How ot optimise a website for competitive keywords?
-
Hi guys,
I hope to find some good answers to my questions, because here are some of the best SEO's in the world.
I'm doing SEO as a hobby for a few years and had some very good results before the latest Google updates. Now I'm not able to rank any website for competitive keywords. The last project I started is this website (man and van hire company targeting London market).
The problem is that I can't rank even in Top 100 in Google UK for the main keywords like: "man and van london" , "man and van service london" ,"london man & van"...
The site has over 1k good backlinks (according to Ahrefs), unique content, titles and descriptions but still can't rank well. Am i missing something? Few years back that was more than enough to rank well in Google.
I will be very grateful to hear your suggestions and opinions. -
Thanks for your response guys. I got your point - need to remove some keywords repeating to make the website look more natural and need to update the site architecture. But I can't agree on "doorway" pages statemnet. Every page of the website has unique content. Infact, there is one of our competitors who OUTRANK US with copy/paste text on every area page like this:
"Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Barnet"
"Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Acton"
"Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Hammersmith"
How is that possible? I thought that content is king for Google but in this case a website with duplicate content outrank a website with unique content.
-
Matt has made lots of accurate points.
This site might have a Panda problem that would require noindexing, deleting, or improving those doorway pages. If the analytics show a sharp drop in traffic that matches a Panda roll-out date that would help in the diagnosis.
Algo change dates can be found here... https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/
-
I would definitely say that your site is over-optimised and that you are having issues as you have built a lot of landing pages for locations which are very similar just with postcodes and location names being the main difference.I know you have tried to write unique content and specific location information but it still feels very similar and over-optimised purely written as an aggressive way to rank in all these London locations. I would say your site could be classed as being full of doorway pages for all the locations and this is definitely something Google doesn't like and falls fowl of their guidelines thus hurting your ranking ability. You also don't appear to have physical locations in these places so they are more of a service area. As you aren't ranking at the moment I would personally cut everything back focus on ranking for your actual physical location then you may want to choose service areas and build some pages around these, but you don't want to overdo this and you definitely don't want a cookie cutter approach. Look to build pages that really are unique. You also need to look at building the main service areas you cover into your main navigation not at the bottom of your page.
Here is an article on Search Engine Land which addresses this very well and gives you lots of points to consider in order to help you get your site sorted and hopefully ranking - http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583
Have you also looked at how others have ranked for the main terms you mention above? Competition that is successful is always a good place to look
Hope this helps!
Matt
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
-
Keywords and relevancy
Should you always go by the highest relevancy when your choose your keywords sor can you take some keywords with the lowest relevancy possible and will it still help your webpage ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Sale Pages On An eCommerce Website
I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this: 1. For Cats/Sub Cats site/sale
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale. 2. For Brands site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for, so we need to do something. Should we Category Pages: 1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens Brand Pages: 1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis) Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA. Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed. That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!0 -
Anchor text optimisation
Hi, I would like to know the best anchor text practices. I think it's same for On-page and Off-page. As per the internet seo buzz, people suggests differently as below. Which actually work out? Exact match with target page title or partial match Will "Read more" and "learn more" are Okay? How much it must be relevant with URL? Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How to find the redirects on website
I want to find the complete internal redirects on website. Just internally linked. How to find such?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Multilingual Version of a Website
Hi All, We created 'EN' and 'FR' version of a website and translated all labels and message from English to France with the help of Google Translator. Lets take an example: English version URL - https://www.sitegeek.com/softlayer France version URL - https://fr.sitegeek.com/softlayer France version also contain same reviews available on English version page. So the reviews content or language is same on both pages. To eliminate the duplicate content issue we put following meta tags on both 'EN" and 'FR' version pages : So My question is that (1.) Is this the correct implementation of Multilingual Version of a Website? (2.) Is Added meta tags work for both Google and Bing Search engine? (as Bing not indexing all pages) (3.) We are translated labels and messages from Google Translator. Is this the issue pages not being Indexed in Bing? (4.) Finally, What would the correct SEO approch if we translate our site in other languages? Rajiv
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gamesecure0 -
URL strategy mobile website
Hello everyone, We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going. We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users. Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user? Shall we create brand new set of urls such as : http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/ Or shall we adapt the main desktop url : http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/ and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version). Or even redirect people to a sub-domain : http://m.mydomain.com/ The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now. Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site? But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience. Any input on this will be really appreciated. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drimlike0 -
Can I swap a website yet keep it's high ranking for a competitive keyword?
Couldn't fit the entire question in the main bit so the explanation is here: Working on a client's website which is hosted by volusion and also been doing SEO for them for about a year. Now we've finally got them ranking at the lower end of page 1 (around 10+) for their main keyword. They now want to move from volusion over to Amazon Web Store 😢 which seems to be an SEO nightmare from even my basic understanding of SEO. From looking at the coding and the way Amazon Web store is built on top of how restricted you are from doing anything with it, I am almost certain the shop will be extremely difficult to optimise and we will have to completely change nearly all of the content. Finally! the actual question; I was thinking I could get them to delay their move to Amazon webstore until they are ranking in the top 5 for this top keyword. Once they switch over, i assume they'll keep this ranking for at least a short while? This keyword attracts a high volume of traffic and if this traffic is clicking on the result for their website, and google sees that people are finding this website valuable (not clicking back onto google results). Will they be able hold onto this high ranking? Basically what I'm asking is, this will be a terrible outdated badly SEO'd shop, but if a high volume of people are clicking on it and staying on it from their lingering ranking will Google just let it stay at the top? A massive amount of gratitude in advance for anyone who tries to help with this! 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | acecream0 -
Meta keywords vs tags
On a blog from an SEO perspective how do you choose keywords to use in the "meta keyword tag" vs. "post tags"? Will it be different based on the search volume/competition of the keywords targeted?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saravanans0