What else: struggling with google position

[AdamJamesCytronex]

Hi.

I understand everyone is offering their time for free here so any advice or support is much appreciated.

http://www.cytronex.com
PA 44  ||  mR 4.6  ||  mT 5.73  ||  986 links from 43 Root Domains
DA 33  ||  3,942 links from 71 Domains

We've dropped from position 25ish to position 70ish in keyword searches for 'electric bikes'. I've tried everything and I just don't understand! It's genuine content, the actual product is increasingly popular, we have several links from sites which are (well, to my mind) reasonable quality.

I've only just been brought in to look at this and my lack of any SEO or web experience is not putting my boss off expecting an instant solution As I'm only just getting to grips with it, Analytics was only installed about a month ago so I can't pin point a moment when it dropped.

We're consistently out-positioned by sites with lower PA/DA scores.

Any insight anyone might have would be amazing!

Thanks
Adam

[JacobFunnell]

Hi there

A few thoughts on 'electric bike':

You've got a huge amount of keyword cannibalization going on. Have a look at your title tags - you've got 'Cytronex Electric Bikes' at the front of most of them. That's some of the most important space on your site's page, it needs to be used wisely. Put whatever keyword(s) each page is targetting there. You'd be better off having something like:

Electric Bikes | Cytronex

Electric Bike Reviews | Cytronex

Light Electric Bikes | Cytronex

etc.

Also, you're in a very competitive niche - a search reveals lots of highly SEO-ed pages. I can't imagine you were getting much traffic when you were at 25-ish anyway. Your boss needs to understand dropping from page 3 to page 7 is nowhere near as bad as dropping from 1st position to 3rd - at least in real revenue.

You do have some links from some relevant sites. But your inbound links could use a bit more keyword rich anchor text on inbound links. I've had a look, and your inbound anchor text is mostly your brand name. In an aggressively SEO-ed niche, that's going to hurt.

Google Adwords estimates a million global searches a month for that term. That's high and that's why the competition is so high. Nobody can reasonably expect you to compete with agency-managed sites, especially if you're new to this.

How long have you been looking at this drop? Big changes, especially in the lower rankings, aren't that unusual. All the more so in competitive (ie highly spam-ridden) niches. You're at the sharp end of algorithm changes. You'll need to measure this for a longer time before really freaking out about it.

So my main advice would be to get some better anchor text links. You're getting some good media coverage - see if you or a PR person can get a few anchor text-rich links in from good sources. That'll make a difference.

You should also definitely try targetting some less competitive terms as well as getting rankings for 'electric bikes'. Targetting the entire site at that one term isn't likely to help.

Have you considered adding a blog, a resources section (etc) which can contain some easier keywords? 'Best electric bike', 'fast electric bike' etc. You already rank well for 'lightest electric bike', you could try picking up some variants of that. Much fewer searches, but a lot better chance of ranking.

Being fast seems to be a Unique Selling Point for your bikes, so I'd target anything related to that - 'fast electric bike, power electric bike' hard.

Also you don't seem to have any of the synonyms for bike - pedal bike, push bike etc. - anywhere on your site. Your customers may use that language so so should you.

[RikkiD22]

Hi Adam,

Your right, you had have a very solid DA and PA and there are certainly competitors in the top 10 results with similar kinds of authority. Also the design of your site looks very nice.

One problem I can see by using http://www.opensiteexplorer.org is that all your anchor text is brand related. Anchor text is one of the key ranking signals which indicates what your website is about and none of your refer to 'electric bikes'.

Of course your 'raw' number of links (by total and root domains) is lower than those in the top 10 results too, which is also another ranking factor which you could improve.

Hope this helps,

Rikki

[AdamJamesCytronex]

Thank you, that's a very thorough response. I will take some time to digest and implement your suggestions.

Thank you again. Adam

[JacobFunnell]

No problem. I know how hard it is to start in the deep end. Best of luck.

[RankStealer]

Can I ask what things have you tried?

How many visitors were you getting when you were ranked 25 and how many are you getting now?

You want to be aiming to be on the first page (spots 1 - 3 ideally) going from 25 - 70 will make hardly any difference in actual visitors imo.

Do you know when this drop occured?

If the product is becoming increasingly popular it could be a fact that other sites are moving up due to relevance and you down and you need to adjust your approach a little.

Another thing is alot of your competitors have the words "bike" or "electric" in their domain name and this helps too, you don't.

Anchor Text for you is REALLY important so every link you get from now on make sure it says Electric Bikes or Buy Electric Bikes (as that what you want people to do buy your bikes)  You will rank for your brand name with any issue so try to avoid any further links with your brand name.

I would even go as far as changing the tab that says "bike" to "Electric Bikes" also.

++++++++++

As a side note:

When you get visitors to your site I feel you will have a issue with converting as many as you "could" because your site isn't very friendly it shouldn't be on black it makes it very hard to read but you may not deal with that nor want to talk about that yet....