[Build Backlinks Online] Why You Might Be Losing Rankings to Pages with Fewer Links, Worse Targeting, and Poor Content

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Why You Might Be Losing Rankings
to Pages with Fewer Links, Worse Targeting, and Poor Content'


Posted by randfish

Most of us have a pretty good sense for the best ways to improve our search
rankings, including earning links, targeting the people who search for us, and
making sure our sites contain high-quality content. Sometimes, though, we get
outranked by sites that clearly have work to do in these areas. In today's
Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some of the reasons why that might happen to
you.






Why You Might Be Losing Rankings to Pages with Fewer Links Worse Targeting
and Poor Content - Whiteboard Friday





For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:



Video Transcription



Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week, I want to address a question that comes up all the time. I get so much
email about this. So many people asking in Q&A, the Moz Q&A, about:


"Why am I losing rankings to a site or page that has fewer links, worse
keyword targeting, and/or poor content?" It's usually some combination of these.
A lot of times it's fewer links and poor content, or they're not targeting a
keyword at all, and their content's terrible. "Why are they outranking me?"


I want to try and address why that might be happening for you, because it's
such a common theme. I think, as SEOs and marketers, we're trained to look at
the data. We look at who's ranking for chicken coops, and we see these three
results, and we go and check. Okay, how many links does this site have? How many
links does the page have? What's the page authority? What's the domain
authority? What does the anchor text look like? Is it an exact match domain, and
maybe it's getting some domain biasing from that, or those kind of things. And
then, when we don't see one of those patterns that we're accustomed to, we go,
"Why is that happening? What's going on there? I don't understand why I'm seeing
this page outrank my page." So I'm going to try and address those.


First off, let's understand the basics of what's going on in rankings,
because there are multiple things. First off, domain based features. So it could
be that MNN, which I think is Mother Nature Network maybe it has a very powerful
domain, or not as powerful a domain, in terms of domain authority and trust and
those kind of things.


There are page based features. This is like the content of the page and the
keywords that it's targeting and how it's doing that, as well as the content
experience on the page and the links that are coming to the page. The individual
URL, not the domain broadly.


Then there are listing based features, meaning: Have they done a good job of
making this a very compelling thing for a user to click? We've certainly seen
examples of where making a more compelling snippet has actually boosted people's
rankings as more people click it, and Google is seeing that searcher behavior,
and now they're saying, "Oh well, if so many people like this result and they're
scrolling down to find it, then we should probably be bumping it up."


Of course, there are secondary benefits to that, which is the more people
who click your listing, the more people you get exposed to, and the more links
you can earn, and all those kinds of second order benefits.


But it's not just these things, or it is these things, but it's also a bunch
of different inputs that can be affecting these, and so I'm going to walk you
through some of those.


What I really like asking is, "When we're being outranked, where do we have
weaknesses that the other listings have strengths?" I think this is a common way
of going about this, but it's not always numeric. It's not always quantitative.
Sometimes it's qualitative, and sometimes you have to ask yourself tough
questions.


Do I have a poor listing or a poor snippet? Is this something where, out of
all the listings on here, someone would want to click mine more than anything
else? That's a copywriting challenge, it's a creativity challenge, and it's a
empathy challenge. We want to be inside people's heads. If we were to go and get
a room full of a hundred people who performed a search for chicken coops, and we
asked them, "What would make you click on a listing? What would inspire you to
say, 'Wow, that's what I want to see.'"
A lot of time it might be something like this.


If you're being outranked in this search result by Mother Nature Network,
and you're going, "But I actually sell chicken coops, they don't," think about
how compelling it is to say, "Oh eight awesome urban chicken coops."


Well, given population trends and how chicken coops are rising, it's very
possible that lots of people who live in cities and dense urban areas are
searching for chicken coops right now. So this kind of an article, that's
inspiring and interesting to them, might be better than what I've got, which is
chicken coop designs or backyard chicken coops, those kinds of things. Maybe
that's what's going on, and we need to have a real conversation about who those
people are, what they're searching for, and whether we're providing something
that's really compelling for them to click on.


Likewise the brand and domain. People have a hard time hearing this, and for
any of you out there who are consultants, or agencies, or are a marketer who
joined an organization, you know that there's nothing harder than going to your
boss, or your board, or the client and saying, "Your baby is just ugly. Nobody
likes your brand, and people don't enjoy interacting with it, and they don't
have a positive association with it. We're going to have to change that if we
want to move the needle on any of these other tactics."


This is true in social. It's true in content creation, and content
marketing. It's true in SEO for sure, and remember that brand bias is one of the
strongest signals. A lot of people say, when surveyed and when they do tests,
that the domain name, the brand is what biases their click, and they might click
on something lower if it has a better brand association for them.


Likewise user experience and design. One of the most fascinating case
studies, and unfortunately I can't talk about fully, transparently, because this
is an interaction that I had with someone who did not give me permission to
disclose it. It's a big brand. It's a brand that you've heard of, a site that
you've heard of, and they had this experience where their user experience
changed at one point, and they made a conscious decision to change it. It was
providing sort of a worse experience for people coming to them for search
results, but they were getting a higher conversion rate as a result of how they
changed the experience, and Google just dropped them way down. Their search
traffic cratered and fell off a cliff. They had anticipated that they would be
hurt by it a little, but certainly not this much, and that's speaks to the
quality of user experience that you're providing.


If Google sees lots of people go and visit your page and then come right
back to the search results and click on someone else, that's a really bad signal
for them. So if you're not answering that query and doing a great job from the
landing page of delivering value, Google sees that. Whether you're using Google
Analytics or not, they see it from people coming back to the search result and
clearly being unsatisfied, clicking other listings more frequently than they do
when they click on someone else's result first. That tells Google you're not the
right match, and so you want to make sure that you're delivering that sort of
user experience.


Another thing that I see sometimes is people saying, "I have more links, for
more linking root domains to my page than they do." Okay, but let's examine a
bunch of things about citations, and I don't just mean direct links. I also mean
mentions, brand mentions and brand association mentions, and I also mean things
like social shares and social mentions, because remember these are all being
taken into account, either as a first order direct impact or a second order
effect.


So I like to ask about quality. Are those coming from high quality sites?
Are those references high quality? Are they really saying this is a good
place to go for this? Remember, Google has started using things like sentiment
tracking and sentiment analysis to determine are people really pissed off at
this brand? If so, that's not actually a mention that I want to make them rank
higher.


I'm looking at quantity and that's certainly something that all of us can
track pretty easily.


Variety, this is one that's tough for people. What they see is hey everyone
out there is linking to me. Well, are they all exactly the same kind of stuff?
Like no news sites are linking to you. No blogs are linking to you. No social
shares are coming to you, but a bunch of small business websites that use your
widget on their page, maybe you've got some sort of a tracking widget or you
have a WordPress plugin, or something like that, but there's no variety.
Everything that links to you is of one particular kind, and years ago, this
tactic totally worked. Now it's much tougher. If you don't have that broad
sentiment of lots of people saying nice things and lots of kinds of people
saying good things about you and linking to you, it can be tougher to win.


Also acceleration rate. Sometimes I see folks who have a really strong site,
a really strong page, and they're seeing someone with only a few links, who's
relatively new popping up, and they're go, "What's going on here? How are they
getting so far ahead of me?" The answer often times is well, their acceleration
rate is higher. You're growing links at sort of this rate, and they're growing
links at this rate, and even though you might be up here in terms of links, and
they're way down here in terms of links, that growth rate is something that's
taken into account, especially if it's coming fast and furious, because it
suggests to Google this is really interesting right now. Lots of people might be
interested in this today, this week, this month.


Next, I look at content quality and usefulness. When I'm addressing that, I
want to know does the content address the searcher's intent? One of the
challenges that people have a lot of time is when they've got commercial
products especially. So, for example, let's say that you are selling backyard
chicken coops. Your competing with folks like Williams-Sonoma and
BackyardChickens.com, and you see content outranking you. You've got to be
realizing, oh there's a lot of people who are not looking to buy this product,
but are merely interested in set up and design and learning more about it. Can I
offer that educational, or resource-based, or news-based, or just design based
type of content as well? Should I be blogging about this in addition to having
my commercial page about it, and maybe both of those can help me perform better
in the search results.


Does the content provide great or unique value than anyone else? I actually
did a whole Whiteboard Friday on providing unique value. I'll let you guys watch
that one. That's a pretty good Whiteboard Friday on this particular topic. But
it could be the case that even though you've got a great page, with great
pictures, great video, how to set up, all this good stuff, it's not unique.
There are seven other people in the top ten who do almost exactly do the same
thing, and you're not providing unique value. You need to stand out. You have to
be the exception to the rule if you want to outperform, and that's often why you
see stuff that looks like it doesn't have the metrics to perform doing so well.


Last thing, ask a little bit about results biasing. Remember that if you're
doing a search, if I'm doing a search from Seattle, Washington, I might see a
lot of Seattle-based and local companies in here, even if it's not the maps and
local results, because that local impact, Google knows where I'm coming from,
where my IP address is. If I'm using a mobile device, they know nearly exact
where I am. That kind of biasing can hurt. So I like to append. You can do a
search that appends something, like &gl equals your country code, onto a search
that you uses say .co.uk. So I might go Google.co.uk?search=chicken+coops&gl=us,
and now I've said put me in the UK. No wait, put me in the back in the U.S., and
now there's no localization, and I can see what the national, sort of geographic
picture is, the non geo-biased results. If it's geo-biasing that's going on,
it's really going to be very, very hard to compete in those geo markets unless,
you have a local presence in that market, and for a lot of searches, that's what
Google's doing, and the best you can hope for is be the national brand that
performs somewhere in here.


Also, look for mobile biasing. Remember that Google has said recently that
they will discount or not rank you as well if your site doesn't perform quickly,
have responsive designs, do well on mobile devices. So that might mean that if
you're seeing a large amount of mobile searches, be careful, that's something
you definitely need to test.


And finally verticals. Sometimes Google sees that, hey, when people are
searching for a particular keyword phrase, they really want video. They really
want news. They really want images. If your page doesn't have some of those
features, you might not perform well even in the normal search results. Video
snippets a lot of the time can help folks to perform in those types of results.


So these are all questions you can use to ask yourself in that case scenario
where the numbers just aren't lining up. I really like using Moz's Keyword
Difficulty tool, which has this advanced SERPs analysis, does this big kind of
Excel spreadsheet layout of oh yeah, this is every metric about every kind of
thing possible or imaginable, and now I can really get into those numbers. if
you're seeing those numbers not matching up, this is a next good step to go
through, check mark by check mark, and figure out why you might not be
performing.


All right everyone. Hope you enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I
look forward to the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.




Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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