Competitor outranks us, even though we are better in every measurement

[Rent]

I run a site www.rent.com.au. We are a realestate portal that is dedicated to the rental market across Australia. We have been adding more content to our site and now have close to 80% of all realestate agent listings in Australia. Over the past few months we have spent time on:

• Canonicalisation of our search result and property pages
• Updating titles and descriptions to match key terms
• Adding a internal link structure to promote the capital cities of Australia

Yet despite this work there are sites which are much smaller, have less traffic, and haven't changed for years outranking us for terms like:

• rental properties perth
• houses for rent perth

One of these site is rentfind.com.au. Looking at the competitive domain analysis between us and rentfind we are better in every measurement.

I have compared our backlinks and there isn't too much difference with who is linking to us.

My conclusion is that there is something wrong with the way we are organising our content for search engines. I think that it could be because of our search drill-down from our home page, but before I do anything drastic it would be good to get some feedback on what we could be doing wrong.

[jwdl]

Just a first impression and I'm not by any means an expert here but there are quite a few ads.

[bradkrussell]

Hi Rupert,

Just having a quick glance - if you go a Google search for 'rental properties perth' for your site (enter "rental properties perth site:rent.com.au" in Google) - your top ranking page for that term is http://www.rent.com.au/rent/properties-in-north+perth-wa-6006. I assume you'd want to rank for a page like this, however: http://www.rent.com.au/rental/wa/perth

Is that the case?

The URL http://www.rent.com.au/rental/wa/perth rates as only a 'B" in SEOmoz's on page report card tool. The keyword is only mentioned only 3 times on the page, only once on the body.

There's obviously some issues with that - plus your internal linking structure. You need to direct all 'Perth' type pages to a central Perth location.

Hope this helps,

Brad (also from Perth :P)

[Rent]

Thanks Brad, I suspected something like this. Our site has two link structures - the drill down and the suburb. The idea was the drill down would be useful for users and also provide a way for crawlers to index our site. We would run with any page that would rank - although ideally it would be for the suburb page /rent/properties-in-perth-wa-6000 rather than /rental/wa/perth which is for all suburbs inside the greater metro area.

I think we should set a noindex,follow for all the drill down results, yet that would remove almost half of the pages indexed so I'm not sure if it is a good idea.

[Rent]

My hands are tied about the number of ads. We comply with AdSense for the number of ads we display (3x AdSense for Content or 1 AsC + 3 AdSense for Search).

I would hope that the ads are offset by the content we provide.

[bradkrussell]

Hi Rupert,

I'd be careful doing this. You need to plan your strategy very carefully.

For instance, for the page http://www.rent.com.au/rent/properties-in-north+perth-wa-6006 you still might want that indexed for very specific, longtail searches about rental properties in north perth.

I'd start with some on site optimisation of existing pages. Get more content on whatever page you want to rank for and make sure the keyword is in title tags, alt image tags, headers, body text, anchor text from other parts of the site etc.

Also, try and build links to the pages you want to rank for, that will give Google a good indicator.

The noindex, follow - I would do a full site audit and identify exactly what pages you want to apply this to. This should be done VERY carefully.

Thanks