How long you've seen it take to rank in small niche
-
Hello,
How long do you see small niche sites taking to rank where they should be for their strength?
Our last site took at least 6 months. Our current site's home page for our main term is stuck at around the 40th page and not moving. It's an exact match domain so it should be on at least page 2.
We have one site in the industry already that carries similar products but it is much bigger with a much wider scope of products. It took a while to rank too.
Our only backlinks I'm working on are Google & Youtube (and DMOZ), we have a facebook fan page. Our site is nicer than the site in position #1. Working on making as many pages as possible 10X content.
Thank You,
Bob
-
This is just wildassguessing... When you metrics are overwhelming, and your content is greatly superior by formal industry standards... but these little cottage industry sites with informal content and a tribe of visitors are beating you.... your best prayer of getting to the top is to be patient and allow Google to observe that your visitor metrics put enough weight on the scale to make your site more credible.
Google will believe rubbish for a while but strong truth can still prevail.
-
Wow, I think that's exactly what is happening. There's a ton of spam being searched for. Really good insight EGOL, thanks a lot!
-
I've had some keywords that I thought my site would shoot right to the top upon publishing a new page. Why? The competition was sleepy little sites that didn't use formal language, had lots of inaccurate and pseudo-information. I thought that my site would roll right over them. However, my site didn't make the top 50. Six months later, still not in the top 50. So, I take a close look and my bet was that the presence of informal, inaccurate, pseudocrap was probably what the masses of people were searching for. I refused to put that stuff on my site - even in criticism - and now, after well over a year, some of my pages in this niche are starting to break into the top 10 and pull a little traffic.
So, you can have weak competitors, even BS competitors, but if they got the language of the niche and a tribe of searchers and visitors behind them, you might have trouble winning even if your metrics are overwhelming.
-
I found a checkbox in our cart today that rel-cononicals www, non-www, index.html, etc. They were separate. Do you guys think this could have caused it?
We also have a lot of these products on another site, this is a smaller, specific niche.
-
Hey Bob,
Organic SEO isn't really my area, but if that niche is really niche, being stuck on page 40 after several months of work raises a red flag for me. Have you dug into Google Search Console to be sure there isn't a problem with a site?
-
It depends on the niche, competition, Quality and frequency of content and also the language. I have been able to rank a site as less as 4 weeks. But Again I could not do scalably across languages and niches.
Unique Quality of content and frequency of publishing goes long way
-
Hi Bob,
You might know that it depends on the niche's difficulty.
In my experience, it ever took less than 6 weeks to rank in the 20s.Also, I presume that you understand that having great content and a great site doesn't neccesarly mean you'll rank higher fast.
As you say the only backlinks you have are just a few, you might need a few more links to go higher. But, just links aren't the ticket to 1st page.
Usually on page optimization plays an important role in the rankings.
Are you sure that your more important pages are correctly optimized for the desired search terms? And just to role out the obvious, are you sure that google is seing your site? Are you getting the correct visibility from Google? What about other search engines?I gave you more questions than answers, it may be that there's something that you've overlooked and missed. Or just that the niche is competitive enough so you wont rank better faster as you think.
Hope I've helped.
GR.
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
-
Page Rank Metrics Disapearing
Hi Everyone. I keep hearing from different people that googles PAGE RANK , Will soon be eliminated. Has anyone heard anything more about this ? Or is this a myth? This would make it more complex for the average person to rely on DA and TF etc.. Would love to hear from you guys. I actually like the PR rating system. Also have websites more then a year old which are still not showing actual PR yet .Maybe delayed or maybe not. Robert
Algorithm Updates | | Yellow20000 -
Studies showing that social sharing does/doesn't affect rankings?
I'm currently researching this area in order to show to a client that social shares aren't as valuable for SEO as they might think. Can anyone point me in the direction of the best studies done on this topic? Thanks in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | QubaSEO0 -
Ranking For Synonyms Without Creating Duplicate Content.
We have 2 keywords that are synonyms we really need to rank for as they are pretty much interchangeable terms. We will refer to the terms as Synonym A and Synonym B. Our site ranks very well for Synonym A but not for Synonym B. Both of these terms carry the same meaning, but the search results are very different. We actively optimize for Synonym A because it has the higher search volume of the 2 terms. We had hoped that Synonym B would get similar rankings due to the fact that the terms are so similar, but that did not pan out for us. We have lots of content that uses Synonym A predominantly and some that uses Synonym B. We know that good content around Synonym B would help, but we fear that it may be seen as duplicate if we create a piece that’s “Top 10 Synonym B” because we already have that piece for Synonym A. We also don’t want to make too many changes to our existing content in fear we may lose our great ranking for Synonym A. Has anyone run into this issue before, or does anyone have any ideas of things we can do to increase our position for Synonym B?
Algorithm Updates | | Fuel0 -
Timeline for 301 Redirects to Take Full Effect in SEO Rankings?
Hey, I am working on transitioning a website and all of my current URL's will be slightly changed (moving to dynamic pages). I understand that I will need to 301 redirect all the old pages to their new counterparts but I would like to know how long it will take for the 301 redirects to take full effect in the search rankings. I ask because my site is an e-commerce site that receives 90% of it's business in January and the transition would take place December 15th. If my search rankings are not back up to par by January 1st then I will take a drastic hit to revenue. Please help this SEO noob out!
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2221 -
Infographic rankings has nose dived? Anyone else experienced this recently?
I posted an infographic back in April, 2012 on my company blog.
Algorithm Updates | | adamlcasey
I added embed code at the bottom, so people could embed on their websites (not many did that I can tell) I also submitted it to a number of Infographic directories and got links back from around 5-6 of them. The title of the Infographic is exact match long tail search term.(6 words) By July it had hit Position 6 in Google.co.uk, where it stayed in the top 10 until December fluctuating between positions 6-9. I haven't done anything else to the post and yet since December it has started to trickle down the rankings, in the past 3 weeks it dropped from 15th on Feb 3rd to 93rd on Feb 17th, then bounced back up to 33rd on the 25th of Feb and has now fallen again to 89th yesterday. Is this normal or have I been hit with a penalty of some sort? Not sure if this matters but I have the word infographic at the end of my title?? Also when I run it through OSE I don't see some of the backlinks that I can see from GWT.0 -
With Google's Location Based Searches, Should I Include a City Name with My Keywords?
What I mean is when you search on Google it seems to pull information by your location so would it be helpful including the city name + keyword still for SEO or would it be just as helpful using just the keyword? For example, a client is in Alexandria, VA and has a computer repair shop so would "Alexandria computer repair" be as good or better than "computer repair"? Just a little curious. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CodyOelker-AMICreativeStudio2 -
Google Page Rank?
We have had a quality website for 12 years now, and it seems no matter how many more links we get and how much new content we add daily, we have stayed at PR3 for the past 10 years or so. Our SEOMoz domain authority is 52. We have over 950,000 pages linking to us from 829 unique root domains. Is this in line with PR3 or should we be approaching PR4 soon? We do daily blog posts with all unique, fresh quality content that has not been published elsewhere. We try to do everything with 'white hat' methods, and we are constantly trying to provide genuine content and high quality products, and customer service. How can we improve our PR and how important is PR today?
Algorithm Updates | | applesofgold0 -
Google's reaction to site updates
Hi, Is it safe to assume as soon as Google indexes updates I've made to my site that any ranking changes the updates effected will happen at that same time, or is there ever a lag time before these changes ( if any ) take effect?
Algorithm Updates | | minutiae0