Why a Competitor Outranks You

Start with the actual page

Not their site, and not their business. The specific page that appears above yours for the specific search.

That is what you are competing with, and comparing whole businesses produces conclusions that are both discouraging and useless.

Open it, read it properly, and compare it against your equivalent page.

The differences are usually obvious within two minutes, and they are usually not subtle.

What you will normally find

• It is about one thing, where yours covers nine.
• It is longer, answering questions yours does not.
• It names the town in the heading and the title.
• It has prices, or at least a range.
• It has more reviews behind the business.
• More sites link to it, or to their site generally.

The first accounts for more outranking than everything else combined, and it is the cheapest to fix.

Reviews, specifically

For local searches, one of the largest factors and the one businesses most neglect.

The number, the recency, and whether reviews mention the service and the area all contribute.

A competitor with thirty recent reviews will generally appear above one with four from 2017, other things being equal.

That gap is closable, and it closes by asking, which is the part nobody does consistently.

A short message after every job, with a direct link, is the whole mechanism. Businesses that ask systematically overtake ones that do not within a year.

A worked example

A business consistently appearing fourth for its main service, behind three competitors.

Comparing the pages: theirs was a services page covering eight items with three lines each. The three above had dedicated pages of eight hundred to twelve hundred words, each with prices, photographs and questions.

Two of the three also had substantially more reviews.

They wrote a proper page for that service and began asking for reviews after every job.

Six months later they were second, above two of the original three.

Nothing technical changed, no money was spent, and the work they do was the same work throughout.

What is usually not the reason

Worth saying, because businesses reach for these first.

Being newer. Age helps and it is not decisive, and plenty of established sites are outranked by better pages.

Site speed, unless yours is genuinely slow. A page taking two seconds is not losing to one taking one point eight.

Design. A better looking site does not rank better, and several of the sites above yours are probably worse looking.

And paying somebody. A competitor with an agency may simply have more pages, which you can also write.

Reaching for those explanations is comfortable because they are outside your control, and they are usually not the cause.

Links, honestly assessed

Genuinely a factor and frequently over-emphasised for local businesses.

Links from other sites signal that a business is real and referenced, and a competitor with more of them has an advantage.

What matters for a small business is the ordinary kind: listings, trade bodies, suppliers, local organisations, a chamber, a manufacturer's approved list.

Those are places a real business appears, and getting the ones you are entitled to is a legitimate afternoon of work.

What is not worth doing is buying links or joining schemes, which carries risk and is unnecessary when the ordinary ones are available and unclaimed.

The counter-case

Where the gap is not closable and the effort should go elsewhere.

A national operator or an aggregator holding the position, with resources no local business can match on a general term.

A competitor who is genuinely much larger, longer established, and comprehensively better resourced.

In both cases the answer is narrowing rather than competing: a more specific service, a more specific town, or a question the large site does not bother to answer.

Second place on a specific search is worth considerably more than tenth on a general one, and it is achievable.

The listing comparison

For local searches, worth doing alongside the page comparison.

Open their business listing and compare it with yours: categories, photographs, hours, description, the questions section, and the number and recency of reviews.

Categories in particular are worth checking, because a competitor may hold a primary category you have not selected, and that single field carries substantial weight in local results.

Photographs count too. A listing with forty current photographs generally outperforms one with three from 2016.

All of that is free to match, takes an afternoon, and produces results faster than any change to the website.

Being honest about the comparison

The part that determines whether this exercise is useful.

It is uncomfortable to read a competitor's page and conclude it is better, particularly when you know your work is better than theirs.

Those are different claims. Their page is better at answering the question somebody typed. Your work may well be superior and nobody searching can tell that yet.

Businesses that treat the comparison as an insult learn nothing from it. Ones that read it as a specification for their own page usually close the gap.

The competitor has done that research for you, at their own expense, and left the result visible for anybody to read.

Where they are weak

The half of the comparison that gets skipped, and it is where the opportunity is.

Read their page for what it does not say. Most competitor pages, even good ones, leave obvious questions unanswered.

Prices are the usual gap. So is what can go wrong, how long the work takes, and what happens if the job turns out to be bigger than expected.

A page that covers everything theirs does, plus the three questions they avoided, is a better page rather than a copy of theirs.

And it differentiates on the site as well as in search, because the visitor comparing both of you notices which one answered more.

The competitor sets the floor. The gaps in their page are how you get above it.

A comparison you can do in an hour

1. Search the term in a private window.
2. Open the top three pages.
3. Note length, structure and what each answers.
4. Check their review counts against yours.
5. List what they have and you do not.
6. Write your page to cover all of it, better.

The sixth is the whole exercise. The first five produce a specification and the sixth is an evening.

How to structure the page you write is covered in one page per thing you sell.

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.