Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Large Competitor closed, how to capitalize in search. Any ideas?
-
Hey Mozzers,
One of our biggest competitors closed down on January 1st, 2020 in several US cities. They did stay open in some areas just FYI. The competitor's website is www.execucar.com. This is a very large company that has a presence in almost all US major airports. It's a private car service just like Uber but for wealthy individuals.
For example. when you search " lax car service" they are #3 on Google or "car service to lax" they're #2 still.
What can we do to get more of their traffic and actual business? Has anyone done something like this before or knows quick and easy tactics to get their clients? We have a local landing page: https://dcacar.com/lax-car-service that ranks 9 through 11 for those same keywords.
Thanks for your thoughts and time.
Davit
-
Hi Miriam,
Hope you're doing well. Thanks for always answering my questions.
Yes, they closed at LAX Los Angeles and many other US cities as well. But they still rank for that location and rank very well. It has been almost 2 months since they stopped their operation at LAX. And to answer your 2nd question yes, we do serve LAX we're not ranking as well as we would like but I was hoping to try to capitalize on this opportunity.
One thing to mention that is important is this. Their website does not mention that they no longer serve these locations, in fact their city page still lists these pages as being served. But if you try to get a quote online or even call the phone number you will get a response that we no longer serve this location.
The company was sold to a venture capital firm which decided to close some of the unprofitable cities. I reached out to the venture firm to see if it possible to buy their local phone number, customer email list etc but they are not interested in selling those. So I was wondering what else can I do to get their customers. They have been in business for almost 20 years and they do have a large number of customer lists etc.
-
Hi Davit!
Some questions:
Are you saying that this business closed its location that services LAX, but they are still ranking for it?
Or, are you saying they still have a location open there?
Do you serve LAX?
Please, let me know. Thanks!
-
Same happened with https://www.devicesprice.com/ I have hired to worker who help me in case but I am also wondering to get good idea.
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
-
Can you disallow links via Search Console?
Hey guys, Is it possible in anyway to nofollow links via search console (not disavow) but just nofollow external links pointing to your site? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lohardiu90 -
Why differents browsers return different search results?
Hi everyone, I don't understand the reason why if I delete cookies, chronology, set anonymous way surfing in Chorme and Safari, I have different results on Google. I tried it from the same pc and at the same time. Searching in google the query "vangogh" the internet site "www.vangogh-creative.it" is shown in the first page in Chrome but not in Safari. I asked in Google webmaster forum, but nobody seems to know the reason of this behavior. Can anyone help me? Thanks in advance. Massimiliano
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vanGoGh-creative0 -
Subdomains vs directories on existing website with good search traffic
Hello everyone, I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it. We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go. So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits. All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damienthivolle0 -
Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?
So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out. One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant. None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues. Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better. So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper1 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Link Building Ideas for a health site
Hi, I am trying to rank a health related website. This is the url: www.ridpiles.com Domain age is 1 year 6 months. Done Directory submissions Blog Comments + Forum posts Done Social Bookmarks Article submissions (Not much) I have done competitor analysis. All of my competitors are just had links from directories and some link exchanges. They got links from quality sites like Yahoo dir. I know my site is far better than my competitors and has 100% unique content. I have submitted to yahoo directory inclusion, but still no luck i hadn't accepted into it. I am planning to go for a sponsered review but dont know, weather the link will be valuable for that much of money. I was left with Guest Blogging. I see this is the only option for me to build links. But i have a very tough competiton, i must compete with most reputed sites like webmd.com etc, i need to get more good links. But i cant get what other ways to get authoritative links. If Guest blogging is the only option for me, how many posts do i need to do daily? And can someone suggest me good Guest blogging sites? Anyhelp would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0 -
How To Best Close An eCommerce Site?
We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Soft Hyphenation: Influence on Search Engines
Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings? We are planning to use in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner
This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9... In HTML 5, the "" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs. Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text? Does it still make sense to use or would you switch to <wbr> already?0