Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin

[jasef]

Hi all,

so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands.

We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more.

• We always write unique content  for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product

• we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags.

• We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content

• Recently we have concentrated to ensure that  page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100

• We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc).

• product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible.

From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car

Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally).

So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping?

Thanks for any comments and / or help.

[residualboulders]

would love to hear what folks have to say about this as I have seen the same issue with our website for the main target keywords in our industry. We went from top 3 to graudual delcline to page 3 and for a couple of words we are completely gone. Like you we specialize in our products and have always outranked the big brands - not any more. Google must push up who spends most on ads

[IEmpresas-92933]

I´m watching you on 9º position for "portable DVD players"

[IOSC]

Hey Jason,

I have been studying this SEO stuff for the past 10 months ( so I am no expert), and the conclusion I am coming to is that you have to play Google's game (as it seems like you are doing) while constantly looking for other sources of traffic/ customers.

My feeling is that Google wants the commercial landscape to essentially look like a shopping mall -- minimal effort to find what you need (Hmmm.... I need a new DVD player. Oh there's Best Buy! I'll go there, I've heard of that place).  So small business needs to try to differentiate as it does in the real world

But just the eye test on your homepage...(take this with a grain of salt, I'm just trying to help)

i don't like the vertical "Sale" banners they look cheesy, and the moving reviews -- 1) they are too fast/ impossible to read and 2) I always look at Amazon and Zappos, and what do they do? Reviews = Stars.  Also if I'm nitpicking, the product photos on the homepage are a bit on the small side

Also this product:

Denver TCU-203C portable stereo with USB - Pink

is listed as out of stock ...so? what do if I want that? Is there something similar?

Just some thoughts...