Best Metrics but Consistently Outranked
-
I am hoping someone could help us determine why we generally rank quite poorly compared to our competition, despite leading in every single Competitive Metric. We get outranked on a term where the Page Grade gives us an "A", and we best the competitor on each of the metrics. Where would those with more experience suggest we start looking?
-
**I was under the impression that the tools here were designed to help alleviate some of manual labor. **
In my opinion, the tools on Moz are best suited to monitoring your progress and giving you objective assessments. They are not going to move you up the SERPs.
Moving your site up the SERPs takes effort from the webmaster (or whoever is hired to do that work). That effort is all about making a better website. There is a lot of valuable information on Moz to guide you with that work. Most of that information is free.
-
It sounds like you are looking at a product page, where several different products or different types of products are displayed in a grid.
Those types of pages can be optimized for the query. That might be enough to raise their rankings in weak competition, but if you are in strong competition their overall rankings are usually determined more by the strength of the domain and its populartiy rather than by the optimization of the page.
I would work to produce great content about these products that is excellent enough that people will share it, link to it, talk about it in other parts of the web. If you can achive that, links from those content pages into the product grid pages can deliver traffic and transfer power that can help these grid product pages to higher rankings.
If these product pages have very little text now, higher rankings might be obtained from increasing the amount of text on them. However, on-page improvments will only have a major impact if you are up against easy competition. When you are in intense competition, those pages will either need to be on a powerful domain or have links or other off-site support to move them up the rankings. These can be dangerous to acquire because google is becoming better and better at identifying contrived links.
-
I understand. It seems like a newbie question, and while I am not an expert by any stretch, this is my 2nd time as a paying MOZ member, and I'm really hoping this time we are able to make some progress. My example is there is a specific keyword phrase that we are trying to rank well for, and our page grade is an A, We outrank on metrics. We are on the 4th page of Google for this keyword phrase. Our competition ranks one or two. We should rank on the 1st page based on our position in industry, age of domain, site quality, etc.
Exactly like those results at the top of the SERPS, we list a page of products, in a modern, responsive Magento grid. There are 4 products per row. We have a description of the category. There are many pages like this, and I am trying to figure out which tools in MOZ can help me find the issue. I have tried to see if we are suffering a penalty. Spam score of 1/17.
I sense a bit of frustration in your response in that I was too quick to ask for help, but I have spent time in the SERP's, and I'm just not coming up with much. This is a site-wide issue. Generally poor ranking against competitors, with very little obvious difference in the quality of our site or results.
Is that the best it gets? Look at SERPS and metrics over and over? I was under the impression that the tools here were designed to help alleviate some of manual labor.
-
** Where would those with more experience suggest we start looking?**
Honestly, I would stop looking at metrics and start looking at ways to make your website better answer the query and better deliver what your visitors are seeking.
The metrics give no information on how to improve your rankings. They are simply a guess at where you would rank using data that is different from what google uses. Sometimes a good guess, sometimes a bad guess. Go out in the SERPs and look at the rankings and look at the metrics. Do that over and over. Make up your own mind how good they are at predicting rankings. Watch Q&A and see how many people come in here asking the same question that you asked.
If you want to improve your rankings, begin by looking at your title tag, be sure it is description of your page and what your visitor really wants for that query. Then look at your page and see if it delivers excellent information to answer the query - and lives up to your title tag. If it is not the best at answering the query - clearly, completely, easy to understand, and well-illustrated, then put your work into that job.
You probably know better what answers the query than any information that metrics will provide.
After that, some things will be beyond your control. A big popular site like amazon or wikipedia is going to win all ties, all close races and a lot that you will never understand.
If you have a small or a newer site that has not become popular, then time and promotion will be needed to become competitive with similar-quality content on stronger, more established and popular domains.
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
-
Help with best seo strategy
Hello all, I am a little bit confused about the "content suggestion'' feature in Moz. If I understood well, this feature suggests Anchor texts we can use in other page to link to the page we are trying to Optimize. So far, I've been using page keyword as Anchor Text in other articles. For example, I have a page about the best places to visit in Morocco, where the keyword is 'places to visit in Morocco'. I am using this same keyword as Anchor text in other pages to link to that page. While Moz suggests '10 best places' as Anchor text. What does it mean ? Is '10 best places' anchor text better ? Or should I use both ? Thanks in advance for your enlightenment.
Moz Pro | | sportygirl0 -
Duplicate content report - question on best practice
Hello all, New to MOZ Pro and SEO - so lots to get my head round! I’m working through the Duplicate Content section of the Crawl report and am not sure what the best practice is for my situation. Background: We are a reference guide for luxury hotels around the world, but the hotels that are featured on the site vary year on year. When we add a new hotel page, it sets up the url as ourwebsite.com/continent/country/regionORcity/hotel. When the hotels come off, I redirect their URL to the country or region where we have other hotels. Example: http://www.johansens.com/europe/switzerland/zermatt/ The hotel in Zermatt has come off the site, showing 0 results on this landing page. Question: My duplicate content report is showing a number of these regional pages that are displaying the copy “0 places - Region’ because the hotel has come off, but the landing page is still live. Should I redirect the regional page back to the main country page? And then if I add a new hotel to the site from that region in the future, simply remove the redirect? Should I also delete the page? Any tips would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | CN_Johansens0 -
What is the best way to add a noindex./nofollow meta tags to tags in a blog?
Could anyone tell me the best way to add noindex./nofollow meta tags as I have around 12 duplicate tags in a blog. I have the Yoast SEO plugin - unpaid version.
Moz Pro | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
How to choose the best canonical URL
In a duplicate content situation, and assuming that both rel=canonical and a 301 redirect pass link equity (I know there is still some speculation on this), how should you choose the "best" version of the URL to establish as the redirect target or authoritative URL? For example, we have a series of duplicate pages on our site. Typically we choose the "cleanest" or shortest non-trailing-slash version of the URL as the canonical, but what if those pages are already established and have varying page authority/backlink profiles? The URLs are: example.com/stores/locate/index?parameters=tags - PA = 54, Inbound Links = 259 example.com/stores/locate/index - PA = 60, Inbound Links = 302 example.com/stores/ - This is the version that currently ranks. PA = 42, Inbound Links = 3 example.com/stores - PA = 40, Inbound Links = 8 This might not really even matter, but in the interests of conserving as much SEO value as possible, which would you choose as either the 301 redirect target and/or the canonical version? My gut is to go with the URL that's already ranking (example.com/stores/) but curious if PA, backlinks, and trailing slashes should be considered also. We of course would not 301 the URL with the tracking parameters. 🙂 Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Critical_Mass0 -
Hi guys What the best way to adress duplicate content on photo gallery?
inside my moz report for duplicate contentit says that the photo gallery has duplicate content. let me post and example. is saying this site->http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/name-of-the-page site photogallery category page name its being duplicated to all these other urls : http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/name-of-the-page-categoryone http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/name-of-the-page-categorytwo http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/name-of-the-page-categorythree http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/name-of-the-page-categoryfour and so on! each one has it own canonical tag to its own individual page. the site structure is this: http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/ in here there are all the links pointing to the right categorypage ie: http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/ >>>> http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/categoryone pic 1 pic 2 pic 3 http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/categorytwo pic 1 pic 2 pic 3 http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/categorythree pic 1 pic 2 pic 3 http://www.yoursite.com//photogallery/categoryfour pic 1 pic 2 pic 3 So i don't know how to interpret Moz diagnose. how could i interpret moz reports to find out what to fix and how to fix it? Sorry for the long post! ;
Moz Pro | | surgeonsadvisor0 -
Can I calculate "Keyword Difficulty" metric using Mozscape API data?
We already have a web application that pulls certain metrics about websites using the Mozscape API, but we are wanting to extend the usefulness of this application to enable users of the app to pull "Keyword Difficulty" metrics in bulk, instead of one at a time (or 5 at a time). I wouldn't mind the 5 at a time limitation if we could just automate the API calls and let the tool pull data for 50 or so keywords without user-interaction. I know that it's a "formula", but I don't know what SEOMoz uses for it's formula. Has anyone figured out a way to calculate this, based on the Mozscape API data? Has anyone ever tried to reverse engineer this metric?
Moz Pro | | brchap0 -
Best way to rank an E-commerce site fast? [GOOGLE]
Does anyone have experience in ranking E-commerce sites? I'm trying to rank 1000+ subcategorys and 300+ products. All less than 1k Exacts some are just 20ish some go up to 1k. I've used Traffic Travis all keywords are ranked as [Easy] along with the tools here. My competition have 0 backlinks to there sites. Some sites have PR1-4 (only 2-3 per SERP rest are 0 so should be quite easy. However I'm up against Amazon and Google shopping for the products. Anyways what would you guys recommend me do?
Moz Pro | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
What is the best/your favorite management software?
Currently my company uses basecamp with a splash of google docs a little bit of Paymo, and Raventools for project management. (We use other tools like SEOmoz, but not so much for management as SEO tasks) The ideal features we are looking for are: Collaborative document editing and sharing(Google Docs) Task lists and project organization (basecamphq) Time Tracking on a per task basis (Paymo) (SEO tracking software is great too, but it doesn't have to be integrated with the project management directly. Currently using Raventools and SEOMoz along with some smaller tools.) The project management side can be completely separate from the SEO tool side, but it would be great if there was one simple interface that all of this could be done from. Any suggestions? Are there features I'm missing in my current software that could bring them up to this level?
Moz Pro | | MarloSchneider0