Why Does My Competitor Outrank Me?
SEO The honest list Checkable in an hour
You already looked. Incognito window, your main term, and there they are, sitting one line above you. The outfit whose website looks like it was thrown together during a lunch break, whose photos are stretched, whose phone number is in a graphic. We do SEO for companies in Santa Barbara, and this is the conversation that starts the majority of them. Usually with the word "how."
So here is the honest list. Five reasons, ordered by how often they turn out to be the real one, and every single one is something you can check yourself before you pay anybody a dime.
First, the thing that makes this make sense
Google is not comparing your company to their company. If it were, you would win, and you know you would.
Google is comparing one page to another page for one specific question somebody typed. That is a much smaller fight than the one you think you are in, and it is winnable, because a great company with a lazy page loses to a mediocre company with a page that actually answers the question.
They publish the standard, too. It is sitting in their guidance on helpful content, phrased as a question you are supposed to ask yourself:
"Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?"
Google Search Central, creating helpful contentCompared to other pages. Not compared to other businesses. Read your page and their page side by side, as a stranger, and be honest about which one you would rather have found.
What Google is actually weighing
Nothing on that list is about who does better work. That is the part that stings, and it is also the good news, because every line on it is fixable and none of it requires you to become a different company.
The five reasons, in order of how often it turns out to be the one
Their page answers the question. Yours introduces the company.
Somebody types a specific thing. Your page opens with who you are, how long you have been around, and a paragraph about your commitment to excellence. Theirs opens with the answer. Google can tell the difference, and so can the person, which is why they leave your page and go back, and Google notices that too.
They have been standing there longer.
Not because Google rewards loyalty. Because nine years of being online means nine years of people linking, mentioning, reviewing and arguing with them. That accumulates and you cannot buy it in a quarter. It is the single most common answer and the least satisfying one.
Other websites talk about them and not about you.
The trade association, the supplier's dealer page, the local paper, the charity they sponsored, the podcast they sat on. Every one is a vote. You probably have half of these available to you right now and have never asked for a single one.
Their site is faster, and yours is not.
Everybody nods at this and nobody checks it. On a phone, on cell data, in a parking lot, which is where your customer actually is. If your page takes six seconds and theirs takes two, a share of your visitors never see your page at all. They see a white screen and a back button.
They have nine pages on the subject and you have one.
They wrote about the problem, the variations, the cost, the mistakes and the maintenance. You have a services page with a paragraph on it. Google reads that as one site that knows the subject and one site that mentions it. Depth beats a single good page, and it is not close.
And now the one nobody wants to hear. Sometimes they are not worse than you. Sometimes they are just better at the part of this that happens on a screen, and being better at the actual work does not automatically transfer. That is not fair. It is also completely fixable, which fairness would not be.
Do this in the next hour
The whole audit, start to finish
- Open their page and yours side by side. Read the first screen of each and be honest.
- Check both domain registration dates.
- Count who talks about each of you, in quotes, excluding your own sites.
- Load both on your phone with the wifi off and count seconds.
- Run the site: search on both for your main topic and compare the counts.
By the end of that hour you will know which of the five it is. In our experience it is nearly always two of them at once, and one of those two is almost always the first one, which is the cheapest thing on this entire list to fix.
What to do once you know
Fix the page before you do anything else, because it costs nothing and it is the only item that can move in weeks rather than quarters. Then go collect the mentions you already have access to. Then build the depth, one page at a time, on the subjects you actually want to be known for, and only for the places you actually serve, which is a whole argument of its own we made in can you rank in more than one city.
This is what we did for an industrial fittings manufacturer whose competitors were decades older, and the Superlok story has the numbers on it. It is the same method behind our local SEO work and the wider SEO program it belongs to.
If you are in Santa Barbara
One local wrinkle worth knowing. A lot of the money spent here is decided by somebody who is not here yet, sitting in Los Angeles or the Bay Area planning a trip, a wedding or a move. Which means the competitor beating you might not be the one across town. It might be one you have never heard of, ranking for the person who has not arrived.
Send us your website and the competitor that is bothering you. We will run all five and tell you what is actually separating you, what it would take to close it, and roughly how long. Free, no contract, and it is yours whether you hire us or not.
Get My Free Market Assessment Or call or text 805.243.8321