You are not alone. There are hundreds and even thousands of businesses out there, selling the entirely same content to hundreds of businesses within the same industry. You see it in the Tire & Auto Repair industry, dentists & doctors are prime targets too.
These websites are elaborate too, they have the best use of JQuery and have massive functionality, yet they do not always rank you for the keywords your business needs.
How can that be? The bigger question is how can they get away with this? The truth is they will have clients experiencing massive success; reselling this exact content within same local markets is where the rub lies.
What Happens Next For These Clients With Syndicated Content?
Then those same companies must sell you an outsourced SEO package to come in and modify your content so it is not the same cookie cutter content they just sold your number one competitor. What’s crazier is they will sell you the same SEO that they are selling your local competitors.
Therefore, in the end, someone is always losing. But if they are both ranking one and two, what’s the problem? In that scenario, true, that would not be too terrible of a problem. That is not always the case.
Another thing I commonly see is two or even five of the same type of business running the same website.
Yes, the colors and theme are different, the logo is different, but everything else is entirely the same. What happens in this situation typically, is the person with the most locations (Google Plus pages) ends up dominating the SERP’s, where the others just end up being lower down page one or not even ranking in the first two pages for that content.
The client with the most locations in the end gains the most traction and keywords from Google, while the others are paying the same amount of money for that same content, yet not seeing the same results.
On-Page SEO
One of the first things you have to do to fix this SERP difference is to augment your content. I cannot tell you how many times we have been hired to come in and change the H1s through H3’s, modify, add to, and take away just to get a client’s content to rank like it should.
What is crazy, if you are the only one in your vertical with this “out of box” website, you may never even feel the losses that go along with this duplicated content. I see it most in heavily saturated verticals with several big players using the entirely same content from the same agency, offering an industry specific solution, IN THE SAME CITY!
Off Page SEO
The websites that are dominating the other websites by outranking them and having 2X or 3X more keywords, you would think have more referring domains and backlinks.
Which often they will, but when you actually get an SEO to turn the tables and gain you more backlinks & referring domains, you will notice that these “out of the box” websites are more stubborn than an originally built website.
My initial thought is that it could have to do with which one was purchased first, or even the age of the URL. Ceteris paribus, these websites are very difficult to move. I say, “All other things being equal”, but remember you won’t be able to equalize the number of locations a certain business has versus the other. So, signals coming back from having more locations will gain link juice that can’t be equalized.
Off & On Page Modifications
So, you’ve taken your client from identical content to unique and powerful content, with images mind you. You have added hundreds of backlinks (30-90s DRs). You have cleaned up directories (Moz or Yext, & by hand), increased social media reviews by 30-100+, increased organic keywords by 2X and improved your Domain Rating (DR), & your AHREFS score by millions. Then what’s next??
Remember Google does not honor your SEO work in a 1 to 1 fashion. You honestly, might not see your true gains from an SEO overhaul for 2-8 months. What can help in these moments is using a PPC campaign or even a PPC company like Hibu, Express Update, or even running your own PPC campaigns.
Don’t forget about BING/Yahoo!
How often have I heard other SEO’s say weird things like “no one uses Bing.” It is crazy when people talk absolute nonsense. I have heard SEO’s say we do not optimize our clients for Bing, so we do not even worry about it. Look.
NO ONE OPTIMIZES BING. You optimize for Google, and your changes should show gains for the other search engines, that is just how it is, today. If you have a web company, not submitting your website to Bing/Yahoo! via the Webmaster tools, then you need to throw a fit until they start submitting your pages to those engines.
How often have I seen SEO’s use a robot.txt file that keeps their clients sites from being crawled by Bingbot. Here take a look at our robots.txt file https://nozakconsulting.com/robots.txt, yours shouldn’t be much different! No one knows the future, so make sure your sites are crawlable by these additional search engines. Besides, the many of the Bing tools available from Bing Webmaster tools are just as good for analysis as the Google Webmaster Tools.
Help Me I am On Page 10!
Look you will always be on page 10…for something. Just make sure you research key terms/phrases in your industry and pick wisely which ones you must have for success. These are the ones you will work around and fight for.
That means adding lots of content, using synonyms, and similar phrasings. Reminder: it is not solely about content, remember, you need backlinks, and lots of them.