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I do not believe it is possible for one company to block another, but it certainly does look as though your competitor is doing everything they possibly can to win in the search engine competition.
These are the factors that influence your ranking in a Google search:
Relevance. Does your web site have content matching the search term being used. If so, quantify it.- How many pages within your web site are relevant to each individual search as compared to other sites beating you in Google?
- What percentage of your overall website content is focused on these specific topics as compared to those doing well in Google?
- Of the pages within your site that are relevant for this search, which one is most relevant (the one with the most heavy use of the search phrase). Look long and hard at that one as it is your best bet today for improving your competitiveness in Google. Is this the page you want people from Google landing on when they are doing this particular search? Does this page sell your solutions well enough to generate a sales lead?
Timeliness. When was your content last updated, or does it reference something that is time-related? Everybody, from Google to your potential customers places a value on content that is focused on the issues of today. What can you be doing to develop active content?
Popularity. If you put two web sites side by side, which one is most likely to be visited first? This is an area where brand recognition has a great impact. If people will remember your brand favorably if they see your name on that list, you will attract more clicks and Google will reward you with higher rankings for it. If not, can the text Google displays be crafted so that it reaches out to the issues more effectively?- How many Google visitors click through to you site as compared to other sites with similar focus?
- How many visitors bounce back to Google (indicating they did not find what they were looking for) after they click through to your site?
- How many other web sites provide links to your site?
We can not measure many of the factors that impact Google’s ranking. We can not measure when each of the sites ahead of yours was last updated, how frequently they update their content, and we can not realistically crawl through their sites and look for subtle content changes as often as Google does. Even if we could, how would that knowledge impact our behavior?
We can look at some indicators of popularity, but can not see the most important ones. Most important are the statistics Google keeps that reveal to Google the number of Google visitors following your competitor's link vs. your link for a given search. We also can not measure the number of bounce backs from any other web site into Google. We can measure the number of links pointing to another site and we can look at the quality of those links. That is about all we can do beyond focusing internally on making our own web content more relevant, more focused and more timely than our competitors.
For the most part, you can count on a Google ranking within the top 20 based purely on Relevance. These are the factors you have the greatest control over, that is why I focus on them. They provide the most reliable path toward both a stable Google position and a high visitor-to-contact conversion rate.
The tools I use to measure relevance are found in the monthly SEO reports I post for you on my extranet (http://www.ineedwebsites.com/applications/). I refer to these as Phrase Depth, Saturation and Percent of Content. In my experience, if you can consistently outperform the top sites in these three categories, or at least dominate in two and be competitive in the third, you should be in a good position.
I did an analysis this morning of each of the top 10 web sites for the search you mentioned.
Phrase Depth represents the number of pages Google believes are relevant within your web site for a particular search. Currently, your web site gets credit from Google for having 172 pages relevant for the search phrase. Within the top 10 Google results, 6 of the web sites have a lower count than you do, 4 are more relevant than you are for this search. There is a HUGE range in values, from 2 to 18,700. Among these are two directory sites with thousands of relevant pages each. Directories are hard to compete against, which is why I am pushing to develop some specifically for my clients’ benefit. Your site has a long way to go to win based on phrase depth, so to make your mark fully in this area, can you measure up against the sites with around 550 pages of relevant content? Where can you find around 400 pages of product or application content? If we revive old articles, will we be able to significantly change this number?
Phrase Saturation represents the number of times within a page that the search phrase is used. While your site uses some combination of the search phrase 42 times on it’s winning page, there are only 3 sites you beat on this metric, you lose to the other 7 web sites and are a long way from hitting the Average of 89. One way to compete better is to continue to try to move your Home page out of the top spot for this search. You want your main product line page to be the one Google picks. That page is more optimized for the search phrase, but is it being updated as frequently as the Home page is, or is there a way to link more other web sites directly to that page instead of to the Home page? Some how, that page is the one you want Google pointing to.
Percent of content. I have consistently seen small web sites show up along side of huge ones like the directories we see for this search. The only explanation I can find for this relates to the percentage of content on topic. While the directory site has 18,000 pages relevant for this phrase, that represents less than 1% of their overall content. Compare this to the 41% of your competitor's site that Google credits for this search and you can see why they might be listed so prominantly for this search phrase. While your site may be outperforming your competitor in two other relevance-oriented metrics, that difference is modest while your competitor is getting credit for a significantly higher percentage of content related to this search than you and actually dominates the metrics among all the top 10 listings. It is unrealistic to think that you will shift more than 41% of your web content to this product line in the near term. You have other products that you need to promote. This could be accomplished by splitting off into micro-sites, but in the mean time, you need to be thinking of how your site can really shine in the other categories.
Your competitor.
They may be updating their site more often than you, that is hard to determine from this end, but they certainly are more active in building a popularity score. Every time I do this Google search I see your competitor in the sponsored links list. While Google states that buying AdWords does not influence page rank, I do believe that your competitor is more visible on the page, making them more likely to capture search traffic regardless of where the visitor clicks. If they are clicking on your competitor more often than you for the same search, they should win and be listed first in the natural results.
Other things I noticed. There are two directories showing up in the Google results: business.com and thomasnet.com. Your competitor is listed on those pages that appear when you follow that link. Your site is not. This is a popularity metric in that Google gives greater weight to important sites linking to you than they do to smaller sites. Thomas is of course a big player, so if Thomas links to you, that link is more valuable than a link from me. In addition to the weight of the links, I would think that at least some residual traffic would make its way to them from those two directories. All in all, your competitor is doing a full court press to win or buy traffic to their web site.
I hope this helps you understand the process a little better. I am looking forward to our next meeting to go through all of this in more depth.
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