We at Red Rocket often get clients who come in and ask “why is [insert rival company here] number one in the search rankings and I’m not?”  They hate having to sit lower in the search engine rankings without knowing why. So, let’s take a look at what you need to explore in order to see what makes a website rank better so that you can better control your web marketing.

The first thing to do is understand that in order for your site to rank well, it needs to be well optimized. Does the phrase that you are trying to rank well for occur often within the main body of your text? Does your main headline also contain that phrase? Do you have more than 2 or three keyword phrases? Websites that rank well for a specific phrase tend to focus all of their content on that one keyword, rather than diluting it with multiple keywords.

Next, what is the competitor’s site structure? While this seems like it might not be that big of a deal, the fact is that the more content a search engine has access to on a website, the better chance that the phrases that the website is optimized for will get top rankings. This also has to deal with the way that the URLs look for each link. Do you find a lot of symbols (such as &, %, etc) in your URL? Often a website with a lot of this extraneous code in their URL will not be indexed because the search engines will think that the pages are automatically created (by a computer program and not by a user), and this is frowned upon. How many pages you have total can also effect the site’s rankings as the more pages you have (filled with relevant content, of course), the more search engines can index and rank you for.

Also, what links are connected to their site? One of the most important (and most overlooked) aspects of web marketing is the issue of backlinks. Backlinks are links that point to your site from other websites In this case, it isn’t the quantity of links that is important, it’s the quality of the links. For example, if your website pertains to umbrellas and you have a bunch of websites that are from hair salons, the quality is obviously diminished. The links that need to attach to your website are links that are from relevant topics that include umbrellas, such as an umbrella review site.

If all of this is confusing, as it may be to a lot of people, feel free to contact us. We excel at web marketing efforts and happen to have a lot of experience in understanding all of these trends and more. Contact us today and see how Red Rocket Media Group can make a huge difference for your company in regards to web marketing.