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Hi Jarno,

This happened some time ago and I actually exited the business.

In hindsight, what you commented on was exactly correct. At the launch of the business, I had 0 brand queries. A year later, I had over 2000 monthly brand queries.

What happened was that the press covered us in print, but we also became a 'resource' for the reporters. Every time they had a question or were writing an article for something related, for example seasonal trends in classes, or newly popular classes, they reached out to us and would often quote us in their articles.

Interestingly as well, offline articles in the newspapers eventually made their way online and when i found these articles indexed as well, I reached out to my new-found contacts there and they were glad to link the company's name over to the site.

Hi,

Cool question! I previously ran a startup that was essentially an aggregator, something similar to an OTA, but we were aggregating classes instead of properties/homestays. I found that the best way to structure the site was some thing like this:

1. Home (Targeting the biggest, baddest keyword you can find)
https://qualistay.com/

1.2 Category pages
Broad keywords in each category (in your case, 'tenerife south apartments for rent' etc)
You currently have this as https://qualistay.com/properties/tenerife/ 
I'd have gone with creating multiple 'category' pages like 
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/apartments
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/villas
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-north/apartments
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-north/villas

1.2.1 Sub-Category pages
Still relatively broad, but more specific keywords
You didn't choose to sub-categorize these pages even more, but here's what I would have done:
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/apartments/adeje
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/villas/adeje
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/apartments/arico
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/villas/arico
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/apartments/granadilla-de-abona

1.2.1.1 Property pages
Specific keywords
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/villas/playa-de-las-americas/villa-victoria
These pages would tend be targeting the so-called 'brand keyword' of each individual property.

Structuring your site this was enables you to include the targeted keywords in your URLs and enables you to rank almost every single page efficiently based purely on the location of each property. In this manner, you would be able to rank for the top tier keywords which I'm guessing is 'tenerife villas' and 'tenerife apartments', the 2nd tier keywords which would be 'tenerife south villas for rent', 'tenerife south apartments for rent' and the 3rd tier keywords which would be 'playa de las americas villas for rent'. You also get the benefit of ranking for each individual property's 'brand name' like 'villa victora tenerife south'.

If the property happens to fall on the same building, then you can sub-categorize it even further like 
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/villas/playa-de-las-americas/villa-victoria/level-1
https://qualistay.com/tenerife-south/villas/playa-de-las-americas/villa-victoria/level-2

Hope this helps!

Hi Lida,

This is a great question and surprisingly not one that I've seen before too much.

I've been on both sides of this question before. Once as a small business in the hospitality industry trying to outrank Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) on non-brand keywords, and also once where I was running my own startup which was an aggregator/marketplace.

Having given a little bit of experience here, I can tell you that aggregators tend to focus in on fat keywords, which creates tons of opportunity for an individual business to focus on long tail keywords. As a smaller business, I had literally no chance to outrank an OTA on generic keywords. Heck, even trying to outrank them on my own brand-reviews keywords was a challenge. Instead of competing with the OTAs head-on in the fat keywords, I spent quite a bit of time to put together a list of long tail keywords that were ultra relevant to my business. Once I had that, I began optimizing and creating content targeted at these long tail keywords and I saw results almost instantly. The big benefit of targeting long tail keywords ignored by the aggregators is that there is little competition on these keywords, hence you're able to hit them fast, rank and move on to the next keyword to focus on. That was my strategy as a small business.

During my time in my startup, where I was the aggregator, it finally made sense to me exactly why the OTAs focused in on the fat keywords. As a small business, I had maybe 100 or 200 pages indexed. As an aggreagator, I had over 2000 pages indexed in the first month. I had almost no way of optimizing that huge amount of pages for the most relevant keywords for each of them. I chose to focus in on the more powerful 'category' pages which targeted the fatter keywords. I can say though, if I had the time and the resources, I would have done a much more thorough job and eventually gone through that entire index and done the keyword research properly before optimizing each and every page. If that had happened, there was no way I was going to be out-ranked by one of the smaller sites I was aggregating.

Hi Bob,

I've gone through the process of building and optimizing quite a few different websites and I've found that the best backlinks come from good content. I've also done paid (supposed to be a no-no) and outreach link building, so I think I've got a good perspective across all the different approaches.

My personal opinion is that at the very launch of a website, beyond just indexing and on-site optimization, it's a 100% must to have the site linked to on a few good directories or other sites that are connected. For every single site I've built, I've seen fantastic results with this initial push. I believe that all SEOs have a little cache of backlinks stashed away and we all use them sparingly whenever we need to give a new site that first push. With this little bit of a push, I usually see my sites begin to rank within 4 to 5 days on less competitive keywords. To be honest, I don't think that this initial paying for backlinks is an ethical issue or one that can be classified as 'black hat SEO'. I've found it practiced at the top level agencies and it's also something that's recommended in Rand Fishkin's book 'Art of SEO'.

After the initial launch, then comes the real work. How do we get quality backlinks consistently?

Reaching out to other webmasters in the same verticals has had some fantastic results for me as well. I typically do an outreach program that is personal and not a template-based spam fest. Oddly enough, I've had these outreach attempts even grow into marketing partnerships, and even business partnerships. I find that if you reach out authentically to other webmasters or business owners, they tend to respond much better.

I've competed in large markets and also small ones, and I've found that it can actually be a problem for smaller market segments or industries, that you run out of other sites to reach out to. In my previous startup, I found that the source of quality backlink partners ran out after 3 or 4 months of research. At that point, I set up google alerts for specific keywords, and stopped my outreach program and decided to focus on content creation instead.

This was where it really began to pay off in buckets.

For that business and as a startup, I was able to create backlinks from not relevant sites, but even government organizations looking to highlight a particular type of business (educational startups in this case). Creating content like infographics and how-to articles was an extremely good investment as well. We publicized what we deemed to be good content out across our social media, and I found that these continued to generate backlinks even years later. The main reason why anyone would want to link to your site, is that you have something interesting or useful for them to share. I even used myself as 'content', giving interviews to online news portals and blogs, always asking if they would kindly do me a favor and link to my site as part of the article. We also got lucky with one of our seasonal articles. This particular article was shared on our social media and a reporter at the local newspaper came across it. That eventually led to an offline article published about the company, and since offline content eventually gets republished on their site, it also led to a backlink from an incredibly reputable source.

I think that the reason why most SEOs tend to focus on paid or outreach programs is simply because of the amount of time it takes. Writing an email takes at most 10 minutes, while research, writing and creating the graphics for a good piece of content (video, written or otherwise), would take days and not have an immediate payoff.

All said and done, I feel that a solid linkbuilding program should be multi-faceted and not be overly dependent on just one aspect. If you depend solely on outreach as your main source of backlinks, then what happens when you no longer have time to write emails? Eventually, you will still need to focus on content creation.

Hi Bob,

I ran through quickly the site you're trying to rank, as well as the others, in particular InstantPrint.co.uk

The very first thing that stood out to me is the massive amount of links that InstantPrint.co.uk has versus your site FastPrint.co.uk. IP (InstantPrint.co.uk) has (according to the MozBar), 10,908 links from 83 domains, versus your site's 758 links from 115 domains.

Couple of things I can suggest right off the bat here:

1. Keywords ranked on: You've done a great job of pulling out the raw data from SEMRush for the keywords via which the traffic is coming in for. I noticed that according to the data from SEMRush, IP is getting a very large amount of traffic from the keyword 'business cards' ranking 3rd, versus FastPrint which doesn't seem to be ranked on that keyword. Have you pulled the entire list of keywords from SEMRush's crawl of IP and tracking them via Moz? That will be my first step here. To see which keywords IP is ranking above you on. Once you've tracked that for a couple of week and know where you stand, then the next step will come in. The first step I'd take is to identify what are the keywords most relevant to the business. Once I've done that, I've established the main baseline to measure the optimization work to be carried out.

2. Content creation: You've created some lovely tools and infographics, but a side-by-side comparison of the the two landing pages targeted at the keyword 'business cards': http://www.fastprint.co.uk/business-cards/ versus https://www.instantprint.co.uk/businesscards show that IP's landing page for 'business cards' has a Page Authority of 34 versus FastPrint's Page Authority of 24.

One particular item I noted was that IP has placed their key landing pages for keywords like 'business cards', flyers & leaflets', 'banners & POS' etc on their footer, meaning that throughout the entire site, the internal links are continually pointing back to the key landing pages, while FastPrint doesn't. I'd strongly suggest further optimizing the internal linkages pointing to the FastPrint key landing pages.

3. Amount of Links: While it looks like IP has FastPrint beat in terms of the overall amount of links, I realized that the FastPrint site actually has more overall domains linking in to the site. I took a look at the backlinks pointing to IP and FP, and I think there's a lot to be learned here. If you take a in-depth look at the backlink report for IP, I think you'd find a massive amount of links that can also be pointing to FastPrint. Both businesses are in the same field, so I'd strongly suggest you take reference from the sites you've identified and figure out how they earned the backlinks they did, and apply the same to FastPrint.

Hope that helps!

Hi!

Sounds like you did a great job optimizing the new pages! Perhaps what you can do is to check if the pages are indexed? If the new pages aren't indexed, then that might be the reason why they aren't ranking at all. If the previous pages ranked, but the new ones aren't even in the top 50, that suggests to me that the new pages aren't indexed.

The best way to do so is to simply access your Google Webmaster Tools account, then under the Google Index tab on the left, click on the Index Status tab and take a look there.

Here's a great guide to requesting a re-indexing of specific pages too: http://www.websitecouncil.com/get-website-url-indexed-google-minutes/

Hope it helps!

Hi,

Wow, that's a really broad question! (And one that I'd love to have the secret formula too)

In all honesty, I follow a pretty simple framework for optimizing a new site or working on a new project.

1. Find out what's the main Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the site. For example, if it's an e-commerce site, then the main KPI is most likely conversions into sales ($) rather than just traffic. So in that case, the aim is to get ranked for high converting keywords. If it's a local business with no e-commerce function, then localized search ranking for relevant keywords might be best. So find out what's the KPI before anything else.

2. Do the keyword research! This is pretty much the MOST important part to me. Rankings can be worked on and improved, but if you start off on the wrong keyword, it can be a massive pain to redo the entire site, just because the targeted keyword is wrong! I've got the most experience working with e-commerce sites, and what I do typically is to run some traffic for a first batch of targeted keywords via Google Adwords (if it's not too expensive!), to see if the traffic is useful in converting to actual results. AdWords will take a few minutes to set up, but to optimize the site for organic search is a bigger project! If the traffic from AdWords pans out, then it's probably a good set of keywords to work on for organic search too.

3. Once I've established the keywords, the next thing i work on is the on-site stuff. Site architecture, URLs, domains, page titles, content relevancy, internal linkages, the whole works. It might be a while before you look at all these stuff once the site is up and running again, so you want to make sure it's all right and in-place.

4. Prep for the launch of the site by creating all relevant social media pages/profiles. Social's a big part of search too and for overall marketing purposes too. For search optimization, it's also best to ensure that all your social media profiles are linked to the site you're working on.

5. Once the site is live, tap on whatever quality backlinks you have. I'm pretty certain most of us here have a secret cache of backlinks that we secretly hoard. So tap on those to give your new born site that little bit of boost at the start. You can also consider a few (just one or two) directory links. For directory links, I'd highly recommend DMOZ since it's free (might get a link or might not, but definitely worth a try), and Yahoo's directory (paid inclusion at $299/year but actually worth it).

6. Now that everything is in place, this is where the real work begins! Ensure a constant (and quality) presence on social media, continue to create good quality, relevant and most importantly, share-worthy content for the site, build relationships and get links either organically or through social engineering, try to get PR coverage if possible (not press releases, but relevant and hopefully good coverage of the business), and grow your traffic!

Hope this helps!

Hey Issac,

Not necessarily true. The PA is calculated quite similarly to the site's DA. Which means that (as a rough example), the older blog post you checked the PA as 33 on, might have earned more backlinks, been around longer etc. It's not a confirmed thing that the page with your backlink will eventually have the same PA.

PA and DA are interlinked in the sense that DA will affect PA, but often times, you'll actually see a wide spread of pages with different PAs under every site. For example, my site's home page PA is 42, but a lot of my other pages have PAs ranging from 1 to 19, depending on how much emphasis I've put on them, or if they've earned more backlinks over time.

Hope that helps!

Hey everyone!

I run the marketing for an ecommerce marketplace and we're doing good on the SEO front of things, with 60%+ of our traffic coming in via search and we're ranking for some competitive keywords.

I'm really curious about the conversion rate though. Despite intensive googling, I've not been able to find a rough benchmark for conversion rates. Our conversion rate is about 1.2%, increasing as we continue to do more optimization work with regards to the site's usability. While we track other forms of conversions, the 1.2% conversion rate is for bookings through the site, which is our main source of revenue.

Does anyone have a reference guide for conversion rates, particularly for ecommerce marketplaces? I'd like to know if we're doing ok or really bad, and also to take reference from other similar sites to improve our conversion.

Thanks!!

Hi Isaac,

Wanted to chip in here too as I was faced with a similar issue recently. We got featured in the local press a few years ago and had a backlink from a 70+ domain authority site too and wanted to make the most out of it.

What I saw happen might be relevant to you. We plugged the feature on our social media etc. and got a few thousand in referral traffic from that feature, but it died off after a while after then content became less popular (seasonal article). The most valuable thing at the end of it was pretty much that we now had a backlink from a highly authoritative source adding to our site's overall domain authority. We saw a nice jump in our overall site's organic search traffic less than a month after the feature was released. This was due to our overall list of keywords jumping ahead by a couple of positions and getting us more exposure across the board.

TL:DR

Powerful backlink adds to your site's overall domain authority which helps you rank for your targeted keywords site-wide. Referral traffic from same backlink might not last too long, so keep moving and take actions that'll continue to help long-term!

Ecommerce marketplace for local classes here. We have over 3K SKUs on the site and I'd agree with what Dimitrii suggested. As an add-on to what he said, I'd also strongly suggest that you ensure the site's overall SEO architecture is well positioned to rank on a variety of keywords (depending on what your keyword research says of course).

For example,

• Our home page targets the broadest keywords (local classes etc.)

• Category pages targets 2nd tier keywords (baking classes, cooking classes etc)

• Product pages targets long-long-tail keywords (macaron baking class in the east)

I find that this approach works very well for ecommerce sites with a broad range of categories. In your case, Evening Dresses might be a category of it's own, with each SKU page ranking for its own long-tail keywords. As Dimitrii mentioned as well, image search does contribute a fair amount of traffic on it's own, and we've even received backlinks from site-owners who found our image via image search, and credited our site with a backlink

It's best to optimize the images you post up to be as descriptive as possible. Being an ecommerce site owner, I personally know your pain with hundreds if not thousands of SKUs, but cumulatively, it does make an impact and will help!

Hi agsIn,

Domain authority has a ton of other factors beyond just domain age. Rand Fishkin from Moz actually did a great video on it, but for some reason, the videos aren't accessible right now, maybe someone from Moz can check on them? It'll be great to take a look at those videos again.

http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics

Also, I took a look at the site you mentioned, and though it was registered back in 1996 (which is really old), its backlink profile isn't fantastic and includes quite a few backlinks from link exchanges and pay-for-links directories. I think it would be a good idea to take a look at this infographic: http://searchengineland.com/seotable/

I use it as a constant reference point for optimizing a site and it was great for helping me learn more about optimizing sites in general too.

Hope this helps!

Hi brianflannery,

I'm not sure if you've already gotten a response on this, but I actually just went through a similar situation recently. We changed the navigation structure of the site (e-commerce marketplace) significantly, such that previous category URLs that were already ranked (some no longer existed), were removed. I'm not sure how significant a change in your site's navigation you're intending to make, and whether it was as drastic as ours.

We definitely saw negative effects from the change in the site structure, but it lasted for about 2 weeks or so. Our site was really new, only 6 months old at that point, so it took us a significant amount of time to recover from the navigation structure change. Back then, while desperately searching for a solution, I found this article, it might come in handy for you too. Hope it helps!

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3707-SEO-Identifying-the-Impact-of-a-Site-Redesign

I run the digital marketing for a local start-up that's ranking for groups of semi-related keywords. We've been around for about 6 months in beta and have recently (a few days ago) done our official launch. We're starting to get some coverage in local media and I've tried my best to ensure that links to our site are included with a good range of keywords.

What else can I do to fully take advantage of the press coverage that will be coming our way?

Hi Zippy-Bungle,

Personally I think it's definitely worth it. It's great if you've found a vertical directory that lists companies in your relevant industry! When I built my site, there weren't any great backlink opportunities immediately available, so I created business profiles in the few general directories recommended in the book Rand Fishkin co-wrote 'Art of SEO'. These were BOTW, JoeAnt and Yahoo's Directory. I pretty much saw the effect these links had in about a month or so, bringing up my brand-new site up to the first page for bunch of semi-competitive keywords.

Because my site is an online marketplace, I couldn't find any good vertical directories. If your business has a relevant vertical directory like azom.com, go for it! Besides the backlink, they could also bring you organic leads too!

Hope this helps!

Hello!

My website's http://lessonsgowhere.com.sg/ and we're a marketplace for local lessons. I've been working on the site's SEO for maybe 3 to 4 months now, and am seeing some good results.

The one thing that really bugs me right now is that my homepage is ranking for a keyword that I'm trying to target with another page. Specifically, I'm targeting the group of keywords for 'cooking class', 'cooking lessons', 'cooking class singapore' with the category page: http://lessonsgowhere.com.sg/cooking-classes

However, my home page is currently ranking on the first page for local search (Google Singapore), and my category page isn't! On the other hand, the page that I'm targeting for 'baking class', 'baking lessons', and 'baking class singapore' is doing fine and is already in the top 3 positions for the entire group of keywords.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I can do?