Any advice on how to beat this site.

C

Crotalus

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Hello BHW!

We have been pushing hard for the keyword in the photo. We are a manufacturer of the exact keyword and our site is over 10 years old. We have a very active blog that puts out handwritten content every day around the keyword and other topics that are related. (outdoor hard goods). As you can see the number 1 site has a very weak backlink profile, they do not update the site, and our on page according to Semrush and SeoSurfer is better. The backlinks they do have are spammy forum links. We have some very strong links, Shape magazine, Forbes, etc etc. And well you can see we are very far behind them in ranking this keyword.

Positions 2 and 3 are REI and Walmart. 4 is Amazon, then 6-10 are sites very similar to ours. They have had this spot for over a year, and, well we would like it haha.

Keyword Position.png
 
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What type of BL have you been building to the target page?
I see you have over 1000 coming from 96 root URL. Working the ratio doesn't make sense.
 
We actually have never built backlinks, they are all-natural. Most of them are forum links from popular outdoor sites. I think that is why the ratio is so skewed. We are a niche market of the outdoor world, and there are only so many forum sites that people are active on. We started to naturally get backlinks from these sites over the last 10 years.

A little more context also. We have only started to try to gain organic traffic in the last year, that is when we started to add content every day. Before that, we only cared about our B2B, and not directly to consumers.

In the last year we have also created blogs on Medium, WordPress, etc filled them with good tier 1 content, and then ran RankerX blasts to those sites. Not sure if that will have any bearing on what we are seeing.
 
Are you aware that backlink crawlers like ahrefs can be blocked from crawling websites? That is probably why you can’t see the links the website is ranking with. Because it’s a PBN that is blocking black link checking tools.
 
Well Poop, I was not aware of crawlers being blocked. Dag nabit.
 
Crotalus said:
Well Poop, I was not aware of crawlers being blocked. Dag nabit.
Click to expand...
Are the spammed web 2.0s where your backlinks are that you mentioned indexed in google? Medium articles are a waste of time since they are no index and no follow. This could be why you are not ranking.
 
Zombie Pop said:
Are the spammed web 2.0s where your backlinks are that you mentioned indexed in google? Medium articles are a waste of time since they are no index and no follow. This could be why you are not ranking.
Click to expand...
Yep all the Web 2.0' are indexed. And good to know about Medium, thank you! No more wasting time on that one.
 
Topiano said:
What type of BL have you been building to the target page?
I see you have over 1000 coming from 96 root URL. Working the ratio doesn't make sense.
Click to expand...

What is a good ratio according to your experience?
 
Have you compared their content to your own?

Searchers intent is important now and for some reason, Google feels their page is a better representation of what the searcher wants. So, do a small audit comparison.

Check their page with SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs then compare the results.

How diversified is your backlink profile? Do you have a tiered link set up?
 
PHPInjected said:
Have you compared their content to your own?

Searchers intent is important now and for some reason, Google feels their page is a better representation of what the searcher wants. So, do a small audit comparison.

Check their page with SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs then compare the results.

How diversified is your backlink profile? Do you have a tiered link set up?
Click to expand...
We have been using Surfer to write the content, and with Surfer our content is better than what they have on these two pages. And then we have silos built for content, with one silo dedicated to building content for this keyword.

Our backlinks could use work for sure, and I think that may be where I need to focus more attention. I am just not quite sure where to get started.

I also think time might be an issue, like I said we have only started to dive into fixing our SEO and content in the last year. And we are slowly gaining keywords and traffic, and hopefully another few months we can get on page 1.
 
Crotalus said:
We have been using Surfer to write the content, and with Surfer our content is better than what they have on these two pages. And then we have silos built for content, with one silo dedicated to building content for this keyword.

Our backlinks could use work for sure, and I think that may be where I need to focus more attention. I am just not quite sure where to get started.

I also think time might be an issue, like I said we have only started to dive into fixing our SEO and content in the last year. And we are slowly gaining keywords and traffic, and hopefully another few months we can get on page 1.
Click to expand...

If you're confident that your content is optimal for ranking, then the next step is to analyze the quality of your backlinks.

Mostly what I advise is something along the lines of:

Backlinks should be tiered/layered
- tier 1: DR 40+ from real, active websites & guest posts, niche edits, etc.
- tier 2: DR 15+ from web 2.0, social bookmarks, edu links, wiki's, press release etc.
- tier 3: Lower quality links such as forum links, auto-approved blog comments, etc
 
I think you should try some google sites backlinks it can boost your rankings pretty good.
 
Have you over optimised your content, keyword ratios, internal linking, anchor text ratio's etc etc. You could be pushing yourself down by going too heavy.
 
fasttrak said:
Have you over optimised your content, keyword ratios, internal linking, anchor text ratio's etc etc. You could be pushing yourself down by going too heavy.
Click to expand...
Yes, I think we did do that at first, maybe back from Jan-Mar, since then we are trying to be much more natural. I will look at our internal links again and see if they are over-optimized. Is there a tool to help with this, or is it just old-fashioned work?
 
Everyone on this forum will tell you to spam more backlinks, etc.

But my guess would be it's the difference of on page SEO - content, and relevancy, etc.
 
PHPInjected said:
Backlinks should be tiered/layered
- tier 1: DR 40+ from real, active websites & guest posts, niche edits, etc.
- tier 2: DR 15+ from web 2.0, social bookmarks, edu links, wiki's, press release etc.
- tier 3: Lower quality links such as forum links, auto-approved blog comments, etc
Click to expand...

Seconded on what's been said by PHPinjected,
Alternative, I would piggyback on top 1-5 target pages BL profile to see what contextual links they're building and find backlinks with "in-content" anchor using Ahrefs.

Using the filter above by @PHPInjected , average of DR30+ putting the keyword competition into consideration. Filter out the list of links you're currently not having a link. Since links is one major attribute of ranking pages on SERP.

You're piggy backing on have seem to work for others.

kimy said:
What is a good ratio according to your experience?
Click to expand...

You should have a ratio of 1:1 i.e One BL targeting your landing page. There are case where BL get autogenerated by spammy blogs , you honestly don't have total control over that.

You might require further audit to see if you need disavow or leave as-is.
 
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