Rankings slip

[Voids]

Hi Guys,

I've slipped down the rankings in recent months (last 12 specifically) yet I don't feel I'm doing a lot differently.

www.footy-tipster.co.uk

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts regarding my SEO and and advice on how to improve it?

Thanks

[chaumi]

I can offer some comments on your home page around its presentation, which may help with rankings (by making the site more attractive/usable to the visitors you do get, which in turn will most likely have some SEO benefits ie by sending appropriate 'signals' to G......

Home page is pretty basic and doesn't scream out why I might want to stay (and if your bounce rate is high this might be one signal that G don't like...although that is debatable and there could be n number of factors that are more or equally likely)

You could try moving the 'latest tips' posts to the right and placing the 'free bets' and 'offers' tables under them...then use the free space above the fold to spell out your unique proposition.

Eg

Focus on Premiership
High Quality Previews, Tips, Accas
Best value multiples at odds 5 to 15-1

and instead of saying 'We have one tipster' turn it into a positive.....eg Expert fully focused tipster

Show some (positive) tipping results as a trust signal


If you had good rankings in the past, it could be that competitors have leapfrogged you...equally if you had good ranking and it was a fairly new site it might be that G eventually found where they really want to put you.

Getting (good quality) links will almost certainly help (easier said than done, right!)....and you could run searches on the kw phrases you want to be ranking for...look at the returned results...and analyse what the top 10 ranked sites are doing....then attempt to better it.

[PromoteCasino]

I Agree with chaumi, looking at your acca tips the pages might be considered thin content so would not rank well.
Have you recently changed the design of your site? as I am sure i have been on it before but was different in appearance

[DanHorvat]

I'd just like to point out that it doesn't have to be you - you may be doing everything right - but the competition may be improving. So you'd better take a look at who exactly is overtaking you, and try to figure out why. The answer doesn't have to be on your website but on theirs.

[chaumi]

Yeah, actually I didn't go deeper than home page.

If you take an acca tips page a an example - weds 10th Aug - there is basically no content. This would only work if you had a loyal readership who wanted to hit a page and in two seconds see 4 matches to bet on.

And to achieve that, they'd have to trust you in the first place, which would imply that other areas of the site were high quality/trustworthy.

But even then, I'd have thought you should have summary write ups of the matches explaining why you think they'll go the way you said.

It's even conceivable that you might have had a manual reviewer hit a page and think ' this isn't enough to warrant us placing higher'.

[PromoteCasino]

I had the same scenario with my racing tips as my tipster sometime gave me just the selection and nothing else. But I saw this as providing a service but it had no value with search engines. Even then with the daily tips we saw some traffic off of it because we were producing day in day out

[Voids]

I Agree with chaumi, looking at your acca tips the pages might be considered thin content so would not rank well.
Have you recently changed the design of your site? as I am sure i have been on it before but was different in appearance

It will have changed a couple of years ago, around 2014ish I expect, but the layout of the home page will have been tweaked.

I started with the thin content to match the competitors that were leapfrogging me. Although now they have established themselves, they appear to have the funds to be able to hire writers to substantiate the previously thin posts.

etting (good quality) links will almost certainly help (easier said than done, right!)....and you could run searches on the kw phrases you want to be ranking for...look at the returned results...and analyse what the top 10 ranked sites are doing....then attempt to better it.

How would you go about analysing this?

I'd just like to point out that it doesn't have to be you - you may be doing everything right - but the competition may be improving. So you'd better take a look at who exactly is overtaking you, and try to figure out why. The answer doesn't have to be on your website but on theirs.

I have a feeling that strong 'social' signals could be at play with many of the competitors having large twitter followings. The problem with this is, that a number of them lie to their followers, faking winning bets, and completely making up profits. This breaches an ethical boundary for me, and I won't cross it. I've tried building the social media using conventional methods, with little or no success, feel almost invisible.

[DanHorvat]

I have a feeling that strong 'social' signals could be at play with many of the competitors having large twitter followings. The problem with this is, that a number of them lie to their followers, faking winning bets, and completely making up profits. This breaches an ethical boundary for me, and I won't cross it. I've tried building the social media using conventional methods, with little or no success, feel almost invisible.

You can see their followers. And you can follow or message each and every one asking them to follow you back - it's nice having a list of your competitors' customers.
There are too many tipster Twitter accounts out there and I believe people would trust a real face, a real name, and real winnings.
I actually couldn't find your Twitter page. The link on your site just leads back to the site, and a search for "twitter footy-tipster" returned some other results.
I don't know how serious you are with this site but you'd definitely need to run a bit faster.

[Voids]

Thanks Dan, not sure why the social media settings weren't working but I've fixed those now.

I'm serious, but it's currently a 5-9 job as it's not doing well enough to support me full time. What do you mean by 'run a bit faster'?

I've tried the follow, like and interact with users of other accounts, but haven't tried tweeting them and asking them to follow me.

[DanHorvat]

Nice work on Twitter. Followed you (@soccertransfers). Now some say 1000 loyal followers is all you need, others want a high follower count regardless of how loyal they are. But in any case you're going in the right direction.

I was just referring to the Red Queen effect and meant to say your competition is improving and you must improve as well.

Since your Twitter account is so active you might want to embed the tweets on your website.

The site is really an area which you could improve as it has no images and it looks like thin content unless you actually bother to click around like I did.

[Voids]

Yeah I'm going to look at a site redesign, especially the home page.

Going to try and add a bit of content to the accumulator selections, try and get each post to around 300 words too.

Hopefully will have a couple of accumulators / winners land to get some momentum and create some validation of the tips.

[chaumi]

Analysing competitor sites......

Basically what you're doing here is seeing what works (in Google's eyes) and adjusting/building your site/pages to take the best elements and create them on yours.

Example - search 'football accumulator tips' and look at the first couple of pages.

Some of these may be there because of links solely, but you can probably trust most to be overall authoritative (you mind the odd one is there by spamming, but should be fairly rare if Google are doing their job - which we know sometimes they're not - and normally you can spot the difference between crap and good).

Look at the page titles and descriptions. See how they are crafted.
Click thorough and look at the page structures and content, the offers, the focus etc etc

And if you can think of ways to better what they're delivering the more the better.


And if you want examples of the type of high quality match previews that will support the tips, have a look at Dan's betinsight.co.uk. Sadly I think Dan has his hands full with other projects to post write ups more often than in the major tournaments..but as a punter I've not seen better than these anywhere in a lot of years!

[Voids]

Unfortunately as I'm not a full time affiliate, I've got to be able to manage the workload (as well as keeping the missus happy). I would love to be able to provide really high-quality regular content, but I can only do so much, and there is no profits spare for help.

Still I think I can match a few of my rivals on my own, so that's the goal!

[RacingJim]

Agree with the others, having looked at your site it needs a bit of an effort on the home page to give more content and more links to articles to show a site that has depth and more use of images to brighten it up and give the user more to see. It'd be interesting to know your bounce rate for that home page?

Also agree with Chaumi about the wording, you can sell yourself a bit better rather than lines like:
"The site has one tipster at the moment but we are looking to grow all the time"

That almost sounds like, sorry we've only got one tipster, whereas you can say it like Chaumi said, subtle change but can help with perception

Agree about social media, most successful tipster sites rely on the social media, just look at Footy Accumulators and try to emulate them, they are the example for any wannabe tipster site for how to engage people and create a tipster brand, not even based on winning tips, just based on content and engagement and understanding how to milk the Facebook and Twitter cows.

Finally, Google search rankings, which your thread is about, I checked your link profile and bar a couple of good ones (Coral, Flash Scores), your links are thin on the ground. I would try and get a few more high authority links to your site and that should really boost things.

[chaumi]

Unfortunately as I'm not a full time affiliate, I've got to be able to manage the workload (as well as keeping the missus happy). I

...and the kids/pets. Know just what you mean! One of the ways round it is 4 am starts! Hard to keep that up long term...but there will be some full time affiliates who do close to that for sure.

[RacingJim]

...and the kids/pets. Know just what you mean! One of the ways round it is 4 am starts! Hard to keep that up long term...but there will be some full time affiliates who do close to that for sure.

Harder with kids etc and I can't comment from that respect, but when I first started I was working 30 hours a week in a very physical job, I'd have a kip when I got home, get up have something to eat at 5.30pm and then start work at 6.30pm til 12am every night to get this thing off the ground. When I started making mid 3-figure commissions I quit the job and went full time, knowing I had to do that to take it to the next level.

You've got to work harder than everyone else. When you think you've done enough, do another hour. I used to get to a point where I wanted to stop and go to bed - at that point would have a word with myself and push on for longer.

[DanHorvat]

You're not that far from success.

You got 2400 Twitter followers and you're really doing a good job with tweets.

You just need to make the website much more attractive and engaging. By adding the Twitter stream, by including "Tweet This" buttons (search for this plugin), by redesigning your template for posting acca tips, and by adding some color or banners or images to the site.

As a visitor, I'm missing some real information. Your acca tips are difficult to find, I don't see the KO times, no odds for individual matches, no writeups, no call to action. No images, no stats of previous tips, no indication that some tip has expired, no indication which tip is new and can be used to make money. It's all way too dry and unengaging. Font is too small, there are breadcrumbs that catch my attention more than the tip itself.

Plus you're making the age-old mistake, you're talking in first person yet you didn't reveal yourself. Either go with "me" and show your face and name, or go with "we" and market Footy-Tipster as a brand. I'm not a fan of cartoonish websites, and real people and authorship is the way to go these days.

I'd post tips to ALL social media if I was you. All with the same brand and same logo, sending social media signals back to the site. This way you'd amplify the effect of each new tip, and once you set up the system, you only need to work on posting the tip.

Are you all about acca tips? If that is the case, then make the website focus on making the most of acca betting. There are acca betting bonuses, cashbacks, insurances etc. And there are bookmakers which are better or worse for acca betting on English football, when it comes to odds.

Perhaps your audience would be interested in bragging with their own acca wins. Ask them.

The obvious problem here is that a user is coming from a really exciting environment (Twitter) to your site, which is anything but exciting. That's a big contrast. Plus Twitter is white and your site is black. Since the user is coming from Twitter (and is already logged in), try to engage him by offering a Twitter stream, a "Tweet This" button so he can share your tip, and maybe try to strike a conversation by asking him to comment on the tip. Using Twitter, of course.

Solve the problem of presenting your tips on the website. Do it yourself or get someone to do it for you. If this website is how your vision of a website looks like, get someone with a different vision who can design an exciting and engaging website.

I may have been a bit harsh. But I'm probably right in some things I've mentioned, and I feel you only have to make some minor changes in order to make this work.

[baldidiot]

Dude do you know your tips from this weekend aren't indexed yet? That can't be helping ranking for date specific terms (eg - your post: Football Accumulator tips – Sat 27th August 2016). If google isn't indexing you quick enough, maybe try submitting the posts through GWT.

As the others have said, I'd add more content though. Both from googles perspective (ie: it's a bit thin at the moment) but also from the user - if they're reading your tip, why should they follow it? There's no justification/reasoning/stats etc.. to back it up.

I remember you used to do this (eg: https://www.footy-tipster.co.uk/foot...th-april-2015/) so I'd go back to that system if I were you.

[Voids]

Dude do you know your tips from this weekend aren't indexed yet? That can't be helping ranking for date specific terms (eg - your post: Football Accumulator tips – Sat 27th August 2016). If google isn't indexing you quick enough, maybe try submitting the posts through GWT.

As the others have said, I'd add more content though. Both from googles perspective (ie: it's a bit thin at the moment) but also from the user - if they're reading your tip, why should they follow it? There's no justification/reasoning/stats etc.. to back it up.

I remember you used to do this (eg: https://www.footy-tipster.co.uk/foot...th-april-2015/) so I'd go back to that system if I were you.

I've got a new site design and post layouts coming soon. (no internet at home right now as just moved house!) I'm going to add a bit more content to the accas again too.

I knew that google was slow to index the site, but I think like 200 posts aren't indexed currently, not sure what is happening with that, need to look into it.

[baldidiot]

I knew that google was slow to index the site, but I think like 200 posts aren't indexed currently, not sure what is happening with that, need to look into it.

This is probably coming back to the thin content issue, goog's may have decided not to index them.

Even if you do something with the new posts (more content) you may want to sort out the thinner posts as they may hurt you down the line (panda). They're not indexed so shouldn't affect anything, but if it were me I'd 410 them (or combine into one big archive post or something if you want to keep the content on site).