I have just ran a Competition analysis and discovered that a competitor that is not doing any seo campaign nor has the website optimized has better positioning than my client website. Lets consider my client as Site A and competitor as Site B. Site A has friendly urls, alt tags on images with the relevant keywords, title and meta tag description with keywords, a specific page and url for different keywords, h1 and h2 with keywords. Also site A has more backlinks from different web directories and some forums, the domain is 3 years older than site B. Site A also has more text content. Site B has the title tag with the main 10 keywords on several pages and on meta description. Usas page.aspx?=keyword for different pages, has less backlinks, around 80% less visitors per month. Any idea why site B is ranking better than site A?
Are you basing the 80% less visitors on Alexa or any other similar traffic collecting site? That figure might be misleading, especially if site B ranks higher than site A for the keyword. It is tough to answer why site B ranks better than site A. One reason could be the difference in domain names ( one may have keywords, while the other might not)
Site B doesn't have any keyword on the domain name, site A has a variation of the keyword. The 80% traffic is based on a rough number the owner of site B told me. Even if it has more visitiors does not get more visitors than site A.
Site B - May have more/better content More relevant backlinks from aged sites or Site A may just be 'too optimised' and is being penalised slightly.
We can assess that the difference in your client's site and its competitor goes beyond the points you have already compared; such as urls, alt tags, title, description, keywords, use of h1, etc. That said, I personally would like to know the age of the competitor's site, and also how many pages it has. Additionally, how competitive is the niche in question? Are site B's backlinks of more value (Page Rank-wise) than those of site A? Are site B's backlinks varied in their use of keywords and phrases, or are all (or many) of them the same? This is a question for Canonical. I recently saw a post where he spelled out a very thorough process of site-to-site comparison and evaluation. I will attempt to find that post, as well.
The number one thing that will make a URL rank for a particular keyword is its inbound links. It's not the number of inbound links. It's how many inbound links to that URL have the exact keyword phrase in it, how many of those links have variations of the keyword phrase in it, how may have keywords that are related to the keyword phrase in it, how many pages linking to you are relevant to the keyword phrase in question (have it in THEIR <title>, <h1>, content, have it in the link text for backlinks to the page that links to you, etc.) My guess is that the other site has more inbound links with the keyword phrases you're looking at (or slight variations of those) and/or more inbound links from more relevant sites... Personally, I think having the words in the link text is far more important even than the page linking to you being relevant. Ideally I would want links from relevant pages with my keyword phrase in the URL. But if I had to settle for one of those, I'd rather have inbound links with keyword phrase as the link text from irrelevant sites than to have relevant pages linking to my URL with "click here" as the link text. This, I believe, might be the post on comparing the backlink profiles of 2 sites to see why one ranks better than the other for a particular keyword phrase that Tara, my fellow Charlottean, was talking about...
This is something that many people on these boards do not seem to understand. Anchor text is extremely important - enough so that one can rank for obscure phrases with only a couple of links with the proper anchor text. I think that the importance of anchor text is what creates the illusion that domain name is an important factor. This because many links use the domain for anchor text, so having keywords in the domain name provides appropriate anchor text in many links, albeit by accident. A good study in effective use of anchor text (and its major influence) is Wikipedia. Huge amounts of wiki content is plagiarized and one would think would be subject to the so called "duplicate content" penalties. But instead wiki dominates the SERPs in almost every area, largely on the basis if thousands of highly targeted internal links with the right anchor text.
How about page B having lower bounce rate (i.e. visitor stick to that page longer)? That could mean the site B just has better content.
One quality backlink, is equivalent to 1000s of low quality backlinks. You need to check the quality backlinks of your competitors getting: - anchored keyword - pr of backlink page - domain/post age - dofollow/nofollow - number of outgoing link on backlink pages Of course, anchored, dofollow, high PR, aged domain with min outgoing links are the best. If you able to get one PR7 link match above could drag your ranking to new level. Maybe, it is time for you to concentrate on getting quality links or else you might be wasting your time and your client's too.
Not all backlinks are created equal. It's all about relevance and importance than quantity with backlinks.