• Your competitors’ content is more unique and valuable. Some estimates suggest that less than 2% of the content on the web is truly unique and valuable. Most content seems to mirror content found elsewhere, with the verbiage merely reorganized. Since Google wants to land its searchers on content that directly answers questions and adds value, ‘me too’ content is often not deemed worthy of ranking. A good means of comparing your site’s performance is to examine how many web sites link to your site versus the competition. The assumption (and it is Google’s too) is that web sites will link to exceptional content. Run this check yourself by visiting www.majesticseo.com, typing in your domain, and hitting the ‘Get Link Data’ button. Then click on the graph, and enter your competitors’ domains into the ‘Domains to Compare’ fields to see how your site compares.
• 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 quality content on a site is to perform a Google search for site:yourdomainname.com (eg. site:www.searchenginepeople.com). This search tells you how many pages of your site Google has in its database. Monitor it over time. If it declines, then Google thinks the content is substandard and is de-indexing content. Also, compare to competitive sites to see which ones have more pages indexed, and which are gaining good content quickest.
• Your competitors’ content is better structured. Since Google’s goal is to answer searchers’ questions quickly, speed matters in the ranking algorithms. Content structure that dramatically impacts speed becomes an important ranking factor.  Make sure your content is ‘scannable’, and that key takeaways can be extracted at a glance, otherwise competitors will likely continue to rank higher.

 

• Every page of a competitors’ site has a unique and descriptive page title. Does every page of your site have a unique title? Do the keyword(s) 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.
• 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 and reward those pages you consider most important. In the end, if your competitors manage their internal linking more efficiently, they’ll likely outrank your site for the terms that matter most.
• Your competitors are asking others to link to their site. They’ve reached out to suppliers, clients, related associations, and complementary businesses and asked those sites to link back to them using the keywords they wish to rank for in the text of the link. This signals Google that their site is important (the more links … the more important), and the addition of the keywords to the link text tells Google that their site is ‘relevant’ to those keywords.

If your competitors consistently outrank your site on Google, odds are that one or more of the six reasons above are the culprit. If these reasons do not appear to explain your unique situation, then the problem is more systemic, and will require a deeper analysis.