How can i compete with a competitor whose ranking better only coz of older site

Marketing
1

This one is my first real SEO project and it has already made me go nuts. The problem is that the the niche i have is not so technical and neither do i expect much of the users searching for this online. I did deep down research but just couldnt find the right keyword. My competitors didnt have much keywords and pages either but they are ranking on the top just because they made their websites a long time ago.
Talking to my client, he’s suggesting some very technical keywords which i dont think my target users will be typing in search engines. This may sound silly but trust me, this is a fact i have to consider. Keyword research doesnt give me much hope. I took down all the keywords from my competitors and added a lot of new ones, but m still not satisfied. Any suggestions ??

My site is 3 months old and google has indexed all of the pages in my site. But the only keyword search it is showing on is when i search for the site’s name itself. There are many single paged website with much less keywords than me showing up in the search results. I dont think mine is listed at all as i have went as far as 20 pages deep in search results. Is this because site is too young or i need to do some more SEO ??

2

[FONT=verdana]There are a number of points here.

First, it is unlikely that the competitor’s site is ranking well “because they made their websites a long time ago”. The age of a site might well affect its ranking, but by itself it doesn’t ensure a high position. Similarly, your own site’s lack of success is not because it is “too young”.

The more important point is the choice of keywords. There’s only one clear answer to that. The keywords you need to optimise must be the ones that potential customers are likely to search for. You must put yourself in the position of those customers, and figure out what you would search for if you were looking for the product or service in question.

You say you didn’t like the technical terms that your client suggested. You might or might not be right about that, but remember that your client knows his products (and, presumably, his customers) better than anyone. The client is usually the best person to know what keywords to optimise. There’s no guarantee that he will be right, but you should at least take his suggestions seriously.

Finally, you need to look at your competitor’s site, and see if there is anything that you can do better. If you are selling the same products, there’s no point in just posting the same product descriptions. You need to provide additional value in some way. That might be customer reviews, or more detailed information, or something similar.

Actually, I was reading about a similar case earlier today. You might like to take a look at the article I was reading:
http://www.highrankings.com/get-ahead-in-google-334

Mike
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3

I, for a long time, have felt domain age seems very important when ranking a site. I have seen sites which I just couldn’t figure out did well apart from that aspect. They had very little content, broken pages, not a huge amount of backlinks, so what else could it be.

This was the day, not so long ago, when you could use yahoo explorer. Since a few Google updates, some of these sites have deservingly dropped IMO.

Your site is young, but you should be ranking for keywords that aren’t that competitive. Use Adwords to check the competitiveness of the keyword. I ranked quite high quite soon for these type of keywords.

Everything has changed now and I think a lot of people are scared to build links since Penguin, but building links is still a key part of SEO. Build them in the right places and slowly. If you can, create regular content to the site, and have your keywords spread across these pages in a sensible fashion.

It is very frustrating and I replied to your post as I was obsessive about all this in the early days too. Look at it as a long game (hopefully) keep doing what your doing, invest time in the right areas and do the right thing and hopefully you will see you site start to rank. I’ve gone from PR0 to PR 4 in about a year, but it’s been a lot of hard work. PR before someone jumps all over this is just one factor, but it’s a good indicator of how your site is doing, which can go up or down.

Content/Links/Structure are the things you should be concentrating on. 3 months is very early days unfortunately. Create sitemaps, submit every new page to google/bing e.t.c and get some deep linking to other pages. Try to get people to naturally link too which I understand might be hard in your niche.

Things change all the time, site go up, go down disappear. I personally think that GOOGLE still don’t know what they are doing are always changing thing because they are always getting gamed. I’d hate to have their job. To this day I still see useless results returned.

4

Go for lesser searched terms that still have some volume - like long tail keywords or variations.

5

Now thats something which would require a little tactics. you need to search keywords which have adequate searchers and low competition. You can do this by using google’s keyword research tool. You could also analyze your competitors website and choose the keywords accordingly. Hope this helps you.

Cheers

6

You can use other keywords and do not directly compete with the other sites. You have to work double the way you think your competitor does and keep your reputation high.

7

You really should consider those long tail keywords there. Even if they’re not going to bring you that much traffic, they have a higher chance of converting because they’re looking for something that’s a lot more specific. Since we’re talking about a client here, is he/she trying to sell something? If yes, then I would really suggest those long tails. It’s a big miss if you’re not going to use them.