Competitors ranking in top three with worse SEO
-
Ok I am at a loss.
Our client is trying to rank for keywords like "dental assistant programs utah", but they are still on the bottom of page 1/top of page 2. The guys in the top 3 have terrible SEO. No links, newer domains, etc. I looked into it extensively and learned about the "honeymoon period" people talk about but we are long past that.
I've looked through webmaster tools to see if there are any issues, and I can't find a thing.
Anyone have an idea of what we could be doing wrong that is making us be put down so far on the page? Before I got here the SEO guys were doing older tactics which I think was starting to hurt them with penguin and what not so I tried my best to delete the crap content and clean everything up on the website.
thanks for all your help! I really appreciate it.
-
sorry but I'd rather not give out the domain publicly. I appreciate the help and will continue to investigate
-
boyakp,
We're still waiting for you to share your client's website....
-
Here is something interesting. This is the company in the top spot:
http://www.dentalassistingschoolofutah.com/
but I also found this: http://assistingschool.com/
so they are mirroring their sites... which my client had been doing (they have several domains) and I assumed it to be bad (duplicate content?) so I turned it off...
also just did a backlink check and the top domain has ONE link, a crappy one at that. what the heck??
-
When 16 is winnin' it means really easy SERPs and when 58 is loosin' it means they done sneaky stuff and got in trouble.
-
I sometimes see that happen too and wonder if the competitors have one golden link, one super authoritative followed link incoming to their site that just blows your client out of the water. I know your question says "no links", but take a look. It's all I can think of.
-
Would you be willing to provide your domain so that I could look at it?
-
my client has a score of 58%, the company in the top spot has a score of 16%
seriously I am so confused... I just don't get google sometimes
-
Have you tried doing an audit of your business citations to see if your NAP information is consistent across all the various business listing sites? Since Moz acquired GetListed.org (now called Moz Local), you can check your own site versus your competitors here: https://moz.com/local/search
You might try this and see if you gain any insights. It's a place to start at least. Hope that helps a bit!
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
-
I am looking to find the top pages based on traffic volume on my competitors websites, does anyone know of any good resources?
I want to know how which pages on my competitors websites are the most popular based on the traffic volume. I do not care how many links or directed to that page or any other metric. Only thing I am looking for is the traffic volume. It would also be nice to know the length of time spent on that page.
Competitive Research | | kanteenboy0 -
How can I tell if a competitor has a KML Geositemap or not?
Is there someone to tell if a competitor has a KML Geositemap or not? Would it be in the source code on their homepage? or can I just put their url in a "Open Site Explorer" type product to find out? Thanks, Ruben
Competitive Research | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
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
Competitive Research | | harrybingham0 -
SEO of app in appstores
Dear all, do you know what factors have impact on the ranking of an app in Apple's appstore? do you know what factors have impact on the ranking of an app in the Google Play-appstore? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Competitive Research | | HMK-NL0 -
Keyword - Competition between competitors
So, I'm about 2-3 weeks into my subscription and see a renewal coming. I love the information I'm getting - but I really want to maximize my capabilities with these tools. Any article/blogs or forum post suggestions that I should read would be awesome, right now I'm still in that phase where i see lots of cool things - but have no idea to fully use them to really give me that even bigger boost. My First Question is - There are some keywords, that I climb and sometimes slip. But overall a competitor and i flip flop between 15-22 range for it. What would be a good way for me to really add that extra push to throw me down into the top ten and leave them in the dust?.. Also on the Keyword topic - There are a lot of keywords they probably rank for that I don't, what is the best way to go about identifying keywords they may targeting/have a good presence in that I'm not aware of. I do have a site that is on multiple newspapers, and .gov sites. Among other things... This has already proven to be very good for me. But I'm 99% sure I have a few/lot of leaks, that if they were plugged - We would see a lot of good things come from those results.
Competitive Research | | choiceenergy0 -
How to track competitor who uses another website on the url?
Hi everyone, The thing is pretty simple: I have a competitor who uses a different format of url, very similar to this: www.example.com - but he started to use a thing like this: example.mtv.com The problem is that every analysis that I make tell me something about mtv.com instead of the site I want. The url is redirected. Sorry about my english, but I think it is very clear. I want to know how to track something like this, because even in competitor analysis I'm getting info about the big site, and not the one I need. Thank you very much.
Competitive Research | | bluehelmet0 -
Why is this site ranking #1?
I've done extensive research into http://www.maggiesottero.com/ and cannot come up to any definitive conclusions as to why this site is ranking #1 for the term "wedding dresses." The page is not optimized for the keyword. **Any thoughts? **
Competitive Research | | craigsmith3330 -
What is the difference between "external backlinks" & "referring domains" on Majestic SEO?
According to Majestic SEO's glossary, a "Referring domain, also known as "ref domain", is a domain from which a backlink is pointing to a page or link." Given this definition, I'm not sure what an external backlink is?
Competitive Research | | nicole.healthline0