How do you explain this in this Keyword Difficulty Report?

[fablau]

Hello here,

I am trying to understand how my site virtualsheetmusic.com can better compete for the keyword "sheet music download" where we used to be 3rd until a few months ago, and now we are at the 5th spot.

But here is my specific question: I can't find an explanation why two of our competitors are ranked before us at the 3rd and 4th spot. Please, look at the attached image (very wide) which shows the Keyword Difficulty Report for this keyword. You can also download a PDF of it here below:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/keyword-sheet-music-download.pdf

We are at the 5th spot, and the two competitors highlighted in pink are the ones I am talking about: I am trying to understand why they are ranking better than us, despite our metrics look much better than theirs. In fact, if I look at the metrics in the report, I can't find an explanation to justify their outrank against us, so there must be something else that the report is missing.

Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome!

Thank you in advance for any help.

Sincerely,
Fabrizio

[keyword-sheet music download.jpg](http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/keyword-sheet music download.jpg)

[BrightHealth]

External links in and linking C-blocks are playing in their favor. Both are still an important metric to look at.

What keyword is this for?

[WesleySmits]

Your metrics in fact look better than the other websites in the list (the ones in red at least).
In a different question you posted here you mentioned that you no-indexed all of your product pages. This could be a reason since i'm pretty sure your product pages can contain a lot of information which you want to be found on.

The overall user experience could be an issue too (Google Panda). Go to your statistics on Bounce rate and overall time on page. Are people happy with what they find on your website or do they leave immediatly?

If they are leaving immediately try to determine why. Is the design of the website not good enough? Are they looking for something completely different in terms of content?

This is a very difficult question to answer without access to information which is not provided in the attached image.
I tried naming a few possible problems.

Let me know if you find something and I hoped i helped in some way.

[fablau]

I don't see that, both external links and linking C-blocks are much lower than mine (I am talking about the sites highlighted in red). Am I missing anything?

[fablau]

Thank you Wesley, actually the only real explanation I have is that we are under a Panda penalization. That's why we have removed some many pages from the index and are hoping to recover in some way with the next Panda update (or Panda algorithm integration).

The bounce rate for our site is always pretty much the same as in the previous years: 45%

Do you think that a Panda penalization could be the "missing" metric here to explain our lower ranking? We have the same kind of problem on many other long tail keyword results targeting specific product pages: we have much lower rankings than many crappy websites!

Thank you again.

[WesleySmits]

Fabrizo, as I just commented in one of your other questions Google Panda is now part of the standard Google algorithm and it isn't a periodic update. You said you were waiting for the next panda update in order to make a recovery. I don't think this is going to work anymore.

A bounce rate of 45% is a very high bounce rate in my opinion. Is this for all pages, the home page, product page?
Where is the bounce rate the highest? From direct traffic, referral traffic or search engine traffic?

I think that two things are not very good for your rankings:

1. You are not being found on your products since they are no-indexed.
2. Bounce rate is one of the metrics Google Panda misses. A bounce rate this high is an indicator to Google that users are not finding what they are looking for at your site. If a user types in a query, clicks on your site, goes back to google and clicks on one of your competitors and they look like their site then it is a clear signal to Google that the other site is more relevant for the user on a given query. If this happens a lot then they can lower your rankings.

Try to find out where the bounce rate is coming from and try to give us here some more information which we can help you with. If anything was unclear, let me know.

[fablau]

Thank you Wesley for your comment on the other thread about the Panda. We have decided to put back all the pages in the index and in the meantime try to differentiate and thick them more. Our traffic was down too much as well as our business was suffering too much that we couldn't keep up.

As for the bounce rate, that is pretty much from all our sources. Direct traffic has actually an higher bounce rate right now (58%), and used to be better in the past (38% in 2009), but on the Google side it is now 46.33% whereas used to be 57% in 2009. Referral traffic is about 50% bounce rate and used to be worse in 2009 at 53%. Please, note that in 2009 our business was going great. 2009 was the best year ever and we always take it as the reference the reference year.

I am aware that we need to get that down furthermore, but it is hard to understand how to do it. If I look at our website, I don't see anything misleading or anything for which users can be scared away, but maybe I need someone that can think more "out of the box".

I really appreciate your help and brainstorming!

All the best,