Stumped about why competition is beating us
-
Hi All,
Sorry if this question is too specific but I have exhausted all other options. I am optimising a site (www.sandafayre.com) for the key words 'stamps' and 'stamp auctions'. I get grade A for on-page, and off page shows we have way more links than the 2 sites who are beating us on Google UK. One of the sites who is beating me has the keywords in the URL, but the other site doesn't. Would anyone have any ideas as to what might be going on here? Thanks in advance for your help.
Nikki -
One other thing to consider is that you have a lot of that text in graphics. I would especially get your links on the bottom (sitemap, stamp atlas, help, etc) out of the images and onto the page so it can be read. Check out Google Webmaster tools and view your page as Googlebot. That can really give you a good idea on the best way to optimize your site.
-
You could also make better use of your title tag. You're gaining little SEO in the repetition of stamp 3x in tag.
I would also advise a design of the homepage, because, even if you do manage to attain good position your bounce rate will be remain high. The page is not what it could be and is costing you £££s
-
Thanks Daniel, I agree 100% about the UX. We are in the process of redesigning the site but I think it's going to take a while before it comes on board.
-
Also as a general rule, category links should be at the top for easy navigation.
Hope that helps.
-
Your page content is well-optimized, but the user experience (UX) could use a tweaking. There are flashing banners and categories, which make the website look spammy. Google's latest Panda Update has put an emphasis on UX, making time-on-page and bounce rate more important. Improving those attributes and having a graphic artist de-clutter your page layout would help.
The keywords in the URL isn't a big factor on its own. But since most people are lazy when in comes to anchor text, they only put the website name, which includes the keyword and gives that site a rankings boost.
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
-
Us eof outbound links and referencing sources
Hello everyone, I am writing weekly articles for a website. At times, I am referring to data/statistics from other articles/studies. My question is - how do you include links/references to this material? For example, I notice that some articles cite their sources at the end/bottom. But - some include outbound links to the original source throughout the main content of the article- so that when you click on the link it takes you to the correct web page. So far, I am including a 'Sources' section at the end of my article that includes title, author, date. I am doing this to stop people clicking off my article to check out the link! Do I need a specific sources section if I cite my source as I go along? For example, 'In their 2017 study of life insurance, the Association of British Insurers found that 70% of Brits are without life insurance'. (made up statistic! Different web writers seem to do different things and it's a little confusing!! Sorry if this is rather long -winded! Any help with this would be much appreciated. Thanks guys, Clare
On-Page Optimization | | ClareO0 -
Best site structure for us?
Hey guys, I have a somewhat silly question that I probably know the answer to - but would still like to hear your POV's. We're a WP theme making company but we also build other stuff. Context: 1. All demos for themes currently go under domain.com/Theme_A/ The demo is lorem ipsum so is marked noindex nofollow. That being said we get rocking analytics data usually (not sure if it's still valuable for G after the noindex). 2. Currently we need landing pages for themes and we're running them under domain.com/Theme_A/optimized-landing-page-title.php dofollow and indexed ofc. My question is...Would we be better off to include all landing pages under a domain.com/wordpress-themes/ category/tax and then go for the optimized-landing-page-title.php page? Does it make any difference either or? Right now we're not REALLY running them on subdomains (though the structure seems like it), they're just folders. We're thinking that more seo juice would flow through the different pages if we have them all under the same category, rather than basically starting from scratch each time under a new folder. Right? Thanks!!!
On-Page Optimization | | andy.bigbangthemes1 -
Aggregator/comparitor site outranking us
Hi I would like to know if anyone has experience with trying to outrank an aggregator/comparitor website. We are being beat by one that also includes our range of products in their comparisons and I was wondering if there was a smart way around this?
On-Page Optimization | | Discovery_SA2 -
Site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page
Hi Guys, I know that is not good having any kind of duplicate content on your site, but SEO is above all "competition", so I have to see what my competitor are doing to find the best way to outrank them. So this is my question: is it good or not having site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page? At the moment, I can see many - too many - of my client competitors having the "Why choose us" as site wide content above the footer. The funny thing they don't use a couple of sentences, they have placed many words and 10/20 internal links, in other words, they have enough stuff to put down a stand alone page. What do you think: this is just a bad SEO practice or it may work, as I can see so many sites ranking well with this kind of piece of junk on each page. I am not going to recommend this to my client, but as am trying to detail every decision I make showing what the competitors are currently doing, my concern is that my client finds it and therefore will ask to have the same shiny piece of garbage above the footer. Thanks, Pierpaolo
On-Page Optimization | | madcow780 -
A Page For Every Conceivable City In The US - Seeking Community Feedback
Hi Guys! If you ask Local SEO questions here in the Moz Q&A Forum, you and I have probably had the chance to chat at some point or other. This time, I'd like to ask you question! I'd like to request feedback from the community regarding a practice I've been running into for as long as I can remember. Here's what I'm talking about: Let's say the company is a national florist company, a cell phone service company, a website design company. They have national headquarters but either very few or zero physical locations beyond this. In other words, they are virtual rather than local, apart from their national headquarters. Their approach to online marketing revolves around creating a landing page for every conceivable city or zip code in the U.S. I would guess that the thought behind this strategy is that their product is available in each of these cities, and this is their method of getting the word out. Because I work almost exclusively with local rather than virtual companies, the scenario I've described falls somewhat outside of my work experience. It does, however, relate to what I do for a living because I frequently encounter these types of pages (some with near duplicate or very thin content) ranking in the organic results for local searches, alongside the local pack results. My questions are: What do you think of this practice? Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value? Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend? I really appreciate you taking the time to read my question and consider replying!
On-Page Optimization | | MiriamEllis2 -
How to find competition for a particular keyword
Is there any operator to find the level of competition for a particular keyword in Google ? Is intitle:keyword a fair indicator ?
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
How do I check how a competitor ranks in the UK vs. US?
In building my strategy I want to check how well my competitors rank in country specific searches, for example in Canada or the UK vs. the US. Can someone help me by pointing me in the right direction? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | jclubb0 -
Competitive Domain Analysis
In the competitve domian analysis my domain root (gpscity.com) is showing up as a 404 not found. My competition is showing up as 200. My site is live, index and viewable, but I'm wondering if this has an effect on my rankings? What can I do to test that it's not returning a 404 when the crawlers view my site?
On-Page Optimization | | tinyfactory0