Rankings lower than expected

[rowleysit-259892]

It's an age old question, "why is my site lower in the ranking than theirs"

But in this case, I'm really not sure!... and we perform the SEO on both sites in question.

The problem site is www.esp-machinery.co.uk

We are looking for ranking for phrases such as Used Machine Tools, Grinding Machines, Drilling Machines, Used Lathes etc.

We aren't getting it as high as we have already with another customer of ours:

www.bwmachinetools.co.uk

We perform the SEO on both these sites, yet we've put far more work into the ESP one, and still not getting very far.

There are more linking domains to ESP than BW, in truth the BW site has a higher mozrank, but by only a single point.

We did not build the ESP site, whereas we built the BW one.

There have been some URL problems with the ESP site, but we have hopefully improved things enough working with their original developer to be on the right track now.

Any advice most welcome.

[AlanMosley]

What about the content of each site, how do they differ?

[rowleysit-259892]

HI Alan, the content is very similar, they should both have their own unique content, but the navigation is structured very similarly.

They are different sites, so there are differences, but it's certainly not like comparing chalk and cheese.

[baptisteplace]

Two quick things I noticed :

On ESP, your top menu, which are the first links of the page, are not about machines. The effect can be seen in the site: request : http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.esp-machinery.co.uk&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozillaofficial&client=firefox-a

You should put the most important menus here : machines ! BW does this.

Second thing : /category/category/sheet-metal-work-machines on ESP vs /sheetmetal-machines.asp on BW. ESP keywords are far from the root whereas BW has a page in the root with the good keywords.

There is several other improvements possible, especially for long tail ranking. For example, you don't have a single item page linked in a category : http://www.esp-machinery.co.uk/category/category/sheet-metal-work-machines. Optimised text on this page is missing too.

[rowleysit-259892]

Hi Baptiste, thanks for putting the time in to look for me, much appreciated.

The ESP site is built in a way which we don't like, but we've tried to get those URLs sorted with their developer. Previously they weren't even showing as static style URLs. with every category page showing as category.php?=......

I read up on root URLs vs. folders within folders URLs, and the suggestion was that it didn't make a difference?

Thanks for the tip on the top nav... although not sure hot I'm going to fix that - I guess some clever CSS perhaps!

[baptisteplace]

I've read several article about keyword posiiton in the url, my thoughts on this is simple : put it close to the left if you don't have a good reason to put it farther.

In your case, having /category/category/ is useless. At least remove one category, right now /category/ is a duplicate of the home. Even if you remove one category, you should put a breadcrumb on the site to make /category/ indexable, and usefull.

My final advice is to have the category slugs in the root, ie : /lathes/. But this means having a good developer which is not the case I guess.

[rowleysit-259892]

Hi Baptiste... yes, we failed to get him to even have one /category/ in there... I do not know why he couldn't do this.....!