Why Are My Competitors Outranking Me in 2020?

We have all been there. You have a great website, with great content. Your site is SEO optimized and all of the boxes are checked for best practices. However, your competitors are still are outranking you. You may even have better content and better optimizations than they do.

This can be very frustrating for Ecommerce websites, especially if they feel they have done everything right on their side. If your competition is ranking above you, it’s time to take a look at what the competition is doing and compare. Here are a few areas to look at when determining why your competitors may be ranking above you and how to build from it.

What Are They Ranking For?

Using various SEO tools and manual search, you can start to dive into what your competitors are ranking for. Are they ranking for the all the terms you are ranking for? Are they ranking for broader high-volume terms? Are there any terms they rank for that you have not considered? There may be an opportunity here to create new or adjust current content.

Backlinks

Do these competitors have high DA (Domain Authority) 3rd party sites linking to them? If so, are there any of those that are relevant to your brand? These are opportunities for outreach to gain partnerships. Websites that have high domain authoritative links pointing to them usually rank higher on Google. Here's why…

Content that is shared more has a greater awareness.
As more people see this content, more organically link to it.
Additional backlinks help websites rank higher.
Clicks and engagement on the website prove to Google the website is engaging and may be more relevant compared to other sites, as it demonstrates to be a reliable and trusted source.

Featured Snippets

A tool like Ahrefs can show what featured snippets you don’t rank for and what competitors are ranking for, isolating those that you want to capture. With that information, you may optimize for those featured snippets through schema markup, formatting, and content optimization. Also, “answer-question” based content is something that tends to populate in these featured snippets. If the site is lacking in this area or if there is an opportunity to add FAQ’s to a section or category, this should be considered.

Social Following

This channel can be difficult because Google says there is no direct correlation between social channel success and ranking success. However, social media does have an indirect hand in how well websites rank online. For example, content that gets shared more gets more awareness. As posts get more awareness, more people organically link or engage with it. By people sharing links to it, backlinks are created which in turn makes the website a source of relevance and authority, increasing the rankings.