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Some Reasons Your Competition Ranks Higher Than You In Search Engines

There’s nothing more disappointing than watching your closest competitors overtake you in the SERP rankings.
Unfortunately, as there’s only so much room at the top, there will always be winners and losers in SEO.

The question being – what can you do to ensure you avoid the latter bracket?

SEO is an extremely complex concept, which to make matters worse is constantly evolving. Nevertheless, if your rivals are ranking higher than you, it’s most likely down to one of four common issues.

The quicker you determine which it is, the faster you’ll be able to do something about it:

1. They know your audience better than you do

If your competitors have a deeper understanding of your target audience than you do, you can’t realistically expect to compete. The better you know your audience, the easier it becomes to tailor your entire website and your SEO strategy around their needs and expectations. It isn’t simply a case of identifying keywords, but also heavily researching the intent behind these keywords. Unless you can honestly say you are investing heavily in the audience research, this is something you need to begin focusing on sooner rather than later.

2. They appear more reputable to Google

Google takes multiple factors into account when assigning SERP positions, including the reputation of the respective website. If you don’t come across as trustworthy as your rivals, they’ll gain and maintain the edge. Building trust and authority in the eyes of Google means maintaining a strong social media presence, using social proof like reviews and testimonials to boost your image, keeping a close eye on negative mentions of your brand name, guest posting on other blogs and sites, posting backlinks on authoritative websites and so on.  The stronger your reputation grows in the eyes of Google, the better.

3.  They produce superior content

Quality content will always live at the heart of a successful SEO strategy. The key to success lying in addressing both quality and quantity with equally high priority. Once again, if your competitors are publishing better content than you on a more regular basis, they’ll automatically take priority in the eyes of Google. It shouldn’t be difficult to figure out if this is the case – just keep an eye on their website and take note of their content marketing strategy. In doing so, you’ll also gain invaluable insights on how to do what they do, only better.

4.  Their user experience is better

Last but not least, the major search engines are placing greater emphasis on the quality of the wider user experience than ever before. From page loading speeds to simplified navigation systems to mobile-friendliness to general site security, Google just isn’t going to promote your website if its performance isn’t flawless. Put yourself in the position of the end-user and evaluate exactly how streamlined or otherwise your user experience is. Check out what’s on offer elsewhere and think about what you can do to step things up. If you lack the technical expertise needed to go about complete site-wide optimisation, you may need to hire help.