SEO having different effects for different sites

[dantemple88]

Hi,

I hope this isn't a dumb question, but I was asked by a local company to have a look at their website and make any suggestions on how to strengthen and improve their rankings. After time spent researching their competitors, and analysing their own website I was able to determine that they are actually in a good position. The have a well structured site that follows the basic search rules, they add new relevant content regularly and are working on their social strategy. Most of their pages are rated A within Moz, and they spend a lot of time tweaking the site.

When I presented this to them, they asked why there are sites that rank above them that don't seem to take as much care over their website. For example, one of their main competitors doesn't engage in any social networking, and rarely adds content to their site. I was just wondering if anyone could shed any light on why this happens?

I appreciate there's probably no simple answer, but it would be great to hear some different input.

Many thanks

[RichardSEO]

Does the other website have stronger authority links? Its more than likely this issue or maybe a 301?

One of my sites with a DA/PA of 30 out ranks a DA/PA 50 site by having a few really strong high authority links. It also has no social media and I only update the content once a month.

Getting a few authoritative links PA/DA 80+ does wonders. Or it could be shuffling from Google this past weekend.

[MikeRoberts]

There are any number of reasons this could be happening. Perhaps they have more high authority links or maybe your site has a lot of links that don't pass much value. Their site could be older and getting a slight boost from that. They don't have social media accounts but they could still have been shared more on social media than your site. The level of traffic, bounce rate and exit % could be better than your site and Google could be seeing them as more relevant for those target terms because of it. Even though they don't update as often, their content could be considered more authoritative. Considering we don't know everything that makes up the ranking algorithm (& its constantly changing) and only really have concepts of the correlation between things, there's no way to definitively state that Tactic X is always the reason one site is higher in rankings for a specific search term than another site.

[ZDAdmin]

Without knowing the URL or the competitors, obviously we have to guess. My money is on they probably have a weaker domain authority and less authoritative links than their competitors. If you want to share the url, I can give you more details, but that's my guess.

[dantemple88]

Many thanks for your answer! I've been reading a number of articles recently about the updates to Google's algorithm. Some people say that link building is a dying art, as Google is focussing on more naturally shared content, where as others say that it's worth spending time on. Is it just that no one really knows?