Is My Competitor Beating Me With A Better URL Structure?

[RyanKent]

Greg,

While your competitor appears to have cleaner URLs, the difference is relatively minor. While URLs make a difference, they are just one of the many factors involved with your site's SEO performance. I would recommend looking at other factors.

A large factor involved is your competitors domain name. After checking Google it seems you are being outranked by partstown.com. The domain portion of the URL is given a significant amount of weight and will help your competitor on any "parts" related searches.

A tactic your competitor is using is questionable. Look at the  the bottom of http://www.partstown.com/apw-wyott/parts. Notice there is a "Read more about APW Wyott" link. When you press that link a new window appears with a large paragraph of content which can substantially help their page ranking.

I tried to look at your site but received a timeout error twice. I tried from another pc and browser and received a "could not find etundra.com" message.

[eTundra]

Hi Ryan,

Even though "parts" in their root domain is only a partial match for these keywords that is making the difference???  Wow.  OK.  That explains why they often beat the manufacturer's website as well.

Try looking at the site again.  We experience regular outages like the one you just saw.  I'm sure that's not helping matters either.  It's a constant battle with IT to get that resolved.

[eTundra]

Why is the link to more content questionable?

[RyanKent]

It is a lot of content buried at the bottom of the page which is most likely not seen by viewers. If you were to install tracking analytics to the page, what percentage of readers do you think would actually click on it?

I am guessing the way it is presented it would be in the very low single digits. That is a lot of content to display in that manner.

[RyanKent]

Yes, the keyword in the domain makes a noticeable difference. Some other issues with your site:

• #1 take care of any outages so your site is 99.999% stable

• you show 3 meta description tags. Delete the last two

• you show 3 meta keyword tags. I would recommend deleting all of them

• your copyright date is 2009. It's not a SEO issue per se but it should be udpated.

• your competitor is clearly beating you on content. Try using the SEOmoz LDA tool and comparing your sites.

[eTundra]

Right, from a usability standpoint it's no good, but from a search engine standpoint, can Google tell the difference?

[eTundra]

Thanks Ryan.  The first four are known issues.  I just can't believe it's content that's beating me.  Is it that link with the pop-up paragraph or is there other content you're referring to?

[RyanKent]

All content on the page is considered but the primary issue is the pop-up paragraph.

Step back and read that paragraph then look at your page. As a user which would you prefer to read, that paragraph or the paragraph on your page?

You can also use that LDA tool. The tool can be used as a guide, and not by any means an ultimate way to choose which is the better page. When I compared both pages, I felt your competitors page offered the better content from a pure keyword phrase ranking perspective, and the LDA tool agrees with that assessment. I used "apw wyott parts" as the phrase, which appears to be the phrase you are both targeting.

[RyanKent]

I am sure they have the ability to tell the difference. I can't say for sure Google's feelings on this particular use. If Matt Cutts was to make a video about this method my guess of his response would be something along the lines of "I don't like it, it's not user oriented, but I can't say it's black hat".

This reasoning is why I referred to the tactic as questionable. I would love to hear discussion about this topic from other SEOs.

[eTundra]

Yeah I've used the LDA tool in the past and found it helpful as a guide.  If I had to guess I would say LDA is giving their page a higher ranking because they have the line "Mfr. APW WYOTT" in every part listing on this page.

Meanwhile we have broken our parts up into subcategories to make it easier for actual users to find what they're looking for, and we therefore lose all of the relevant product content to the subcategories.

I think what I'll do is add content below the subcategories on these pages that is both useful to the visitor and keyword rich for the search engines.