Yet another SEO thread!

[ehasler]

I'm trying to work out how a particular site seems to be ranking well, but can't for the life of me see how.

If you google for "dog food price comparison", there should be a site called *og*ood*rice .co .uk near or at the top. However, the site doesn't appear to have a huge number of quality backlinks, doesn't have an active blog or social media presence, and isn't even a particularly high-quality site in terms of my understanding of what Google is looking for.

Basically, I want my site to beat it, but despite having better content, more regular updates and a better (IMO) site, I'm nowhere near it.

Can anyone see how they are getting such good rankings?

[ehasler]

Purity14 said:

What is the age of the domain?
What is the age of yours?
Plus the fact that the domain contains three out of the four keywords!

I think it's about 6 months older than mine - which is just under a year old now.

miniman said:

Are you confident that there are significant volumes of search for that specific phrase? In other words, is there a significant audience looking specifically for a dog food price comparison site, vs, for example, "cheap dog food", "dog food deals" etc?

Not a massive volume for that one term, but when you add up all the "cheap xyz dog food" searches then it does add up - and that site ranks well for those terms too.

[ehasler]

OllyMo said:

If 'dog food price comparison' is the phrase you're looking at, then that page you've suggested is pretty perfect for that phrase.

They've got the exact phrase about 10 times (good keyword density) along with 3 of the 4 words in the actual domain. That means it's pretty much sewn up as far as google's current algorithms seem to work.

They have a few backlinks from what look like relevant sites, which is all you need. The days of spamming backlinks all over the place are gone.

That's a good point - although some of the other pages that rank well for particular phrases only have it appearing 2 or 3 times on the page but they still rank well.

Gemaeden said:

New here. Your site doesn't seem to have as many brand options as your rival. For instance I see no reference to ACANA. Google likes sites that may be seen as authorities. By listing more brands you should increase your chances of improving your ranking.

That's true at the moment (more are being added), although I do have more listings per brand so have a similar number of pages overall, and more (unique) content on each page, which is what Google is trying to encourage as far as I can tell.

[ehasler]

cluckcluck said:

looking good, especially as organic and not paid for


ok performance, but could be improved:

Interesting stuff - thanks. That site is definitely doing well in the results, but I still have no idea how.

It doesn't even do that well in Google's performance tests - mine is much better, so clearly site speed isn't a key ranking factor!

So I guess I should take some comfort from the fact that even though I'm not getting the traffic, I still have 5 "A" scores for performance

[ehasler]

Dick Dastardly said:

Or go to aol.co.uk to see more non-personalised results, as it's google search listings under a different logo.

Nice tip

I tried this, and get the same results - the rival site is ranking on page 1, and even position 1 for a lot of terms - far, far better than my site is doing.

It's even ranking well for terms that it has nothing to do with - for example "cat food price comparison" - the other site is at the top of page 2, while my site is on page 19 or something, but the other site doesn't have any content related to cats at all, while mine is 50% cat-related

So either they are incredibly lucky, or are doing something dodgy - but I just can't see what.

[ehasler]

951TSE said:

I wouldn't claim to be any sort of SEO expert but I hope you will allow me some observations?

1. Your competitors site is very focused, he's dog food and only dog food. Whereas yours is food, insurance and accessories. Maybe separate websites for each subject and with links to each other might be better?

2. Anywhere in the meta tags for titles where the website name appears he has the .co.uk extension on it, yours does not. No idea if that matters. Same in the copyright notices.

3. While you have Facebook, twitter and a blog he only appears to have Facebook BUT he also appears to have an RSS feed although I'm not sure what it's doing, possibly serving the banner.

4. He's got an email address capture in the form of aweber, although you have the code for mailchimp in your code, unless I'm blind there isn't any capture on your front end?

5. He is using Wordpress for his site with these two plugins:
https://www.w3-edge.com/products/w3-total-cache
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Not sure what your site is written in but you might like to look at using similar? As they both 'seem' to be SEO tools.

6. In the title you use words that aren't in your URL namely you say "price comparison" but then the website is called "pet money", is it worth making them the same?

Thanks for taking a look. I'll reply to your points below rather than quoting each one.

1. From my understanding of what the great Google wants, one "authority" site is better than several niche sites, so I'm not sure that would make much difference. I don't know, but to me it seems odd that if you had site A with 600 pages about topic xyz, and site B with 600 pages about the same topic plus another 600 pages about a related topic abc that Google would rank A higher than B?

2. Not sure if this matters - other sites I've looked at all seem to do this differently, but with title length getting shorter, getting rid of those extra characters does make a small difference in the useful description you can enter as the title.

4. I do have a mailchimp email pop-up appear after 30 seconds, so I guess you weren't on a page long enough to see it? Not sure that would make much difference in the eyes of Google though? I personally don't like these forms if they pop up as soon as you visit a site, so I've set the delay to be quite long on purpose.

5. Mine is written entirely by myself (although I do use Wordpress for the blog), so I've tried to do manually what the Wordpress SEO plugin does, plus I use caching on my server rather than an additional plugin. All SEO and performance tests I've done rate my site higher than his as well, so I don't think it's a technical issue.

6. That may make a difference, although from what I've read, keywords in domain names don't make as much difference as they used to. I don't really want to rebrand my whole site though as it isn't just price comparison, and I can't believe that this is the only reason my site isn't ranking well.

In fact, since the end of August, my site seems to have been penalised in some way as I've lost about 80% of my search traffic, while the other site still sits on page 1 for a lot of search terms... Annoying!

[ehasler]

Webber3 said:

This sounds like your main problem. If your site has been penalised, for all the effort it takes to recover, you might as well start a new site on a new domain.

That's easier said than done though - the branding of the site, social media, links I have built up - that would all need to be done again from scratch.

And I currently have no idea what caused the drop in traffic - there are no manual actions from Google in my webmaster account, and I've not been doing anything knowingly dodgy to cause a penalty so who's to say that my traffic won't return to previous levels in a few weeks when they do their next update? Or that I wouldn't have the same issue again in a few months if I did move to a new domain.

It's pretty frustrating when Google keep saying how they want sites to produce good, original content on a regular basis - yet still favour sites that do the opposite.

[ehasler]

Webber3 said:

The Google webmaster forums used to be full of people moaning about crappy sites outranking them. They never got anywhere with it.

They're full now of people moaning that they lost 80% of their traffic overnight so at least it seems I'm not alone.

Webber3 said:

You do need to try to ascertain if this is site related. It could be that your top search phrase just dropped a few places. To a point where it gets no clicks. Page 2 perhaps. Look at webmaster tools and pinpoint which Search Queries dropped (select the 'with change' option). If all your rankings dropped at the same time then it may well be site related.

It does appear to be site related. Prior to 19th August, I had about 1400 search terms listed and was ranking on page 1 for a good number. Then the queries dropped 80% overnight, and many of the terms I was ranking well on had dropped 50-100 places, plus the number of search terms dropped too.

Webber3 said:

If it is site related, I know it's a ball ache moving to a new domain, but I once spent 6 months trying to recover a site and got nowhere. Google will never give you any feedback, so you're working in the blind with no guarantee you'll ever fix it. If you move your content to a new domain and are squeaky clean with your SEO, you could see results a lot sooner.

I can see your point, but what's to say they wouldn't do the same with the new site after 6 months? If I'd been creating spammy links, or doing something else dodgy then I'd at least know what not to do next time - but I really have no idea what Google doesn't like.

Since the drop in traffic last month, I've made a few changes and added more unique content so I'm going to stick with it for now and hope that Google miracles happen! I'm also going to focus on getting some articles written that will hopefully attract social media sharing and links from blogs, so should improve my backlinks which is one area that my site falls down on.

[ehasler]

951TSE said:

Yes, I do remember it coming up briefly on my first visit, but with cookies set I didn't see it on return visits and someone with a popup blocker won't see it at all. I'm not sure if that is important to you but all the marketing blurb I've ever seen says that a nice large targeted email list of willing buyers is the holy grail of direct online marketing. Whereas on your competitors site the details capture appears on the page permanently and on my small screen is 'above the fold' if that matters anymore.

I've read the same blurb too, but IMO there's a fine line between driving visitors away by being too in-your-face, and capturing details - I've started off on the cautious side as I personally don't really like those pop-ups, but will look at making it more obvious.

Saying that, I did sign up to the other site a while back and haven't seen a single newsletter, so they aren't even making use of the details they have collected.

951TSE said:

Talking about small screens what does your site and his look like in comparison on phones and tablets as Ebay's research suggests that more and more of their customers are buying using those devices.

I've no idea if a google (or other search engines) algorithms are skewed to mobile device optimisation these days? Perhaps an expert can advise us?

It looks OK on tablets, but isn't responsive (yet) so looks a little small on phones - although is usable if you use it in landscape mode or zoom and scroll a bit. I don't know if they are looking at mobile device optimisation, but I would guess they do or will do as they have a score for both mobile and desktop browsers in their Webmaster Tools site analysis section. But again - although my site isn't great, it's still rated higher then the other one.

[ehasler]

Webber3 said:

This sounds like your main problem. If your site has been penalised, for all the effort it takes to recover, you might as well start a new site on a new domain.

I thought I'd update this thread with some good news

After a lot of work, my site has recovered from the drop and is now doing better than ever.

I did quite a few things, including:

1) Added additional content to the product pages which were quite thin on unique content, and removed some internal URLs with anchor text.
2) Optimised the site to improve time on site and page views.
3) Wrote a few 2000-3000 word blog articles.
4) Removed a few backlinks - one of which was a comment on a blog which ended up on the footer of every page of that site which resulted in hundreds of backlinks from them.
5) Asked a number of relevant websites for links to some of the new content I'd produced, which resulted in a few decent links.
6) Waited...

Interestingly, and I have no idea if this is co-incidence or not, but a couple of days before I saw a jump in Google traffic, an old post of mine on here (about an old site that no longer exists) got bumped up in this forum which resulted in lots of people visiting my site from PH.

As you can see, some or all of these paid off!



Even better, the competitor site has gone the other way...