Fantastic engagement - poor rankings

[AlphaDigital]

Hi all,

I've got a website that, for the life of me, I just can't get to rank highly: mariart.com.au

Our DA/PA is higher than many of our competitors, and the engagement is amongst the best I've seen (7624 unique visits with: Pages p/visit = 7.28, Bounce rate = 5.26%, though Avg duration is only 2:36).

Have I missed something fundamental here?

Thanks!!

[Davinia22]

Hello.

The first thing that stands out for me is, what are you trying to get rankings for? Are they the right mix of high traffic driving terms vs. low competition. If you aren't targeting the right terms then it doesn't matter that competitors are ranking higher (quality). Also, are you using a ranking tool or a non-personalised search when determining if competitors are ranking higher?

If you are happy with your keyword targets I'd be looking at how traffic is arriving to your website. 7624 visits will be made up of other non-keyword ranking related traffic such as direct traffic, social, referral traffic etc. A nice way to do this is to work out the percentage split between each medium. If you find that your organic traffic is low then you need to review your website to ensure that all basic SEO practices have been completed - this is a must!

Then I'd look at the search queries that are driving traffic to your website and determine the split between brand and non-brand keywords. You can use Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics. But please note that Google (as of about August 2013) have started to report less on this data, so you need to get in and grab the historical information now. I'd focus mostly on non-brand keywords as these are the visitors that you are winning off competitors. Once you have this information you can see impressions and clicks, this will allow you to see if searchers are being served your target keywords and which are being clicked (perhaps you need to revise your keyword targets). It will also show you keyword opportunities - what keywords are Google serving your website up for that get no clicks, perhaps these would be better targets.

Good luck!
Davinia

[katemorris]

How have you gotten your links so far? The strongest ones I see are very exact match looking, on homepages, and therefore I am wondering if they are paid links or other business deals.