Competitor Ranking in Positions 1 & 2
-
I have seen an increasing instance of where the same company, one of our main competitors, are ranking in positions 1 and 2 for the same search phrase.
It appears that both the homepage and dedicated service page relevant to the search term are ranking, but surely having them at position 1 & 2 is not something search engines like Google want to encourage?
I have also seen other instances of the same company ranking twice on page 1 but not necessarily in #1 or #2. Is this an anomaly or just something I have to live with?
-
I agree, our main page ranks for our #1 term and we have /products/ pages that do as well.
-
Really appreciate the responses, collectively they have answered my question, The companies in question do have some high quality backlinks and it's not an incredibly competitive market, relatively speaking.
Think its time to start building some content to challenge their backlink portfolio.
-
If the search phrase isn't brand specific, I would assume this is due to relevant backlinks, dang good on-site optimization, and probably a fast loading, content heavy website for both the homepage and the service page. I have seen this before as well and if you were to do some in-depth competitor research on them, I believe you would find that it is more than likely a pretty well optimized website, and they have quality backlinks pointing to both the homepage and service page.
I would do a full analysis on their on-site factors (meta titles, outbound links, H2s, amount of content on both pages, internal linking, etc) and then use Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs for both rankings pages to see what backlinks they have. Use that insight to see if you can, to a degree, duplicate what you see. Once you feel you have duplicated as much as you can, while still keeping the content original to your website, try and out-do them in both helpful, relevant on-page content and quality backlinks they don't have. Each situation is different and I am assuming some things here based on what I've seen in the past with this situation, hope it helps though and best of success!
-
This isn't an anomaly. It occurs when one domain has two pages that Google feels are both relevant enough and strong enough to earn a position on the first page of the SERPs. It used to happen a lot more often but you still see it a lot today - especially in niches that are not extremely competitive or where one site is far more powerful than others for the niche.
When one domain has two pages that are strong enough to earn a position on the first page of the SERPs, the second page will position right below the first and this can result in 1,2 or 2,3 or other consecutive position on the first page. One site occupying three or four positions can be found but are much less common.
Some sites that are strong in their niche can intentionally produce these double listings by publishing two very strong pages that are both optimized for the same keyword. In your situation it is a competitor's interior page and homepage taking the first two positions.
-
Is the search phrase brand specific? I have seen in numerous instances that brand specific phrases will produce more results for a particular brand. Some of these results will include facebook and other listings that are not directly tied into a url but mention the brand.
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
-
Canonical Issue On AMP
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari
I have one issue about canonical. kindly guide me about it. I have a site example.com/abc and I convert it on an amp and know its URLs is example.com/abc=?amp. but the search console tells me to add the proper canonical URL but both pages are the same. kindly guide me about it. what will I do?0 -
SERP Ranking
Hi everyone, I'm struggling to figure out why our website has dramatically changed and is ranking far worse than ever. We were top for around 10 keywords, and had over 4 high traffic keywords in position 1. I think the website needs updating (as it's magento 1.7), and that the competition is increasing. Taking our eye off the ball has been a huge mistake. Could anyone advise on what the next steps would be to start increasing to a better serp rank? These two are own main ranking pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mg33dev
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/budget-roller-banner.html Any advice or pointers would be absolutely awesome. Thanks0 -
Ranking for keyword I don't optimize for & Other oddities
Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a clients website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda update because of some spammy links from a shady SEO firm. We've made a decent climb back but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords we don't optimize for: I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website. We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages. 2. Index not found when doing site: search: Other oddity is that when you search site:www.mywebsite.com, I see all the pages within the site except the homepage. Not sure whats going on here, but when I fetch the homepage in GWMT, it returns the homepage. When you query the homepage by itself, it also ranks. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscienceweb0 -
2 pages ranking for the same term
Hi everyone, I have had two pages ranking on page two of Google for a while now for the same term. I have tried dedicating a page to it but as the other has a url with the search term in Google is ranking both it seems. How can I without deindexing one of the pages help better tell Google which one to rank? I imagine if it only ranked one page I would get a higher result rather than 2 weaker ones? On-site has been done and so has links to the homepage, but the innerpage still ranks also as it has the search term in its url. Would a canonical tag be worth it here? the page is however getting some traffic itself for other terms so I am reluctant to do that. Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdigital0 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Penguin 2.0 update, ranking dropped. Advice needed!
Hello After another penguin 2.0 update the website i've been working on dropped in rankings,some of keywords that i ranked in #1 are now on second and third page, you can see this screenshot here http://screencast.com/t/MramoXgTr 95% of my competitors were not even effected with this update at all, most of them don't even optimize their website for SEO, rather they use paid directories. First thing i did is analyzed my backing profile using OSE, to my surprise i found a lot of low quality domains pointing to my pages with a keyword in anchor text. A lot of them blog commenting and low quality article directories. Since i don't have control over these links and i cant remove them i used Disavow tool to do the job. For the past 3 months, i've been doing a lot of hight quality link building; such as
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentR
press releases once in 2 months, squidoo lens and hubpages 3 posts a week for each keyword, youtube video, in fact my youtube video still ranks in #3 for high competitive search, i was involved in social media, posting tweets every week and Facebook posts. I really hope that someone can help me here with a good advice on getting my rankings back here's my website, let me know what do you think about it. Thank You0 -
Google Places - How do we rank
So, google places showing up on search results is great feature . . . But how can we get our results to the top? I mean I can see some terrible websites appearing at the top of the google places with their places page having no activity whatsoever. Is there a trick to this at all? What can we do to increase our ranking on Google Places because our old GOOD rankings are now appearing BELOW the map results Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayweb0 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hey All My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools. My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity. Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website. regards Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team2