Today, I will analyze Rock Bottom Golf and Golf Discount to show you how these websites rank on Google for high-traffic keywords in the golfing niche?In this SEO analysis, you’re going to see how these sites use effective on-page and off-page strategies to outrank their competitors and be on the page, attracting more than 2 million visitors per month. We will look into the site structure, keyword, content and backlinking strategy.

Interested? Let’s make it more interesting by diving deeper and understanding areas of improvement by finding easy to rank keywords in the niche.

Every month, the traffic brings in sales for e-commerce websites, and we will take an average 2% conversion rate and calculate the stores’ utopian monthly revenue.

SEO is not simple, but if you are running or managing an SEO campaign for a website, understanding how particular websites or even competitors are rankings can make your life much easier and help you get a broader perceptive of what has been and is working in the particular niche.

Table of Contents

#1: About the store & niche

#2: How to find top keywords

#3: Understanding their content strategy & page optimization

#4: Backlink Profile Analysis of Rock Bottom Golf

#5:Key takeaways

 

Disclosure & Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post or paid article. I do not get any affiliate commission from any of these websites. This analysis is just for educational purposes and does not guarantee actual stats or information. Any action that you take using this data or information will be your responsibility. Now that the disclaimer is out of our way let’s continue the fun part.

Step #1: About the store & niche

We will start with analyzing Rock Bottom Golf— an e-commerce website in the Golf niche.

 

Analyzing website traffic:

Dissecting the traffic driving keywords for each website is not easy since they have 10,000s of long-tail keywords that they are ranking for, but we will try to understand the top keywords with good search volume.

Based on our initial analysis with SimilarWeb, the Rock Bottom Golf website gets 92% of its traffic from the United States and 4% from Canada. The remaining traffic is just 4%, which we are ignoring for our analysis.

The sites receive 46% of their traffic from search engines and the remaining 54% from direct combined with social, which we will look into in the upcoming sections. Thus, 84.56% of Search traffic is Organic, and the remaining comes from paid advertising on different search platforms.

The site majorly ranks for “used golf clubs “and the brand keyword “rock bottom golf” from what we can see on Similarweb.

Rock Bottom Golf website ranks for branded and buyer keywords at the same time. For example, rock bottom golf itself has a huge search volume.

The website ranks in position #2 for its target keyword, “golf bag”, with a monthly search volume of 1,35,000.

The website ranks for for whopping 125,000 Keywords in Google with a monthly traffic value of $117,000.

You could research these keywords and their volume using keyword tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs or even a simple tool like keysearch.co

Step #2: How to find top keywords

2+ million visitors just from top 100 keywords ranking 1-3 positions in Search

Keyword Rankings and Search Volume for Rock Bottom Golf

Buyer Keywords

Keyword: Golf Clubs

Monthly search volume: 201000

Intent: Buyer/Research Phase in Buying Cycle

Value: High Value

Now let us see how these pages look in the search results to get to know how the meta titles and descriptions are structured for this one page.

Every day this keyword brings 1000s of targeted buyers to this website. Without access to Google Analytics or Search Console, it would be not easy to understand the exact keywords and positions. Still, we can do an estimation with other publicly available information from different tools or platforms.

Now let’s look into how the website has grown over time and the growth pattern.

For this page,

https://www.rockbottomgolf.com/golf-clubs/ ranks for the target keyword.

Now that we have a few keywords to analyze, let’s see how hard the competition is. Rock Bottom Golf website has been around since 2016.

The website has captured major spots in search results for important keywords in terms of keywords, which is great.

Where can they improve?

There are a lot of opportunities that are not tapped into. So let’s Look into another set of major keywords.

Primary keywords for Rock Bottom Golf

Keywords: golf bags, golf clubs, used golf clubs

Monthly search volume: 426,500

Intent:Buyer

Step #3: Understanding their content strategy & page optimization

UX Analysis

One of the core areas I am interested in is the user interface. The better the user experience can deliver, the better conversion and user retention it will have. That been said, this.

Scope of Improvement

Rock Bottom Golf website can have a facelift for sure.

If you need to analyze keywords quickly on a page, you could use the keywords everywhere chrome extension. I have written a detailed review a few months back.

The website is ranking for 1000s of long-tail and secondary keywords.

Now that we have seen the keywords let’s analyze the competition, domain, and its backlinks.

Analyzing competition for Rock Bottom Golf Website

When it comes to SEO, the two main tools that the industry uses today are Ahrefs and Moz. For this analysis, I always use AHREFs. It is important to identify the URL Rating and Domain Rating for top results for each potential keyword.

For example:

The lower the URL and Domain rating of the website ranking when compared to yours, the better chance you have in ranking your page for that keywords.

If we take “Golf Clubs”, we see that many e-commerce websites are shopping up rather than wiki or forums. The content type that ranks majority on the first page for this keyword can also help understand the intent. If it is a research or information based search from the user, you will find more blogs and wikis explaining the keywords.

On-Page Analysis of Product Pages

Unlike many experts say, content and backlinks are not independent; they work together to give relevancy and authority to the page, ranking the website faster and higher.

The key difference between off-page and on-page SEO is that on-page is more in your control, while off-page or backlink building also depends on other websites. As a result, SEO experts shy away from the promising results with off-page.

Basic On-Page Check

• Title tag: Golf Clubs | Discount Golf Clubs | Rock Bottom Golf
• URL: https://www.golfdiscount.com/golf-clubs
• Heading tags: Golf Clubs
• Meta descriptions (to help improve CTR):For that perfect swing that won’t break your bank, shop the biggest selection of golf clubs and best prices guaranteed on discount golf clubs.
• Word Count: 1246

Weakest Competitor

• Title tag:New Release & Closeout Golf Clubs | GolfDiscount.com
• URL:https://www.golfdiscount.com/golf-clubs
• Heading tags: Golf Clubs
• Meta descriptions (to help improve CTR):Discount prices on all name brand golf clubs for men and women, guaranteed! Save on our massive inventory of new, used and closeout golf ..
• Word Count:1700

Strongest Competitor

• Title tag:  The best golf irons | Business Insider
• URL:https://www.businessinsider.in/sports/news/the-best-golf-irons/articleshow/71725627.cms
• Heading tags: The best golf irons
• Meta descriptions (to help improve CTR): If you’re a low handicap player looking for a great set of blade-style irons, the Mizuno Golf MP-5 irons deliver the shot-making and shapin
• Word Count: 3500

Apart from the above metrics, you need to analyze the quality of the content. Unfortunately, this process has to be done manually and is subjectively based on your knowledge of the industry or topic.

Step #4: Analysis of Backlinks

Now that we have done most of the initial on-page analysis, we could go on to my favorite part of the entire process, Backlink Profile Analysis.

Backlink Profile Analysis of Rock Bottom Golf

Backlinks give strong signals to Search engines; this includes internal and external backlinks. A new website should like out to authority websites early, but it is often difficult to implement this on an e-commerce website. The internal linking should be strong and can be achieved by having a blog about topics in the industry.

External Backlinks

The website has more than 9000 backlinks from other websites, but we need to understand the difference between do-follow and no-follow links. Even though the site has so many backlinks, only around 1000 does follow backlinks.

Website Performance of Rock Bottom Golf

With Google giving more importance to the user experience, sites with poor performance will have a hard time ranking in Google. The faster the website is, the better it will be in ranking the pages compared to those with an inferior tech stack and poor speed.

According to the Google Developer Speed Test tool, the website has very poor performance in terms of speed on a mobile device which is 6, and on desktop, it is not very good either it is only 51.

Having a poorly optimized website is ranking, but the bounce rates go exponentially high when users find the site to load slowly. The conversions rate drops, thus resulting in fewer sales. Load Speed directly impacts the bottom line of the business as a whole.

This site’s two main actions are compressing their images, minimizing CSS/JavaScript/HTML code, Caching and also using a CDN service to deliver content quickly.

Backlinking Opportunities for Rock Bottom Golf

Taking Backlinking to the next level by engaging and building relationships with other websites and guest posting.

To rank for any keyword, we should

1. Understand the backlink profile of the competitor
2. Find opportunities that the competitor has missed
3. Outreach to get a chance to guest post
4. Find Broken links

We need to analyze the metrics of each website we reach out to for a backlink.

1. Understand the backlink profile of Rock Bottom Golf’s competitors

To do this, we pick the main keyword here, “golf bag”, and quick glance at the competitors ranking for this keyword give the following web pages:

1. Rock Bottom Golf’s Metrics:

• URL: www.rockbottomgolf.com/golf-clubs/
• DR: 59
• UR: 43
• Backlinks: 14,500
• Organic Keywords: 45,000
• Do-Follow Backlinks:
• Position: 10

2. Website: (Strongest DR)

• URL: businessinsider.com/best-golf-irons redirects to https://www.businessinsider.in/sports/news/the-best-golf-irons/articleshow/71725627.cms
• DR:92
• UR:23
• Backlinks:590
• Do-Follow Backlinks:
• Position:4

3. Website:(Weakest DR)

• URL:https://thegolfingpros.com/how-much-should-a-beginner-spend-on-golf-clubs/
• DR: 0
• UR:0
• Backlinks:0
• Do-Follow Backlinks: 0
• Position: 5

Ideally this is a fairly simple task since the weakest position has no authority and no backlinks but there is something that is not right. Seems like the website is cloaking or hiding PBN backlinks from AHREFs and Other tools.

Since this is the case, we will find the next weakest website in terms of metric for off-page seo.

4. Website:(Weakest DR)

• URL: https://www.golfdiscount.com/golf-clubs
• DR: 40
• UR:40
• Backlinks: 3,017
• Do-Follow Backlinks: 12
• Position: 8

The goal is to identify opportunities and, from the analysis, provides insights on how many backlinks we require. We will require 12 to do-follow links ranging from 10 to 70 DR to rank this page above the weakest competitor.

Now that we know to rank for this keyword, this website should start acquiring quality backlinks from relevant websites in the niche.

Here, we know that the topic or keyword is golf clubs and golf bags. We find the sites talking about this using two methods:

• Google Search
• Keyword Explorer

We reach out to each of them, asking for a link to our website from a relevant page.

How to outreach for a backlink:

The main channel of communication when it comes to outreach is email.  You could use any tool like RocketReach, Close etc .

Here is a template that you could use to do your outreaching process:

Always try to personalize the email:

Subject: {Content Topic} post was awesome!
Hi {Content Author},

Hope you are doing well. I write for { your website}, and I came across your post on {content topic}. It gives real insights and has a ton of value. We are linking to your post from {Your Link}

I have also written an article on a relevant topic, {Your content topic}, it would be great if you could include or refer to this post on {prospect website/post} or if you could give me a chance to write for your blog.

Hoping to hear from you soon.

Cheers
Your Name
Your Website

Finding sites in your niche for guest posting.

• “Keyword” + “write for us”
• “Keyword” + “guest author”
• “Keyword” + “intitle:write”
• “Keyword” + “intitle:become a contributor”

With this content and backlinking strategy, a website in this niche can easily outrank others on page one. There are additional keywords that the site can rank for this keyword.

Once the backlinks are indexed, and the page gets authority, you will rise in rankings.

#5:Key takeaways from Rock Bottom Golf Analysis

The strategy that we have analyzed today can be adapted to most of the other verticals or niches. However, one fact that every SEO specialist should understand is that not everything will work as planned.

If you have questions about implementing this strategy for research and execution, please contact me.