A Competitor With Fewer Pages Ranking Higher

The comparison worth making

Page count is the first thing people compare and the least informative.

Open their eleven pages and yours and read them side by side.

The difference is usually that theirs answer a question completely and yours describe a service in general terms.

Which is a difference in what the pages are for rather than in how many of them exist.

What their pages usually have

• A price or a range.
• A timescale.
• Photographs of their own work.
• The awkward detail nobody else states.
• Reviews visible on the page.
• One subject per page, fully covered.

The last is the structural one. A page that covers one thing completely is a better answer to a search than three pages that each cover a third of it, and it is a single destination rather than three competing ones.

Ninety pages can be worse than eleven

Which is the uncomfortable part.

Pages on similar subjects compete with each other, so the signals that would concentrate on one page are split across four.

A high proportion of thin pages can affect how the whole site is assessed, so the eighty weak ones cost the ten good ones something.

And a large site takes longer to be crawled thoroughly, so genuine updates take longer to register.

None of which is visible from a page count, and all of which is visible from reading.

The competitor with eleven pages has none of those problems by construction.

A worked example

A business with over eighty pages was consistently below a competitor with fourteen.

Reading both, the competitor's service pages each ran to a couple of thousand words, opened with a price range, and answered eight or nine specific questions with photographs throughout.

Theirs were four hundred words each, described the service in general terms, and there were five separate pages covering variations of the same job.

They merged those five into one thorough page, redirected the others, and added prices and photographs.

That single page reached the first position within about four months, above the competitor.

They then repeated it for the next group, which is a project of months rather than an afternoon.

How to find your own version of this

Since the fix is specific rather than general.

In your search console, look at which of your pages appear for the same queries.

Where three or four of yours compete, those are candidates to merge into one.

Pick the strongest as the destination, move the useful content from the others into it, and redirect them.

Then check what the page above you contains that yours does not, which is usually a price, a photograph, and an answer to something specific.

That is a concrete list rather than a general instruction to improve.

Length is a symptom, not the cause

Worth separating, since the obvious reading of this is to write longer pages.

Their pages are long because they answer everything, not the other way round.

Padding a four-hundred-word page to two thousand without adding answers produces something worse.

The test is whether a reader finishes with a question you did not address, not whether a word count was reached.

Write the answers and the length arrives on its own, which is the correct order.

Some of their advantage is not the pages

Which is worth checking before concluding anything.

They may have been in business longer, be physically nearer to the people searching, or have four times the reviews.

Any of those can put a worse page above a better one, particularly in local results.

So compare the reviews, the age of the site, and the location as well as the content.

Where the difference is location, no amount of writing changes it and the effort belongs elsewhere.

Where the difference is content, it is fixable and this is how.

Do it in order of value

Since merging ninety pages into thirty is a long project.

Start with the group covering your most profitable service, not the largest group.

One thorough page there is worth more than tidying twenty low-value ones.

Expect months rather than weeks for the effect, and do not judge it inside eight weeks.

And record what you did with dates, since these projects run long enough that nobody remembers what changed when.

That record is also what tells you whether to continue, since the first merged group is the evidence for whether the second is worth doing.

Check what the merged page loses

A caution that belongs with the merging instruction, since it is where these projects go wrong.

Before combining five pages, note what each currently ranks for, since one of them may be earning something on a phrase the others do not touch.

Carry that content into the merged page rather than discarding it, and check afterwards that the merged page picked those phrases up.

Where it has not after three months, that page was doing a separate job and should probably have stayed separate.

Recording the before figures is what makes that judgement possible, and almost nobody does it before starting.

The counter-case

More pages is sometimes right.

A business genuinely offering fourteen distinct services needs fourteen pages, and a shop needs one per product.

Merging pages that rank for genuinely different things loses the positions of the ones you merged away, which is difficult to recover.

And a competitor's ranking may reflect ten years of links you cannot replicate by writing.

Where that is the case, the realistic aim is the more specific phrases they have never bothered to write about.

Read their pages, find yours competing with each other, merge the strongest group, and add what theirs have that yours lack.

What to do

1. Read their pages beside yours.
2. List what theirs have that yours lack.
3. Compare reviews and location too.
4. Find your pages competing with each other.
5. Merge the most valuable group.
6. Redirect the rest.
7. Wait months, not weeks.

Step one settles it in twenty minutes, since the difference is nearly always visible on the page and almost never visible in a page count.

Why adding more makes it worse is covered in publishing more and ranking less.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.