Non Moving #1 Website

[fordy]

Hi Guys,

Bit of an odd one we have recently undertaken our SEO in house (6-7 Months) and since doing this have had some great results, we have identified our competitors utilising Ahrefs, Moz and other tools that we have selected. However we have come up against something that we really cannot work out.

1. One of our competitors ranks for everything related to there term on their website and industry at position #1

2. They are not actively doing SEO, Poor backlink structure from the research that we have carried out

3. No fresh content being generate

I was wondering if someone would perhaps mind spending 5 mins having a quick look to see what you think as i can't think what we might have missed.

Tim.

[Hughescov]

Hi Tim,

What are they site addresses?

[fordy]

Hi Shaun,

You happy for me to PM you the address?

Tim.

[Hughescov]

Tim - You can PM me the address if you like.

It is of usually no harm to post it here so others are also able to help.

[gazzerman1]

I am seeing this a lot recently.

Do they have any good social mentions/activity?

[fordy]

Absolutely chuff all! They have recently have gained 1000 facebook likes but very very little social signals as far as sharing and RT's go nothing

They have a couple of other domains but again nothing special that but to do carry links through, I have checked there is no T1, T2 or Tier 3 Links.

There is nothing untoward about it, we just can't find out why google would rank it better.

Tim.

[gazzerman1]

Do those domains interlink and provide juice to the main site?

[fordy]

yes, but we are talking very little amount i would have thought the sites are just not optimised either and another couple of sites that have been setup with site wide links to there main domain.

Main site has 500 back links 20000 crawled pages, however most of these are down to filters and parameters and 30 referring domains

3 other linked sites

• 1 providing 160 back links
• 2 providing 5 each

[gazzerman1]

Send me the link I will take a quick look

[Hughescov]

Two things I have noticed.

Your site speed is quite slow. I used tools.pingdom.com. Although your page size is quite small it takes 4.51seconds to load with time to first byte 2.73seconds. There is an blog post about that here. It could be server related.

Secondly, the other site has a lot more high quality links to it, giving it a higher domain authority which may also be interlinked with the social side that Gary mentioned.

Maybe these will help you in your search for #1

[fordy]

Hi Shaun,

Thanks for having a look it's very much appreciated, i'm currently aware of the server speed and it's something that i need to sort out sooner rather than later!

I do take you point about there domain authority however if you look at some of the other sites DIY.com, wickes.com, bathstore.com have a huge domain authority compared to the link of the site i sent you.

But they still persist to be there on page one for short tail and long tail, it's not so much me i'm worried about however we are slowing increasing our domain authority and moving up the ranks.

Do you think it's because it's a niche site?

Tim.

[Hughescov]

Yeah, the likes of Wickes etc do have a high domain authority but they're not focusing on these specific search terms. They are appearing because they are closely related. If they did focus specifically on each search term I'm sure they would be number 1.

I'd suggest building up your long tail, maybe slightly varied to your competitor so that you do trump them at the top and just continue down the path of progression. They've probably been there a while and Google has no reason to shift them if people are clicking onto their site and finding what they want.