The mystery of a SERP - Your Opinion is appreciated :)

[VanadiumInteractive]

I'm looking into the result set for "vehicle graphics" with local setting set as Irvine, CA.  The first result is occupied by Airmark Co and its page "http://www.airmarkco.com/vehicle-graphics.html".  Doing a quick scan of this site and its page it seems that a few things are way off.

• Low DA: 12
• Low PA: 19
• Company is located out side of the local area (Irvine, ca)
• Offsite links coming into the site are few with only one external domain (from the company that built the site)

I'm comparing it to a site we launched a few months back, one that has a similar profile and yet is nowhere to be found -- http://www.calibersi.com/page/vehicle-graphics.

Would love to hear your thoughts as to why this site is outranking much stronger and relevant local sites (based on the SERP's that are coming back) ?

[CleverPhD]

I had been thinking about this.   I would make one correction to the order that Jarno proposes and that would be to put the link to the JS not in the head but as the last thing before the tag.   That is for speed optimization - per Google rx:

[CleverPhD]

Thanks for that example Jarno - great way to demonstrate that concept.  Thumbs up!

[JarnoNijzing]

I Agree with Clever,

You use a lot of different Javascripts in the page source code even within the body copy. When your body starts you should also start with the code for the site. Move all of the Javascript to external files and include them just like CSS. This also speeds up the page a lot. And most importantly it cleans up the code real good.

Another issue. Look at the structure of your code.

You also use javascripts in the head code. Move them to an external file. A nice clean code would have to following options in this order:

2. <title></li> <li><meta description></li> <li><meta canonical (if you want this one)</li> <li><meta robots (if you want this one)</li> <li><link stylesheets</li> <li><link javascripts</li> <li></head></li> </ol> <p>This way your title is the first code the search engines encounter. When I changed this for one of my own websites it increased my rankings by almost 12 positions. Off course this is not a guarantee but I would definitely change this.</p> <p>Hope this helps</p> <p>Regards</p> <p>Jarno</p></title>

[MoosaHemani]

I looked in to both websites and it looks like that you have both DA and PA higher than yours but there are few areas where they are beating you!

-          URL structure

They have a better URL structure that discusses the page right after the domain where as your domain structure contains a directory between the page and the domain.

-          Content

Their content is more strong and stable as compare to yours plus the use of keyword is to the point. Try to redevelop your content and make it more stable and user friendly.

-          Overall on-page

Try to audit your complete website and see what other stuff are need to get done in order to make a website more user friendly to users.

-          Links

I do understand that your competitor does not contain good links but if you try and get some relevant links that talks about you, you probably will easily out rank your competitor.

Hope this helps!

[CleverPhD]

The competitiveness of the keyword is moderate and when you run it through the Moz keyword tool, I do not see the Airmarko site in the top ten.  This was the same when I added "Irvine" or 'Irvine, CA" to that keyword combo in the tool.  The pages that did rank had PAs in the range above.  This was the same when I searched with personalization turned off.  If you are logged in, maybe Google is showing you that page since you were visiting it a lot with your research.

One thing I did notice.  On the calibersi.com site, you had over 6,000 characters in a hidden form element and various Javascript,etc, etc all in the top portion of the code.  Googlebot has to get to around line 350 before it sees the "content" on the page.  Airmarko gets you to the content by line 35.  Not saying this is a silver bullet, but there seems to be a lot of overhead going on that could reflect negatively on your site.

[Millermore]

I can see a few reasons: their Domain Authority and Page Authority are both higher than yours. It looks like both pages are properly targeting the keyword on-page, but perhaps you can remove the /page/ from the URL and see what that does? Make sure you redirect the old page to the new URL. Once you do that, try to get a few more quality inbound links to raise your DA and PA and you should be ranking higher than his page soon enough.