SEO Puzzle for my business

[lvuxton]

Hello everyone,

I am new to SEO, so bear with me.
Lately I was having SEO problems that doesn't make sense to me. My competitors are outranking me by far, although it looks like I put a lot more effort into it than them. They don't do content marketing (only my business have a blog and we update it regularly). I bought some whitehat (quality?) backlinks from this forum, but it didn't really help to increase my rankings or outrank them. Another point is, I had some on-page seo issues like duplicate meta descriptions on some pages, but that's been fixed long time ago.
I can't think of anything else that would damage my rankings.

I am using Semrush and Ahrefs to track my competitors, so I'll attach some screenshots for comparison. Please ask me some questions, I am looking to solving this seo puzzle with the help from you good people.
Thanks!

 

[shifubill]

How long have you been at it? It could just need more time.

 

[lvuxton]

How long have you been at it? It could just need more time.

Domain is 6 months old and I've been doing some seo work for the last 3 months now.

 

[davids355]

What sort of links have you built? What are the metrics of those links compared to your competition - it might be that your competition have a handful of really niche relevent links and you only have some random sites - just a guess.

You should check majestic for your sites stats - TF/CF and also check some of your links compared to their links.

Depends on the outcome of that but potentially i would be looking for some real niche specific links - like niche link directory, advertising on some niche sites or something like that - that will give you a good boost.

Also as said above, you need to give it time as well, especially seeing as your site is only 6 months old. My advise is just keep steadily building links and I bet that just when you are thinking about giving up you will rise to the top because you will have steady increase of back links, power AND age. Also keep your anchors as diverse as possible - get some generic / naked URL, image only, lots of longtails, brand etc and also some do-follow and dont follow. Get everything looking super natural.

 

[lvuxton]

What sort of links have you built? What are the metrics of those links compared to your competition - it might be that your competition have a handful of really niche relevent links and you only have some random sites - just a guess.

You should check majestic for your sites stats - TF/CF and also check some of your links compared to their links.

Depends on the outcome of that but potentially i would be looking for some real niche specific links - like niche link directory, advertising on some niche sites or something like that - that will give you a good boost.

Also as said above, you need to give it time as well, especially seeing as your site is only 6 months old. My advise is just keep steadily building links and I bet that just when you are thinking about giving up you will rise to the top because you will have steady increase of back links, power AND age. Also keep your anchors as diverse as possible - get some generic / naked URL, image only, lots of longtails, brand etc and also some do-follow and dont follow. Get everything looking super natural.

Thank you for your advice. We've built some do-follow and no-follow links on our niche blogs, wikipedia, buzzfeed and of course some random sites. I guess as you said, it will take some time to get results I want.

Any idea what could cause for my competitors to jump up so high in rankings almost at the same time?

 

[davids355]

Thank you for your advice. We've built some do-follow and no-follow links on our niche blogs, wikipedia, buzzfeed and of course some random sites. I guess as you said, it will take some time to get results I want.

Any idea what could cause for my competitors to jump up so high in rankings almost at the same time?

Don't know. Maybe they are building and hiding a pbn? Or maybe it's coincidence and there was an algo change or something.

What are you doing for anchor text?

Also what is your content like? Is it comparible to that of the top 3?