Why Are My Competitors Outranking Me on Google?

You're listening to a Rocket Media Blogcast. Prepare for launch as we share another great episode. Why Are My Competitors Outranking Me on Google? If your competitors are outranking you in search results, it's most likely because you don't have one or more of the optimized local business listings. Unique quality website content Reputable backlinks, A mobile friendly website Website pages that load quickly. We're going to go over why each problem is so important and how to fix it. Problem number one your local business listings aren't optimized. When Google ranks sites in local search results, it looks at citations, I.e. mentions of your home service business on other websites. The impact of a citation source where your citation comes from comes from can vary depending on the city or market, but outside of Google we see the most impact from sources like Yelp, Facebook, Bing, Foursquare, Superpages, Apple Maps, Google and other search engines get local business information from these sources as well. And actually there's several hundreds of resources at that. Google looks at these citations to validate that your information is accurate. The more citations you have, the better your business looks to Google and the more likely it is to rank. If any of your business listings are inaccurate, outdated or not optimized for SEO, you'll get lower rankings. How to Fix it to optimize your home Service business listings for SEO, make sure you do some of these. Claim your business Most sites will require that you claim your business listing via phone or email. This is important as as verified listings are more trusted and more likely to rank well. Have consistent nap name address phone number information if Google notices the nap info on your website is slightly different from how it's listed on other sites, it could hurt your local ranking. Select Service categories Moz ranks incorrect business category as the second most damaging factor for local SEO as add primary and secondary categories that complete the statements my business is or my business does to improve rankings when users search for those categories. Add photos to your listing. This shows Google that your listing is accurate and up to date, making it more likely to list your business in a search query. Plus, it helps prospects get a sense of what your company is like. Ask for and respond to reviews. Reviews are becoming increasingly more important in local SEO rankings. Google looks at review content, how quickly you respond to reviews, and how many reviews you have. Google also looks at whether you respond to reviews, so be sure to do that. To learn more about optimizing your business listing, check out our article why does my H Vac business not appear in Local search results? Problem number two, you don't have unique quality content on your website. When it comes to ranking well in search results, you need to have unique quality content on your website. Having a lot of duplicate content on your website can hurt your ratings, not to mention your traffic. Here's why. If Google sees more than one page with a lot of the same content, it won't serve both pages in the search results. That wouldn't be a good experience for the user. It will decide which page is most likely to be the best result and serve that one which negatively impacts rankings on the other pages. For example, say you have an AC repair service page and AC installation service page with mostly the same content, similar headlines, supporting content, brand promise guarantees, etc. Google could actually see these as competing pages and deliver the wrong page. Duplicate content can happen maliciously when content is deliberately copied to impact search result rankings, but we don't see that happen very often in the home security home services industry. More often than not, home service sites have non malicious duplicate content on things like brand promise, guarantees, service pages, maintenance plan pages, manufacturing product descriptions. Now it's okay to have some duplicate content. You want to aim for about 60% unique content. More is always better. Once you get to 50% or less, you start seeing rank issues. So how to fix this? Check out how much duplicate content is on your site using something like Siteliner. Just to give you an idea of how this site works, we've tested a site called Morris Jenkins. As you can see, their site has about 7% duplicate content, which is great for home services. If you click on duplicate content, you'll see that your pages have you'll see that your pages have duplicate content. You can then click on each page to see exactly where duplicate content lives. If you see more than 50% duplicate content on your pages, you can improve uniquenesses by doing the following Adding or removing content Think about how you can make a page content more unique. Can you condense or remove a guarantee? Add a customer testimonial, Localize the content Combine and or deleting pages if you have multiple pages or blog posts that are similar, consider combining them into one. You're more likely to rank higher with one high quality page than several low quality pages. Plus, this prevents what's called keyword cannibalization when multiple pages on your site compete with each other. Add tags to tell Google to use a page as the master by adding what's called a canonical tag. You can tell Google that a URL acts as the master copy of a page and is the one that should show up in the search results. Not rank a page or section. By using what's called a noindex tag, you can indicate that Google shouldn't index a page or section on a page, meaning it won't deliver that page or section in search results. Permanently redirecting a page by telling the duplicate page URL to go to the master page, the pages stop competing with each other and the master page has a better chance of ranking well. Problem number three you don't have enough reputable backlinks. Backlinks are time consuming to earn, but the boost they give your rankings is worth it, and a backlink is created when one website links to another. For example, if Website one links to Website two, Website two now has a backlink. Backlinks are essentially recommendations from one site to another. If search engines see a lot of sites linking to another site, they gather that site has valuable content and is therefore worth delivering on search pages. How to Fix It Just like anything else with SEO, quality is better than quantity. You're better off getting links from a dozen trustworthy, authoritative sites than hundreds of sketchy low authority ones. Links from low authority sites damage your SEO rankings, and it takes a long time for your site to recover. You can get reputable backlinks to your home service website by creating valuable content. The best black links are ones that are natural because you don't have to ask for them with editorial backlinks. Other sites link to your content because it's relevant and valuable, which tells Google that your content is worth delivering in such results. Joining associations like the Better Business Bureau. This not only gives you a backlink to your website, but also shows customers that you're licensed and insured. Asking to be listed on Manufacturers or Supplier Websites if you're authorized to install certain products, ask to be listed on the manufacturers or suppliers website. Joining your local chamber of Commerce. You'll likely have to pay to become a member, but it will give you a backlink to your site from the membership directory and show you're involved in the community working with partners. If you have partners or friends in the industry, suggest linking to each other on your sites. Listing your site on industry associations and trade sites like like Air Conditioning Contractors of America or ACCA or the Plumbing Heating Cooling Contractors Association. Most associations will have a membership directory that link to member sites, finally sponsoring local teams, associations or schools. By adding quality links from these local sites, you'll boost both your SEO and your pr. It also helps to be on social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera and review sites like Yelp, Facebook, and Hounds. Some of our backlinks won't directly influence your organic search rankings, but they do verify your nap information, which helps boost your local search rankings. Note Google weighs social links differently and can even index label a page re rankable certain posts on some networks. Make sure you chat with an SEO expert to understand which platforms your customers use before running an SEO campaign. Problem number four Your home services website isn't mobile friendly in the year 2017, Google started making the switch from mobile first indexing. This means that Google first looks at the mobile version of your site instead of the desktop version to determine how you're ranked. If your site doesn't have a mobile friendly version, Google will crawl the desktop version, but the lack of a mobile friendly site could result in lower rankings. So how to fix this? If you have a separate mobile website, make sure that the content is properly mapped and tagged to the corresponding desktop pages or you could lose rankable terms we recommend having a responsive home service website so your site design adapts to the screen size and you eliminate the need for and problems of having a separate mobile site. Make sure your site is truly responsive, though. Take a look at the website below. It's technically responsive, but looks bad when you view it on a small screen because some elements just don't adapt as needed. Good designers and developers will know how to make a website that's truly responsive and mobile friendly. For example, here are the desktop and mobile versions our team created for one of our clients. Problem number five Your home services website looks too long to load. Page speed refers to how long it takes to display all the content on a page. Google takes site speed into account because they know how fast load speed creates a better experience for the user. The longer your site takes to load, the more likely people will leave it. In fact, a study by Google found that 53% of people will leave a mobile site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. What makes a site load slowly? It can get bogged down by improper or heavy coding, large images, too many URL redirects, and of course, other things. So how do we fix this? You can check your page load speed by using Google's Page Speed Insight tools, which we tested on Morris Jenkins site. The desktop site speed of Morris Jenkins on 4102018 Mobile Site Speed of Morris Jenkins on 4102018 if your site has low, slow load times longer than three seconds, you can help improve speed by SEO ranking by cleaning up the code. You can dramatically increase page speed by removing unnecessary spaces and comments Code comments and formatting and unused code. Optimizing Images make sure images are no longer larger than they need to be in the right file format. For web, SVGs are preferred over PNGs and JPEGs and ready to be used on the web. Reducing URL redirects each time a link redirects to another one, your user has to wait for the request to complete, which makes the page load slower. If too many exist, Google may give up on crawling your content and won't rank it at all. For more tips on how to improve site speed, check out Moz's Page Speed Help Guide. Do you need help outranking your home service competitors? At Rocket Media, we've helped home service companies all over the country improve their rankings. Just drop us a line or call us at 800-339-7305 to chat with one of our SEO specialists. Have more questions about SEO feel to reach out to us to our SEO director Sean on Twitter P Buke.