Hi, This is a very specific question about a travel portal which I am trying to optimize for google. As it seems that the travel industry is really very competitive in terms of SEO, I am trying to go purely white hat: 1. No buying links 2. No directory submission 3. Article directory submission to the minimum. Now as per the topic, I have a travel portal which is http://www.lavacanza.in, but I am talking about a specific page : http://www.lavacanza.in/dubai-holiday/d9 I am trying to optimize the page since last 6 months and generating backlinks for it from all the possible white hat means. But still I am nowhere in competition. In google india search we are on 18th position. The page is Responsive and SEO score is good, and even the PA and DA is decent is showing improvement since last 6 months. Now there comes a website of DPaul's which is a bigger brand than us whose seo score is : Now, comparison of our DA and PA: As you can see that our OnPage SEO score is way better than that of our competitor and our site is responsive which is not in case of our competitor and there is not a huge difference of PA and DA but still our webpage is way behind in google listing on the keyword "Dubai Holiday Packages". Can anybody please suggest something on this issue. How can we beat such competitors. Any discussion or insight would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.
Google doesn't care about little guys anymore. Remember 10 or so years ago when landing pages were allowed on Adwords?
Google just does not focus on SEO score, and surely not by some site that generates seo scores that maybe even 100% inaccurate.... Even though you may have a better score, there could be other factors that give your competitor the edge, maybe his backlinks are better, maybe his content is better; Obviously google looks at the two sites, and feels the other site deserves more... You mentioned you are only going whitehat? Do you really think your competitor is playing on the same field? He maybe using tactics that you are not willing to use, so he stays ahead....He already has authority, as long as he does not go wild, then he will continue to leap forward, while you hold steady.... Google does not focus merely on the SEO score... Google will look at the site as a whole... and google appears to like his better.... regardless if are mobile and he is not... What is his content quality vs yours? How much content does he post vs you? Does he post longer content then you? Google cares about money, not you, and when google saw the internet was turning into easy money/spam, then they started cleaning it up, and started forcing lazy people off the internet that had nothing to contribute.... now you have to work for the money by setting up quality sites that people want to visit, and google will reward you appropriately....
Bigger brands have more backlinks. Generally, they also have older more authoritative sites. Beyond this, DA and PA are external metrics we use - they are far from all inclusive. If your doing everything to the best of your abilitys already, then its time to try something different. I would read through this list of ranking signals, and see if you can flesh out your strategy some more https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
As a user searches for a keyword/keyphrase, Google starts working on understanding its meaning and based on that it pulls out relevant documents from its index and then rank it based on 200+ factors, few being - site & page quality, freshness, safe search, user context, universal search, translation, etc. Being optimum in most these factors will make your webpage rank. Also, an onpage seo score is not a sure shot process to confirm that your webpage has maximum factors. It is recommended that the optimization is done as per Google recommendations, which you can research on support.google.com/webmasters. And also use free Google tools for keyword and website/webpage analysis.