look at the site. You have to dig into their source code. For instance, Wickes is allowing their site to eat itself stupidly by having similar pages pointing to themselves via the canonical tag, as opposed to pointing identical products (other than in size) to a single item like the site you mention does.
I compete in a similar "home improvement" industry and we are up against sites like this all the time. Our issue is that we cover a specific "niche" within this industry and many of our competitors do it all, and we're constantly battling their "quantity of decent/ok content" vs. our "quality and more focused content".
Like you, we also have a superior link profile to most of our competitors, but I often assume it's their content that gets us. We tried to offset that by being the only company in our industry with a blog, but we just ended up cannibalizing ourselves to the point that I think we'll have to ditch it soon.
-
Hi Ted,
Thanks for that - where is all this great content you're referring too? All I can see is a whole bunch of product listings and product pages with minimal content on. The only source of informational content seems to be the blog which has a grand total of two posts and their customer service section which just consists of a load of links to external sites. Am I missing something?
Thanks,
Luke
-
I agree, when you glance at OSE, and only OSE, it could make you scratch your head. However, I look at their volume of content and there is TONS of it, it's well organized, relevant, well written and legit. As I went through the first two pages for the term velux windows (via Google US) I'm seeing it competing with the big boys like HomeDepot, Ebay, as well as a slew of "informational" authority sites that touch on the topic.
Moral of the story, I suspect it would be an example of "content is king". They may not have the link profile others in the industry have, but they sure as hell have a boat load of content, all related to windows. They have over 1,000's in stock, which leads me to believe their site has 1,000's of pages of related content.
I didn't dig deeper, but just by looking at the little bit I checked out, I assume each page is highly targeted and that their handling their business "on-page" which is probably why they rank well.
Then again, you may have already come to that same conclusion.
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
-
Find archived sitemap of a website that no longer exists
I am trying to figure out the site structure of a website and the urls of all the pages. Normally this would be easy but a couple of months ago the website went down and I don't think it will ever come back. Any help would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | EdKim1 -
I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website is doing on google ranking
Hello, I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website (flyhy.co) is doing on google ranking and I have no clue why even though I have been doing my homework regarding SEO. Just a bit of background, I have created a new website about 6 months ago for the paragliding community, the primary goal is to provide a platform for people to publish their ads (osclass), but also to provide some interesting reviews and tools to help paragliders chose their wing. We have been putting a lot of effort to provide a nice user experience and tio build the tools mentioned above. Our main channel to connect with the community is Facebook, and we have been quite active there. I have looked at many SEO articles and I made sure the website provides a good UX, the URLs are SEO friendly, good meta data, etc. Also have been using the google search console and analytics to monitor all of this. But here is the thing, all these does not seem to change anything in our ranking for important keywords such as "paraglider for sale", "paragliding equipment", etc. We seem to only rank (looking at Google’s keyword tool) for very specific wing model names that people have mentioned in their ads. I have ran out of ideas on how to improve our SEO !!!!!! I know the website is only 6 months old, but by now we should get some results. As an example, I will mention one our main website competitors: www.paraglidingequipment.org. OK the URL is pretty obvious and this website ranks in page #1 for "paragliding equipment" (but also for "paraglider for sale" and other paragliding related key phrases). OK there is the URL (paraglidingequipment.org), but I thought nowadays google bots are smarter than just that. The website is 1 year old (so not really much older than us, and was ranking high anyway even 6 months ago). The website looks like it was clearly made by one person and then quickly just left it running, so no content has been added (except for people putting their ads), there is almost no activity on the Facebook account. I have run some test such as "pagespeed insights" and we both rank the same. On "seositecheckup.com", we are clearly better with more 10 points. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what is going on? Have I missed a very important aspect of SEO? Is our website somehow compromising the robots crawling (although I can see about 80 pages have been already indexed in google search console)? I know content is king, but in paraglidingequipment.org the only content I see are ads, and we have ads and other interesting (ie reviews and tools) for paragliders. To conclude, I am basically completely clueless of what to do to rank at least on the first couple of pages of google for the key phrases above. I need help. Hichem. PS: in Moz bar our score is non existing (PA=1,DA=10), on paraglidingequipment.org (PA=23,DA=15). So it looks that essentially we are not apparent on the web! PSS: We have also tried to build some backlinks on few important paragliding community websites.
Competitive Research | | hichemboudali0 -
How can I track where visitors go after exiting my website?
I don't want to track external links. I just want to know where they go when they leave. Is that possible? Can I do this with a cookie?
Competitive Research | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
How can stie A be outranking site B?
Hi everyone. I seem to have a lot of questions the past couple of days! Take a look at these two URLs: Site A: http://www.peachstateaudio.com/products/Mixing_Consoles/Digital_Consoles/Roland/peachstate-audio-roland-m200i Site B: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/roland-m-200i-digital-mixer I will mail 2-dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies to anyone who can tell me why Site A massively outranks Site B for the term "roland m-200i" - Seriously. Thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | danatanseo0 -
How can I do competitor mobile website analysis?
How can I do a competitor mobile website analysis? I am having troubles finding competitor tools for mobile sites.
Competitive Research | | seoflorida0 -
Small Link nalysis project - anyone
Hi, Not sure if someone can help me out. OSE only show the best mozrank data but i might have some links under that benchmark. Therefore anybody with a Majestic account that can filter new links from April 2012 to date. Payment not a problem. WMTools isnt showing data that i expected, so maybe its not there. Need a secondary opinion of the data from another source. Ive contacted some SEOmoz Recommended Companies...no response. Clearly have better things to do maybe.
Competitive Research | | xtopher660 -
Anyone want to test out my keyword research theory?
Hi all, I'm relatively new here but not new to the world of SEO / SEM. Over the years I've loved using SEOmoz and other tools but of course have found certain limitations with respect to how I like to work. That's the case with any tool / service. So over the years I've put together a keyword research / competitor analysis process that has worked well for me and I'm wondering if it might also work for others. I've spent the last 15 years of my life as a director of a range of companies, mainly in printing but also in systems development, marketing, etc. I spent a large percentage of my time developing systems and tools to help me with my search engine marketing. I've now sold all my companies and I'm semi-retired, somewhat bored, and would love it if I can assist others with the process I've used over the years. I'm curious to know whether SEM professionals agree with the way my system ranks search terms from "best" to "worst". If you're interested in testing this process and telling me if you think the resulting list of search terms that I come up with for your website is "spot on", "not bad" or "horrible!", then please read on. My key motivation here is to educate myself as well as others. I'm not charging for any of this... If you give me your website URL, your top 5 competitors and your top 5 search terms, I will return to you: a complete list of search terms including "niche" and longtail search terms you can then... really easily filter out irrelevant search terms, thus creating a list of negative keywords, ready to import into your Adwords campaign. easily group your search terms in "education" and "purchase" search terms so I can analyse these two groups of keywords separately see which words are used most often across all the search terms so you can easily create keyword specific Ad Groups in your Adwords campaign. You can tell me which options you prefer: broad match, "phrase match" or [exact match] when getting search engine results specify any country you want the SERP results for, or even any city. I will then: do all the keyword research, getting the latest (live) Google SERP results combine all competitor metrics (page rank, domain age, juice links, etc) and search term information (search volume, CPC, search term length, etc) together to give you a list of search terms ranked from "best" to "worst" do the same for both organic search terms and paid (Adwords) search terms do the same for both direct search terms and niche search terms take into account "word count" (number of words in a search term) as longtail keywords generally higher-converting search terms And you can adjust things to change how the keywords are ranked: specify "thresholds". eg; you can ignore the really competitive search terms, or ignore the really short search terms specify "weightings". eg; you can put a greater emphasis on search term length, or a lesser emphasis on cost per click As a result of the keyword analysis, it'll also show you who your organic and adwords competitors are based on all keywords, or just your top ranked ("best") keywords. In that competitor data you can see: which paid ads appear at the top, side AND bottom of the results page which organic results are shopping, image, video, and local results all the metrics for each competitor (page rank, domain age, juice links, etc) All of this is is handled in a simple web interface that I threw together recently. It's really simple, merely asking for your site and preferences and then an interface to view / sort the results. Interested?
Competitive Research | | eatyourveggies
I'd like to hear from any SEM professionals who want to test this process. Once I have your basic details, I can get a keyword list together simply (using my internal process / software) and then you need to do some basic sorting, particularly if your search terms are in an industry that I know nothing about. Your input will be required. From there, give me 24-48 hours and I'll return 2 lists of search terms: "organic", and "Adwords". I'd love to hear your opinion about the relevance of the search term lists. I hope it will also spark some interesting discussion and hopefully help people learn a bit more about keyword / competitor research. If you're interested, please shoot me a private message letting me know why you'd be a good candidate to test this system. I really do want people who are well versed in search engine marketing. So please include a basic "resume" about who you are. If you have an SEM company and that's your main career focus then I definitely want to hear from you. Adam0 -
What sould I focus on to get over the top of my competors ?
Ok, I've been on this site for approximately one week now. There is a lot of good information but quite honestly, I don't know where to shoot at first in getting a better ranking against my competitors I have done pretty much everything on my web site to optimize, but I don't get at all the ranking close to my competition. They don't have as much content as we have other than they have been doing SEO for much longer time. I have worked a lot on the content optimization of our site, I get pretty much good result on some of the keywords, registered my site to google, bing , yahoo, I'm using the site map, configured the robot.txt, on-page metatag, URL canonical, clean-ur, H1 H2 tags, etc etc. Ho, And I just got today the approval of Yahoo Directory Listing. It's not sill showing up, but I guess it will come. You will find attached the output of 2 of my competitors and Us. They both rank very well on the keyword we are interested. Where should I start ? I know the Links Juice i important, but how can I workout my strategy to defeat them. Any help would be appreciated. Best regards, h837v
Competitive Research | | processia0