Getting There - But Some Advice Required

barney1 · May 30, 2007

Hi All

We are finally out of the google sandbox after 12 long months. However, we only sit at page 6 for the keyword 'Car contract hire'. Would like to go all out now and get it to page one but a bit stuck as it seems there are some on page one with less links than us? On page advice as well as SEO tips welcome.

Any tips and advice gratefully received.

Thanks.

Aspect Investments · May 30, 2007

You need more quality links to your site barney.

'Car contract hire' is a very competitive search term.

barney1 · May 30, 2007

is paid an ok way of doing it? Or is an organic link preferable?

Aspect Investments · May 30, 2007

Paid links are ok as long as they look like organic. Google is penalizing sites who sell and buy links.

Try free directories, forum links, blog posts, articles, press releases.

simonr · May 30, 2007

Is the firm truly national? If you have a regional market, what page do you come out at for "contract care hire Baskingstoke" ? (made up example) and is it worth optimising your page for that?

S

Scribbles · May 30, 2007

Hi there barney1,
I've just had a cursory look at your website and that of your leading competitor (at least the #1 in Google) and there is a considerable amount of work needed to your website to match what they have done. I'll list a few of the obvious things below:

They have a higher PageRank than you (yours is 3/10 theirs is 4/10). This is something that can be influenced by effective content copywriting and link building.
You are a relatively recent website and they have been around for more than 5 years and longevity adds kudos points for search engines.
Their Alexa ranking is far far better than yours (yours is 2,208,460 and theirs is 172,415). Not much you can do about this in the short term, but everything you do to improve these other elements will affect this ranking.
They are DMOZ registered and you are not. Once again not much you can do to influence this. Registration is free and widely thought to be an important factor in PageRank and search positioning, but DMOZ are a law unto themselves and it can take months to be registered and they can reject you without explanation.
Their links are off the chat and yours are still on the starting blocks. They have an estimated 3,000 links and yours are in the low 100's.

Search engine optimisation as part of a copywriting strategy for your site is the medium to long term answer to this. The phrase you are wanting to be found under is mentioned just 6 times on your Home page. With over 1,400 words on the page this gives you a very low keyword/phrase density and this will hinder your SEO for this phrase. One clever, although I'm not sure how advisable, method that your competitor has used is to use the phrase in almost every single one of tens of Alt tags on their home page. Too high a density of keywords can be seen as spamming, but you should be aiming at something in-between where you are now and what they have done.

There are so many other factors to consider to attempt to improve your rankings so if you're interested in finding out more you could go to scribbles-writing-services.co.uk and see what else could be done.

Richard

directmarketingadvice · May 30, 2007

Barney,

As EBA said, it looks like a competitive market.

Therefore, if you're going to compete online, you're going to have to make sure you get good value from the traffic you generate.

One thing I notice with your site is that the text is quite small and is hard to read. This will damage your website conversion rate.

Secondly, maybe it's just my opinion because your service isn't orientated towards me, but I found the copy quite dull and repetitive.

In particular, the word "contract" seemed to pop up in every sentence (often more than once)

e.g.

"If the company does wish to own the vehicle after an initial three year contract they will be required to pay a larger deposit at the beginning of the contract, the monthly payments in between and one final payment at the end of the contract."

I realise this may be aimed at google (though whether that works is another question), but it'll be humans that buy from you and this text could turn them off and cost you money.

Although it doesn't answer your question, I hope this helps,

Steve

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