Getting Ouranked By A Much Smaller Site

Hey guys

I run an ecom store and have been doing my own SEO.

For one of my lucrative keywords, there's a subdomain that's ranking no1 while I'm at no3 for a few months now.

My site:
DR: 52
RD: 34

Competitor
DR: 2
RD:11

I optimise my onpage once per quarter so I don't think it's due to this and my site speed is 2x better than theirs.

The only reason I can think of is that their whole site is dedicated to that one keyword while mine is just a product page.

I'm still quite stumped as to why I'm not been able to outrank them.

Any suggestions?

mackdaddy88 said:

their whole site is dedicated to that one keyword while mine is just a product page

Click to expand...

most likely this!

If not that, then your domain has lower authority and topical relevance than your competitor's site. Google treats subdomains as different entities, with their own authority, metrics, backlinks and so on. So, if your subdomain is worse than your competitor's domain this could be a reason for which you are getting outranked.

Or it could also be - like I said - topical relevance of the entire domain of your competitor vs your subdomain, or it could be the amount and / or quality of content, or your competitor's URL addresses the main keyword better than you, etc. Or, your competitor could be paying for google ads and you don't, which also affects rankings.

Try to use different websites to analyze your competitor... semrush, ahrefs, moz... already the 3 websites don't give the same "authority", so in one or another you may find out what's pushing the competitor higher. you might be using just one website that is not showing "all" their backlinks.

I've done this before.

In fact, I was the David to my big niche website Goliaths.

The reason why this happens is that a lot of these smaller sites focus on a subtopic or a sub-niche that is an inch wide and miles deep.

By miles deep, I'm not talking about packing your website with all sorts of content.

If you know what you're doing, a website that has 20 posts or even 15 posts can still take down a larger website when it comes to a fairly narrow range of keyword targets.

It all boils down to quality.

Please understand that if you produce quality content that is optimized based on what currently exists in your niche, your content is more likely to draw organic links from sites that matter in your niche.

That's how it works.

They go hand in hand.

So, do yourself a big favor.

If you are an e-com website, you need to look into questions that your competitors answer and try to outrank them that way.

It all boils down to perceived value.