Competitor is climbing google faster then me utilizing an RSS feed?

[Jon_Gibb]

Hello everyone,

I am fairly new to SEO (I've learning as much as possible the last 2 weeks!) and its a fun and interesting process thats already helped immensely with my website thanks to the community members for answering questions.

I am a wedding photographer and videographer on Kauai, and as with most photography sites we are fairly image heavy text light (Working to change that as we speak).

That being said my competitor www.joshuagrantrose.com (my site is www.balihaiphoto.com) is growing his organic results very quickly. Is this due greatly in part to this Parent directory which then leads to single pages like this of images?

With how many single pages there are like this linked in the background of the site with Im assuming with descriptive and proper text, keywords, and so on of each alum like this (lots and lots of images and pages/links).

If someone could help with understanding this or implementing it would be of great help as I've only gotten my feet wet with SEO and don't want to be making wrong assumptions or analysis!

Many thanks for any ideas or insight everyone, -Jon

[MattAntonino]

Hi Jon,

Former wedding photographer here myself so I know exactly what you're going through. It can be hard to watch someone jump ahead of you or start to make huge progress when you aren't.

That said, let me address a few differences on the sites to help you a bit more.

He has 185 pages of content indexed, you have 19. That's 90% more content. Most of this is long-tail keyworded traffic going to things like Waimea wedding photography blog posts, Poipu beach blog posts, etc. That sort of content really helps and fleshes out your site more. It definitely establishes him right off the bat as more experienced / expert in the area.

His homepage title is much better & cleaner. Yours has two pipes - one of which leads to nothing. | <- that thing.

Many of his titles include the word "photography" where most of yours include "photo & film."  Spamming the same keyword over & over isn't necessary but since he's varying the locations & all that, it's working well for him. In several cases your over-use of the photographer/y keywords actually get you into some trouble.

According to Majestic, I see exactly one live link for you: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=balihaiphoto.com  That's not much authority to rank you for anything.

Your domain also has some old Chinese spam/links attached to it. http://2.1m.yt/KSwroiP.jpg mostly from it's history: https://web.archive.org/web/20020926015757/http://www.balihaiphoto.com/

You have some duplicate content going on:

• http://joshuagrantrose.com/nicole-ryan/
• http://joshuagrantrose.com/gallery/nicole-ryan/

Which will be problematic when you have this little authority & this few links.

Anyhoo - that's quite a lot of info to start with. If you want, add me on Facebook where I share quite a few industry-specific tips including this marketing guide for photographers which is a bit outdated now but the concepts should still apply. Happy to help if you need more.

[Jon_Gibb]

Hello Matt!

Thank you for the in depth response with great insight to take action with! I started removing the over the top keywording for more specifics, started removing bad/ no longer live URL's, and will continue to submit indexes of the site to get a higher rank + more long tail keywording for the blog as that becomes more structured.

Also I downloaded your PDF and will be diving into that today to apply to the site.

I did have another question for you, at this point would it be more wise to concentrate on external links from other higher ranking vendors here or, after the website gets cleaned up (title, more longtail keywording, and page indexing) to be blogging more and creating more content?

Many thanks again Matt, I will definitely be using your SEO insight to better my business!

[MattAntonino]

I would say the most important is that you only have 1 link and I always say it like this: you need to be listed where you need to be listed. Local sites, wedding sites, where are your competitors? search their URL in Google or using a tool like Moz and find their links. See what you can easily mimic and expand from there.

Content & blogging will come and need to be done - but the "in between times" are great for link building. (Or, hire a wedding/photography link builder and do the blogging/content yourself.)