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Hi GreatFire,

Your competitor has a much stronger site in the following two main areas:

• More backlinks (resulting in a higher PR)
• More social mentions

Focus on building more backlinks by researching your competitors domain with Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO. Keep up your activity in your social circles, and also get going with Google+ if you haven't already.

You should also fix your title tag to include the target keyword at the start - not at the end. So it would read something like 'Great firewall of china - bringing transparency from greatfire.org'

Looking through your site you don't appear to have that much content (this was also mentioned in your Google Support thread) so I would focus on building out the content on the homepage and also further developing your blog. For example your 'Wukan Blocked only on Weibo' blog post is not really long enough to generate you much referral traffic. Larger authority articles of 1000+ words plus with richer content (link references, pictures, Google+ author/social connections) etc will help you far more.

Conduct the relevant keyword research for your blog posts in the same way you did with your root domain. This will keep your website niche focused and generating lots of similar 'china firewall' terms.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi Emerald,

For local based queries being hosted in Australia, combined with a com.au domain, you will get an edge over the competition. Especially if the keyword choice is weak and the competition are using generic top level domains (.com/net) hosted outside of Oz.

That said, as you mentioned Google Webmaster Tools does a good job with geo targeting. As you are already using a local TLD, the default should already be set to Australia.

I had a quick look at some of the shared hosting options available to you, and the prices are on par with the big names in the US:

http://www.crazydomains.com.au/web-hosting/

http://www.digitalpacific.com.au/hosting/personal-web-hosting/

That said, you need to decide if your website will only ever deal with the Sydney area - if you are planning to expand globally you will need to define a new strategy. An Australian hosted website will load slower for the rest of the world, so if you are expecting global traffic in the future you may wish to consider a CDN (content distribution network, e.g www.maxcdn.com) to distribute your content to local servers.

There are plenty of options available to you however, more local TLD's, country specific sub folders etc that are outside the scope of this Q&A.

Another point to help boost your local presence will be to get as many local citations as possible. This is important from a 'local seo' perspective, so take the time to get listed. Here are few examples for the US & UK market:

http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

And more specifically for you, the Australian market:

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/local-seo/australian-citations/

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

HI Richard,

While it is commonly regarded that a keyword loaded URL is a ranking signal and beneficial to rankings, you would really want your full keyword target 'food truck franchise' in the URL to get the full benefit you are referring to.

That said, Google is placing stronger focus on 'brands', and the leading SEO's feel keyword loaded domains will hold less value over the coming months/years.

Looking at your website, 'Food truck' on its own is quite generic and will generate a lot of irrelevant traffic even if you did rank well with it. I would focus your efforts on 'offsite' SEO and link building related to people looking for franchise/new business opportunities via blogs, guest posting, local business forums, startup/entrepreneurial forums etc etc for your 'food truck/business franchise' related keywords.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew