i've been researching our competition and i've found this site that just doesn't look like it should be in the top ten results. granted, it is sitting at number 10, but it's still so far behind as far as seo is concerned that i'm wondering what the deal is. here are a few things that i've looked at: 1. the site at #9 has 10,000 more links than this site. 2. the site at #9 has a PR4, this site has a PR2 3. #9 domain age 2001, #10 2002 4. #9 in Yahoo directory, #10 not in Yahoo directory... there are many more points, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. the onpage content for #10 isn't that wonderful either. keyphrase is in the page three times at most, once in an anchor. the title is good, but that's about it. but here is the kicker...keyphrase is in the domain name. could that be the reason? by the way, competition for the keyphrase is about 500,000
How did you measure competition? If thats just the how many results are returned when you search for that keyword thats a very inaccurate way to determine it. But anyways, unless you went to every link that the other site has and compared how related the sites are to his compared to how related all your links are it would be impossible to say. Im betting though that his links are coming from more related sites though.
hi aaron, i'm not sure i understood this part. could you clarify a little bit. and you're right about the relevancy of the backlinks. i am yet to go through all of that.
Tell me about it...my main competitor is a TRULY crappy site that has been sitting on the internet since 2001. It also hasn't been updated since then, and my site's content literally blows it out of the water. However, they have #1 serps for all the keywords in our industry. Their site is basically stuck there permanently, I have tried all I can do, and I can't get past page 1, position 5 for the big keywords.
Aaron means you should not measure competition based on quantity but quality. 10,000 "strange" back links would be worthless compared to 3 "strong" back links. Maybe the site is a partner of governmental websites, so it does have the .com domain but the .gov strength in search engines. Quantity counts not quality for that case.
Those are good points. I know that it took me a while to beat out another local website like mine simply because they had one really good link from another company that had strongly SEOed their site. 800 backlinks (me) versus about 20(them). Onpage optimization (me) versus none (them). It still took a little time (I think my domain name needed to age a bit. I'm not for sure as I am not a SEO guru I hire a really good guy on these forums for that ) for me to get past they had an older domain name and one really strong backlink.