Small site cant rank in competitive niche

[qwertzui11]

I am working on a clients site in ecommerce technology niche. He is on page 1, ranking 4-5-6, for keywords he wants to rank for.

But he cant break into top3. The site has way better backlinks than the competitors, having shit-ton of whitehat links too, them are not too common in ecommerce. Onsite and blog are better than the others, age is good too.

But I have noticed one thing. The site is surrounded only with bigger and huge ones. For one of the keywords the serp looks like this:

#1 - indexed pages: 6200
#2 - indexed pages: 17900
#3 - indexed pages: 23500
#4 - indexed pages: 750 - client's site.
#5 - indexed pages: 740800
#6 - indexed pages: 1700
#7 - indexed pages: 399000

Could be this one the reason why he cant rank better?
(This all serp falling started in early 2017, the rankings were better before)
Then what to do next? Obviously he wont buy 5000 more products to sell, and wont write 5000 more blog post neither.

 

[primeCS]

Imagine this.
Your competitors site has 20k posts surrounding this topic all interlinked together, which makes his site super relevant and rich in that topic.
Now imagine all 20k internal pages all pass some juice to the page that ranks.

OK maybe not all 20k posts, but you get the idea.

That doesn't mean you won't beat him though.

During exam it's totally possible to score better than that bookworm, if you cheat.
The point is don't get caught by the teacher.

 

[qwertzui11]

That doesn't mean you won't beat him though.

During exam it's totally possible to score better than that bookworm, if you cheat.
The point is don't get caught by the teacher.

I am totally interested in this cheating method, please explain!

 

[Nargil]

Reasons can be overoptimisation, website age, even hidden PBNs. But in this case it most likely be the size of the website as @primeCS outlined.

 

[moonlighsunligh]

What are his rankings for product keywords/product pages?

I think the site is big enough, but I only had expirence with sites up to 2K pages and not more so far, so I can't say if having 5K+ pages really helps. because sites i worked on started to rank once I had 100-400+ pages indexed.

 

[dugixxl]

I must agree with you. Recently I was trying to find new Kw's on LTP. My niche is about cars.
Almost for every single KW with less than 5 words, first 10 places were occupied with websites with more than 5000 indexed pages.
Often, the number of indexed pages has become one of the stronger ranking factors.

 

[moonlighsunligh]

Could be the case because spammy sites are usually quite small. But a 750 page site can't be judged as low quality because of its size.