What to Do When Competing Websites Start Outranking You

Having competitors outrank your site is common, especially if they have more backlinks, better content and an older domain. You would expect this and it gives you the incentive to create better content and try to get more backlinks. However, sometimes a competitor out ranks you for no obvious reason.

There are several things you can check. Content and backlinks are the two primary ranking factors, so start with these first. Their content may not be longer than your, but it's possible the topic doesn't justify long-form content. Your competitor may have concise content with perfect spelling and grammar, while yours contains fluff and obvious errors. Check their backlinks with an SEO tool. If they are not from higher authority sites and you don't have significantly less backlinks from lower authority sites, it's time to dig deeper. You can check to see if they get their links from PBNs, however, people are quite adept at hiding backlinks from private blog networks by asking bots not to crawl them.

If your competitors are outranking you, see if their website loads faster than yours. You can also compare the mobile-friendliness of each site. Other thing which can cause your competitor to rank higher are SSL certificates, technical SEO and the user experience, including bounce rates.

There are several reasons your site can rank differently on different computers. Your location and your device affect how your site compares to your competitors in the search results. Periodically, search engines run tests which can affect the rankings. There's also brand popularity, reputation and social signals. There are about 200 factors which can cause one site to rank higher than another so it is almost impossible to tell why one site outranks another with similar content and backlinks.

While rank plays a major impact on how many people click on your website, it isn't something you can obsess about, especially if your site is consistently in the top three positions. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/cylc7b/clevelexecatmycompanywantstoknowhow_a/.