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What to do if your client has a strong competitor?

by silveroaks
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello. Need help with some SEO stuff I can't figure something out and I'm hoping that maybe there's someone here who could help me.

I'm not new to SEO, I've been doing it since 2004, but I might not be very familiar with some advanced stuff.

I'm located in Riga, Latvia. I have a client here. This client has a competitor. My task is to outrank this competitor for one very specific English keyword in local search.

My client's site is roughly the same age, but has much (MUCH) more quality incoming links, better internal SEO and quality content. But it doesn't even show for this frigging keyword!

The only important differences I'm seeing are these:
1. Competitor has the keyword in their domain name.
2. Competitor's domain is ".lv", while my client's is ".com" (although there's another competitor in search results that has ".com" domain).
3. Competitor is hosting in Latvia, while my client hosts is Netherlands.

This can't be it! Right?

'Open Site Explorer' has us at 40 vs competitor's 30 SEO score
#client #competitor #strong
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by silveroaks View Post

    OpenSiteExplorer has us at 40 vs competitor's 30:

    40 and 30 what?
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  • Profile picture of the author Irn7997
    quite simple do more be more and dominate them until theres no compitition
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    http://500atm.com
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    2 and 3 might be reason enough if you are takking about a local result. Lcal results are determined by region and the competitor has more local signals

    More interesting question to me is why are there so many on this forum taking on clients when you don`t know what you are doing?
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  • Profile picture of the author AriCooper
    Without seeing:

    1) Amount of links and type of links
    2) Age and authority of those links
    3) Anchor text profile
    4) The "on-page" SEO (How Google sees your website, not the visual representation)

    It's really hard to help or even really give you really accurate information.

    It's almost like you said "I can't beat this guy in an arm wrestling contest, I can bench press more than him, I've been doing it longer, but I don't understand why he keeps beating me at arm wrestling!"

    It's technique.

    The MOST important part (and sometimes the little edge you need) is having the "on-page" information that Google reads optimized as best as possible.

    It starts with simple things, like alt-tags for your images that are keywords. H1 Tag with a keyword or part of the keyword in it. The keyword helps if found in the URL, but that is not a biggie. The keyword you are trying to rank for needs to show up sometime early in your content. You don't have to force the keyword in there several times, just make it look natural.

    Once your on-page is the best it can be, then it is just a matter of getting stronger back links, and ensuring your anchor text profile isn't skewed.

    Lastly, if you are trying to rank the site for a local keyword and your site is not local... that will be an issue as Google is looking to serve the most relevant site to the search term.

    It could help if you got a local address in the area and ties that local address to Google Maps in that area and have it connected to your site.

    Hope this helps somewhat!
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