Top 3 actions I should immediately take.... ?
-
Site: bussongs.com
I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of kids songs.
kididdles.com is my archnemesis. Slight edge in PVs with better ranking on many long-tail KWs (song names mainly).
What are the top 3 things I should do to knock out my competitor? I feel I've nailed the on-page stuff - I have checked all the major items and produced superior content.
The big thing that shouts out to me is that my competitor just has many more backlinks, especially from unique domains and that's lifting up everything.
Thoughts? Can't wait to hear your ideas!
-
I'll also consider non link based ranking signals:
-
Social media presence
-
Improve website engagement - stuff like bounce, clickthrough rates, site speed etc
-
Look at your link-profile via OSE and see what's missing compared to top competitors or similar websites.
Need more high quality links? Then produce content or anything that the linking websites could use and start creating relationships with them. Better yet - pick up the phone and call them!
If in doubt, you can just focus on diversifying your link-profile, avoiding the "bad" types links ofcourse.
Qasim
-
-
Before you spend time buildling a widget, I'd do some research and find out if it's something that webmasters are likely to use (and how many of them would be interested!)
My advice would be to try and identity a "need" first and then come up with something that satisfies that need (and of course give you a backlink too)
What do you know about your visitors? What type of people are they and why are they visiting your site?
Who's currently linking to you and why?
On your website you say "created to help kids, parents, and teachers recall the words and lyrics to loved children songs"
Do you provide nice and easy ways these people can print the lyrics (with your branding and link of course). Getting traffic from off-line sources is still traffic!
Do you have a mailing list? You could offer the lyrics to a song every week. Might to sustain awareness of your site and increase returning visitors.
-
Great thoughts Doug.
Of course there's no quick and easy fix with this. I've dedicated very little to link building, so that's a clear area where I need to devote time now. And you're right - I need to understand the reasons why those links exist and replicate that high-level strategy rather than just chasing to get the same links.
I was considering building a widget that'd allow webmasters to embed lyrics on their site and then I could create a backlink within the display. I'd love to think of an incentive for link-building, but struggling so far to come up with creative ideas.
-
I think the obvious answer is that you need to build links. Can you think of any way you can give your visitors and incentive to link back to you? Getting your visitors to do your link building for you would be ideal!
Have you taken a look at not just the number of backlinks your competitor has, but where they are getting their backlinks from?
You can then try to get links from the same places (take a good look at why people are linking to your competitor though!)
Also try to get a feel for the kinds of sites, and the reasons why people are backlinking and then try to cast your net to capture all sites that match this profile.
Hope this helps.
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
-
How to Handle Spammy Top Referring Domains
We keep getting links from the domain lyricswithoutmelody.org. Currently we have the most referring backlinks of all from them. I'm not sure what to do with it... is it hurting us? I know I can disavow them, but I'm afraid it will hurt since we have 472 total backlinks from the domain. Their trust flow is 9 and citation flow is 11. Another option I was thinking is to block the domains IP from seeing our website, would that work? Just trying to figure out the best coarse of action... or if no action at all is best. I've attached a screenshot of my top referring domains. The ones outlined in red I don't know who they are and if it's helping or hurting. Moz Fam HELP! Ijb09DNhIW5
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file. A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down. I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent. Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again. All comments greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Phantom 3 Update?
My site got demolished by this update and I really don't know why and would appreciate if any Mozzers could help me out to understand this. I just found out about this update that happened today and I am kind of shocked and at a loss on what happened. If someone would PM me, I would really appreciate it Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve450580 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Do Share buttons take LinkJuice?
Hi, I'm using AddThis sharing on my site. The implementation is by embedding a href's all over the site. Do these buttons take my LinkJuice? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
One Website, Multiple Top-level Domains
I have two clients, both of which have a single website, with multiple top-level domains, many of which represent "subpages". For example, when you navigate to the home page, the URL is "[CompanyName].com". However, when you navigate to a subpage, the browser appears to remain at the same website, but in actuality (as you can tell from the URL bar) you've navigated to "SubPage.com". Client A is an insurance company that has multiple branded insurance products. Each product is independent of the other (it's unlikely that a single client would purchase multiple insurance products from different brands) and have their own brand. Thusly, each section of the site that represents a different brand has its own top-level domain. The website design/structure remains the same, with some light color changes and image swaps. Client B is a consultant and offers various services. None of these services are "branded" (a single client would hire the consultant for a wide range of available services). Each subpage on the site represents a different service and has its own top-level domain. Here are my questions: Are either Client A or B breaking guidelines set forth by major search engines? Are either Client A or B hurting their optimization with this trickery? My inclination is that Client A is doing it right, but Client B is not. Your insights would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinckneyHugoGroup0 -
Is Google just taking long time to re-index or did I make a boo boo?...
Couple weeks ago I changed a url on my site from using underscores to using hyphens I setup a 301 redirect and added appropriate canonical to the new page. My site is crawled daily and I've done this on several other pages with good results but this page is just not being indexed right… I see my page #8 with some random title Is there some "interim index" that Google has? It's just bazaar to me, any thoughts? Thanks! - Cliff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CliffAuerswald0