Competitor Ranking in Positions 1 & 2
-
I have seen an increasing instance of where the same company, one of our main competitors, are ranking in positions 1 and 2 for the same search phrase.
It appears that both the homepage and dedicated service page relevant to the search term are ranking, but surely having them at position 1 & 2 is not something search engines like Google want to encourage?
I have also seen other instances of the same company ranking twice on page 1 but not necessarily in #1 or #2. Is this an anomaly or just something I have to live with?
-
I agree, our main page ranks for our #1 term and we have /products/ pages that do as well.
-
Really appreciate the responses, collectively they have answered my question, The companies in question do have some high quality backlinks and it's not an incredibly competitive market, relatively speaking.
Think its time to start building some content to challenge their backlink portfolio.
-
If the search phrase isn't brand specific, I would assume this is due to relevant backlinks, dang good on-site optimization, and probably a fast loading, content heavy website for both the homepage and the service page. I have seen this before as well and if you were to do some in-depth competitor research on them, I believe you would find that it is more than likely a pretty well optimized website, and they have quality backlinks pointing to both the homepage and service page.
I would do a full analysis on their on-site factors (meta titles, outbound links, H2s, amount of content on both pages, internal linking, etc) and then use Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs for both rankings pages to see what backlinks they have. Use that insight to see if you can, to a degree, duplicate what you see. Once you feel you have duplicated as much as you can, while still keeping the content original to your website, try and out-do them in both helpful, relevant on-page content and quality backlinks they don't have. Each situation is different and I am assuming some things here based on what I've seen in the past with this situation, hope it helps though and best of success!
-
This isn't an anomaly. It occurs when one domain has two pages that Google feels are both relevant enough and strong enough to earn a position on the first page of the SERPs. It used to happen a lot more often but you still see it a lot today - especially in niches that are not extremely competitive or where one site is far more powerful than others for the niche.
When one domain has two pages that are strong enough to earn a position on the first page of the SERPs, the second page will position right below the first and this can result in 1,2 or 2,3 or other consecutive position on the first page. One site occupying three or four positions can be found but are much less common.
Some sites that are strong in their niche can intentionally produce these double listings by publishing two very strong pages that are both optimized for the same keyword. In your situation it is a competitor's interior page and homepage taking the first two positions.
-
Is the search phrase brand specific? I have seen in numerous instances that brand specific phrases will produce more results for a particular brand. Some of these results will include facebook and other listings that are not directly tied into a url but mention the brand.
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
-
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
Blog home page and ranking
My question is in regards to ranking a blog under our domain www.xxx.co.uk/blog If we are targeting pc blog should the home page have some content in the side bar or somewhere that stays there contantly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
SEOMoz Keyword Ranking Accuracy
Getting some mixed message on this. Is the keyword ranking informational available in SEOMoz based on the data in Mozscape or based on live Google data? Reason I ask is that my ranking for "crown moulding" for www.worldofmoulding differs: Based on the today's scan my www.worldofmoulding.com ranks in position 40 in Google. Based on a manual check with cleared out cache no local setting ... the site is 4th spot Running a third party check using "Advanced Web Ranking" tool it comes up in 9th spot, but they count the local business SERPs in which case it matches my manual search. It seems that SEOMoz is not in line with actual ranking. Any suggestion for what can be used to accurately asses SERP placement for terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Okay. So I had the top spot for organic rank ( # 1 position ) above the places section. Now it has been eliminated and I am in the top spot for just the places section. What gives?
So i dont just want to be number in the places section.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NWExterminating0 -
Bing and Yahoo rankings
I must admit its every 3 months or so I check these listings 🙂 I would even admit we are that engrossed in google we forget these sites exist many times. I wanted to see if anyone had experience doing sep for these sites and what sort of techniques you used in order to help improve these rankings. I tend to get great listings on Yahoo for many sites but bing seems slightly different. Would love to find out some information on the algos on each of these.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hey All My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools. My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity. Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website. regards Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team2