Ranking well in search engines doesn’t typically happen by chance. In most cases, high-ranking sites are engaging in a dedicated effort. Any why not? There is a lot of money at stake in those rankings. Let’s look at the reasons your competitors’ sites may be outranking yours.
1. Your competitors’ content is more unique and valuable.
Google wants to deliver its searchers to good content. One way of comparing your site’s content quality is to examine how many other websites link to your site versus your competitors’ sites. The assumption (and its Google’s too) is that websites will link to exceptional content. Check yourself by visiting www.Majesticseo.com, and typing in your domain.
2. Your competitors have more content. Every page of your site is an opportunity to rank for more terms, so the more good-quality content, the more chances to rank. A good means of assessing the amount of content on a site is to perform a Google search for your domain name (eg. site:www.searchenginepeople.com), which tells you how many pages of that site Google has in its database. Then, run the same search for competitors’ sites, and compare.
3. Every page of a competitors’ site has a unique and descriptive page title. Does every page of your site? Do the keywords you wish to target with each page appear in the title? These page titles are very important as they tell Google what the content of each page is about. If your site’s pages lack unique titles containing keywords, and competitors’ sites do not, those competitors will almost certainly outrank your site.
4. Your competitors have better internal navigation. How you link amongst the pages of your own site tells Google a great deal about what you deem to be the most important content. If you link each page to every other page, then Google deems all pages to be of equal value (not good). If you link from each page to a few high-priority pages on your site, then you help Google identify those pages you consider most important.
5. Your competitors are asking others to link to their site. They’ve reached out to suppliers, clients and complementary businesses and asked those sites to link back to them. This signals Google that their site is important, and adding keywords to the link text tells Google their site is ‘relevant’ to those keywords. Again, MajesticSEO.com is a valuable tool. If your competitors consistently outrank your site on Google, odds are that one or more of the five reasons above are the culprit. If these reasons do not explain your situation, then the problem is more systemic, and will require a deeper analysis.
Jeff Quipp is the founder and CEO of Search Engine People, Canada’s largest and most experienced search and social media marketing firm, with a clientele that includes some of Canada’s most well known brands. Jeff is a recognized Internet marketing expert with over a decade of experience in the field, and led Search Engine People Inc. to Profit Magazine’s list of the 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada in 2009.
