Why Your Competitors Outrank You (Even Though You're "Better")

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Welcome to the SEO show. I'm Michael Costin.

ARTHUR: I am with… Arthur Fabik. And that… I think you might have scared a few people in the office.

MICHAEL: I hope no one was looking at me then, because I was about four meters from the mic. Came in, just trying to change things up, keep it interesting around here on the SEO show. It was definitely interesting. Tell you what else is interesting, is this week's episode. Now the topic, the little working title we've got here is, why your competitors outrank you, even though you're Better, in inverted commas. Because we hear that a lot from people, don't we?

ARTHUR: We do.

MICHAEL: Like, my site's better. You know, we're better than the competition. Like, they shouldn't be outranking us.

ARTHUR: Okay. So better is like, than their opinion. Yes. Okay.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you're looking at your site and you're like, I can't believe, why does Google hate me? Why don't I rank at the top? Yeah, no, very true. And it's, um, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the only beholder that you want to be beautiful to is Google, right?

ARTHUR: I guess to a degree. You want to be attractive to Google. You want a balance, right? But definitely, if you want traffic, you need to be very attractive to Google.

MICHAEL: You want to be appealing and pleasing to Google.

ARTHUR: But there's a fine line as well. You can do both.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You don't want to be too appealing. No. Well, you do. If you're too appealing, though, you become unappealing. And that's when you get blasted out of the search results.

ARTHUR: There's no such thing as too appealing. If you over-optimize.

MICHAEL: If you're first for every keyword. But I'm just saying, if you over-optimize, you become too appealing. Google can see what you're up to. It gets a yick. Does it? Yeah. It doesn't want you in search results anymore. But anyway, so why do my competitors outrank me, even though I'm better? My website's better. Well, here's the stuff that doesn't matter. We'll tell you the two areas that do matter. The stuff that doesn't really matter. Ready? E-E-A-T. I didn't like it when it was E-A-T. I really don't like it when it's E-E-A-T. Yeah.

ARTHUR: If you're just a local service, doesn't matter. I think it matters when you're like a publisher and you're publishing content. Yeah. And like the, your money, your life segments. Yep. Yep. Yep. But not when you're a plumber or a lawyer or a florist.

MICHAEL: Any real business in the real world, just trying to get customers. Yeah. Forget about it. Core web vitals. Like, nice to have?

ARTHUR: Yeah, nice to have. Look, I think it is important. I think it's becoming more important. Would you say important? Yes. Yeah. I'd say like, I've noticed- It's very pleasing? Yeah. I've noticed a lot of sites that would like, all things equal authority content, Google will preference site that had the Core Web Vital Scores. Okay. I've noticed that. Okay. Not all the time, Like I said, all things equal, let's just say you had two plumbing sites, similar DR, similar content, I would notice that the one with the better Core Web Vitals rank higher.

MICHAEL: But is everything equal? We're going to get onto what we think really matters.

ARTHUR: No. Again, this is based on just an observation. You know what I mean? I haven't gone in and done data analysis to make sure that the content is- Well, geez, you're talking big talk for someone that hasn't done data analysis. But I think looking at sites all day and looking at client sites all day, I think it's a trend. Okay. Well, I'm going to disagree. But it's not the most important metric.

MICHAEL: Because what I'm talking about here is these competitors that a client says, we're better than competitors. Our Core Web Vitals score is better.

ARTHUR: Why aren't we ranking higher? This is funny because this is one thing clients… are obsessed with, because if they've got Search Console, they'll be getting updates periodically. Like, your Core Web Vitals score is bad. It's bad. It's bad. They'll just forward you the email, panicking. Like, what do we do here? Why? Why? And a lot of the time, you need to explain that the stuff in Google Search Console, a lot of the time, is very alarmist. So you've got four soft 404s, and then they forward it to you.

MICHAEL: And the thing with Core Web Vitals, it has a nice little like, Scores with colors, green, red, yellow, sort of thing. So in the scheme of things, like if your competitor is outranking you, even though you're better, in inverted commas, Core Web Vitals probably, in my opinion, is low on the list of stuff that matters. Same as alt tags. Don't worry about your alt tag. That doesn't matter. Bounce rate's a big one in terms of what people think matters. They're in their analytics. Not so much now that GA4's out and no one knows how to use it. Back in the day, clients would be looking at bounce rate.

ARTHUR: We've got an engagement rate, which is effectively the flip of bounce rate.

MICHAEL: How often do you have clients whinging about engagement rate?

ARTHUR: Never.

MICHAEL: Never. Back in the day, bounce rate was a thing for all clients.

ARTHUR: I feel like it's like a metric they've been taught in some sort of course or some online guide. I don't know, whatever. It's easy to see in analytics. What's bounce rate? People again, like they wouldn't understand that different pages would have different bounce rates. So like a product page would have a significantly higher bounce rate than a homepage, not realizing that if someone lands on a product, they're likely to either do one thing, buy or leave. So they would panic, but like my bounce rate is like 70, 80%. But then you have to educate them that the further you go, the higher it's gonna be. But a lot of the time that goes over their head. Like it's the one at lower has to be 30%.

MICHAEL: Don't put your SEO on hold because your bounce rate is at some arbitrary number that you've decided is bad. This one. The next one. Size of your logo. Doesn't matter.

ARTHUR: No, I think it's very common for specific industries that, I guess it's like just being very proud of their brand. They've done some, they've seen some video or something. So their demand that their logo takes up, you know, half the screen a lot of the time. And often they'll have the email signatures take up half the screen as well. Like it's just, I don't know. I think it is just the pride thing really.

MICHAEL: Anyway, we're being a bit facetious with that one, because we're just trying to say a lot of this stuff people get hung up on. That's not really SEO. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. I'll tell you what does matter. There's two things that matter in SEO for the vast majority of businesses. That's one, your content. Two, your links, your authority. That's it. Pretty simple. Very simple. What are we doing here at our agency most of the time is focused on content and links. So let's just recap where you can have an impact. Now the links is going to be the biggest part for pretty much every business out there. Because content, once you get it sort of done, you don't need to necessarily be focusing on it all of the time. But links is something that goes on all the time. And within content, people talk about having a content calendar and having to go super deep publishing blogs and blah, blah, blah. But really, for most businesses, you can be very focused on doing a few stuff, a few stuff? A few stuff. A few stuff properly. and then moving on just really being link focused. You agreeing or?

ARTHUR: No, I agree. Yeah. I think it's good to post content frequently, but it doesn't need to be 15 posts a month. As long as you're like updating it, adding it, keeping it fresh, posting relevant things, not just posting for the sake of posting. I hate when clients want to post just for the sake of posting. Like we need to do four blog posts per month. Why? you know, especially if they've covered a lot of topics. And, you know, like I don't want to name clients, but like, let's just say in the air conditioning industry, which we're picking on, you find yourself just rewriting and rehashing and just, you know, like there's only a finite number of topics you can cover for air conditioning.

MICHAEL: Um, and then you're telling me that an article on an 11 kilowatt, um, ducted system, how to prepare your air conditioner for spring or like how to maintain your ducted air.

ARTHUR: And like, you know, and then you go through all the seasonal content and you go through all the met, like tips, tricks, whatever. And then, you know, you kind of run out, like you, you start getting creative, but you're really just writing about the same stuff.

MICHAEL: And so when I say that content and authority are the two things that matter for SEO, publishing that blog content doesn't fit in what I'm talking about here. So you're talking just like, um, category, like money page content, getting that, ticking the boxes with that and then getting strong links. That's SEO.

ARTHUR: What about, um, your favorite topical authority?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well that like, when you say that they've published a whole bunch of articles, then you don't need to keep going with it. And if I was starting from scratch with a website and I was trying to rank like for local business keywords, I'd be focusing Like our local digital site, most of our effort at the moment, since we've started doing SEO on it, is going towards links and optimizing money pages. There's been a bit of blog content creation, but we're not willy-nilly publishing four articles a month.

ARTHUR: No. You should do keyword research and write content that's going to drive traffic. Have a look and see if there's trends or whatever in the industry. Write about it. And if it's got search volume, do it. Don't just do it for no reason. What do you think?

MICHAEL: Look, I think that can be done, but if I was, let's say I'm Johnny Plummer. Hello, Johnny Plummer. Yep, thank you. I'm here to try and get some clients in the local area. For plumbing? Plumbing clients. Yeah, I'm not going to write how to fix a clogged drain articles. No. Like, I might once I'm big enough to waste time on that.

ARTHUR: Once you're big enough, but also, like, for topical authority. Yeah, but to start off with… To start off with. Sorry, I'm derailing you here, aren't I? You're totally derailing me. This is meant to be a simple, these are the two things that I'm coming in… Hang on, what about this? What about this? Yeah, well… Call Where Vitals is important.

MICHAEL: You're absolutely ruining the episode, to be quite honest. No, no, no. I'm making it better. Look, here we go. I've got four points here. Do you agree with them? The first one, single bucket of keyword focus per page with no cannibalizing. So you don't have to make each page about one keyword. That's super old school. But having a bucket or, you know, a theme, a pillar, a pillar, a seed, a bucket.

INTRO: I'm going to go with bucket.

MICHAEL: Bucket of keywords per page. And that's it. You don't write about clogged drains on your, Clogs your emergency plumbing page. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Because then you're at risk of cannibalizing and then. Yeah.

MICHAEL: It's a very laser focused reason for each page to exist. Yes. When Google lands on it, it understands exactly about that page. Yep. Agree. Do your basic on-site SEO properly. We call it 80-20 SEO. You know, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. That's putting your keyword in the title tag, the h1 tag, the first paragraph. Using it in subheadings, putting the content on the page that talks about the keyword bucket or the theme for that page. Boom, that's SEO. Create pages. to target all of the different opportunities out there. So you mentioned doing keyword research and creating content for the blog. Well, first do this through your service lines, maybe the areas you want to target, that sort of thing, then link between them. What else from a content pillar really is there to do?

ARTHUR: That's basically, I mean, yeah, that's it. Like, that's it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So if you're saying your website, you know, why am I competitors that rank me? I'm better because you've got all that stuff. Like chances are they do too. all of the players in your space would be trying to create this sort of content. So you might think you're better. They might think they're better. At the end of the day, the thing that differentiates you from the competition is your authority, your links, your backlink profile, your popularity online, how many votes you have in the eyes of Google. And that all comes down to links. We talk a lot about links.

ARTHUR: Oh, you do. You love your links.

MICHAEL: You don't love links.

ARTHUR: No, I do. But I think you love them more than I do.

MICHAEL: I think if you're an SEO, you need to have a little bit of love.

ARTHUR: Your eyes light up and whenever you talk about link building, you get excited. Like you kind of like perk up a little bit. Like you sit straighter on your chair. Like, yeah. You know what?

MICHAEL: After we finish recording these episodes, I might go do a bit of link building myself. But look, it's just not volume of links. It's quality. If they're at ranking you, chances are they have higher quality links pointing to them, more authoritative links in the eyes of Google.

ARTHUR: We bang on about how it's always quality over quantity. And a lot of the time, clients don't see that. They get hung up on, I need 10 links, 5 links, whatever. And they don't understand a lot of the time. And we were talking about this before we were recording, but like with the recent update, you know, Google's really hitting like exact, not exact match domains, repurposed domains, sorry. A lot of which are used for blogs that the sole purpose of them is for link building. And that wipes out a lot of link choices for a lot of people. So it's making it more difficult and more expensive to actually build good quality links. So, you know, maybe five, six years ago, you could go and build 10 links, whatever. Now you can probably build one or two, but that's not a bad thing. It just means those two links are high quality links and they're going to do a lot more than those 10 links would have done in the past. So kind of, Yeah, kind of really understanding it is really quality over quantity. But that is easier said than done because when you're asking for a significant investment and in return, you're only getting two links, like to a normal person, that doesn't seem like much. You know what I mean? So explaining that and educating people is important, but.

MICHAEL: We did an episode way back in episode 44 on what makes a good link.

ARTHUR: It's funny because you say way back in episode 44 and it's just, it's just funny. Like we've done so many episodes.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We are esteemed SEO podcasters with a long track record of success. So 44, check that out. What makes a good link? Maybe it needs an update. I haven't actually listened to it in a while. I go back and listen to every episode multiple times.

ARTHUR: Maybe you can do from the vault and then play this. Maybe we will.

MICHAEL: We'll do it from the vault of that episode. But look, quality over quantity. And it's tougher to find quality now. In the recent updates, Google have blasted a lot of options out, but there's still plenty out there. And your competitors are going to have more of that if they're outranking you, even though you're better, in inverted commas. Their links are probably more relevant, like from trade industry type sites or blogs that have a reason to rank to them, not just a magazine style site that posts about everything. So there's like contextual relevance to them. A big one, using more exact match anchor text in the actual links from these strong sites. Like that's a very strong signal to Google to rank you for that keyword. Always has been, always will be. It can get you into trouble if you are too aggressive with it. But you have to be very aggressive with it. Yes. Yeah, you do. And what we see in so many spaces is that. You can pretty much almost exclusively on your really high authority money links use exact match anchor text and then pad it out with other types of links and you're laughing. And chances are if your competitors outranking you, they might have more of that.

ARTHUR: You wouldn't be spending six, seven, whatever it is on a branded link. That's just ridiculous. Yes, correct.

MICHAEL: Links pointing to your money pages, to your internal category pages. So if you're a plumber, you would have links pointing to your emergency plumber Sydney page, not just your homepage. With some exact match anchor text. That is a flow on. It's similar in terms of words to all of that onsite optimization you did. And all of a sudden. Google is seeing all these signals that's going to rank you higher. And if your competitors aren't ranking you, that's probably because they have more of that sort of stuff. So how do you find out how far you are behind the competition? Because if it's just volume, you could go in Ahrefs and say, well, they have 500 links, and I only have 50. So I've got to get 450 links, and they cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars each. How am I going to do it? Well, the good news is not all links are built equal, as we've been banging on about. So you can listen to that episode 44, what makes a good link. But if you want to quickly try and filter out how far behind the competition you are, in Ahrefs, you can put like, let's say someone ranks number one in your space. You can put their site into Ahrefs, go to the referring domains report, Across the top they have filters there. So you used to have to do this manually to try and drill down on like what the good links were versus bad links. They now have an option called best links only where it will display links that meet certain criteria. So their default setting is it's got to be do follow. The link has got to be in content. So it's not like a site wide footer link or whatever. DR is a minimum of 30, traffic is a minimum of 500, and it has only maximum of 200 referring links, like that referring site. So what that's saying is it's in-content relevant link, strong domain, that domain gets traffic from Google itself, which is a sign that Google likes that site, and it's not linking out to thousands and thousands of other websites. So that's a pretty good best links filter, like we used to have to do that manually. But if I give an example here, I run a site in the plumbing space through. They have over 500 links. If I apply that best links filter, it drops it down to 150 domains that you're looking at. So now you can sort of see that closing the gap between you and them is not as scary as it might seem at first. And you can go through that report and just have a look at the links that they have and get a feel for what you could go out and reach out to and get links from yourself. Or you could get us to do it for you. Well, of course, if you're a business owner, you're not going to do that because it takes a hell of a lot of time.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But that's why we're here. So yes.

MICHAEL: So I'll gladly do it for you. Arthur loves link burning. I'm going to do a little bit of link building after this. He loves it. We've got a whole team of nerds that love link building. Um, but that's basically. Oh, there's one more.

ARTHUR: Oh, you're going to wrap up this section.

MICHAEL: That's basically on the topic of authority. Right. It's. That's it. Like, running your competitors through these tools, getting the same links that they do, and then trying to find links that they don't have. Constantly looking for links, links, links. Good quality links. It's like when you're moving house, Jerry Seinfeld, to talk about Seinfeld yet again. When you're moving, you need boxes. You're always looking for boxes.

ARTHUR: I reckon we should. Yeah, you're always looking for links. Yeah, we should always try to relate every episode we do moving forward to an episode of Seinfeld. Done. Make it a little thing.

MICHAEL: In our podcast studio here, we have a little poster of, um, the monks cafe, the restaurant, the pop, what do you call them? And we've got the, the Funko pops. We've got Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. Yeah. Seinfeld fans around here, but, um, okay. Arthur, you had a little thing outside of me saying that content and authority is what matters. And that eeat core web vitals, alt tags, that sort of stuff don't matter, but you disagree. You also wanted to throw something in the mix.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So basically a lot of people will focus on the desktop version of their site and neglect the mobile, but most of the traffic nowadays will come from mobile. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. I'd say I'd argue that most of the traffic's on mobile. So really kind of focus on that and be mobile first, because I know even like today, clients are still focusing on desktop when we're building or when they're building websites, they're always focused on the desktop version. because that's what they're shown first and that's what they obsess over. But you shouldn't, you really should focus on mobile and make the experience like on point, because that's going to help with not only SEO, but with like your conversions, just user experience in general. And Google's mobile first. And yeah, Google's mobile first. That was really it, but pretty simple.

MICHAEL: It is simple, but it's not done. Because a lot of people in business are looking at stuff on their computer. Yeah.

ARTHUR: But your customers aren't. Well, 100%. But like, for example, for a plumber, a lot of the time people call a plumber when there's an emergency off their phone. So like 80% of the traffic will come from But a lot of the time they'll be fixated on the desktop version of the site, realizing very few people actually would be searching for a plumber on a computer. So it's shifting your mindset to mobile first, making sure that the site's fast on mobile, that it's usable on mobile. Because I was telling you today, I was trying to return some shoes to Hype and the form that you use to submit the return was cut off. And using an iPhone 15, One of the most common friends out there. I couldn't scroll up to select the reason as to why I'm returning the shoes. So hype a big shoe retailer here in Australia. can't even get that right. So that's just a small thing. I'm sure they check out and stuff.

MICHAEL: It's a mindset minute with Arthur. I'm going to call this segment mindset minute.

ARTHUR: Well, I'm sure like buying shoes is fine for them. Like they probably don't really care about returns, but it's just an example of like, you know, people not focusing on mobile when they should be.

MICHAEL: Yep.

ARTHUR: Mindset minute with Arthur.

MICHAEL: Subtle flex. iPhone 15, most common phone out there.

ARTHUR: Oh, well, I'm just saying, it's a pro to be. Oh, a pro. No no, I was thinking iPhone is the most common phone out there. I'm winding you up.

MICHAEL: All right, well, so that is it. Why are your competitors outranking you even though you're better? It's going to come down to your content and links most of the time. So work on them, focus on them, use an SEO agency to work on them. If you are using an SEO agency, make sure that the work they're doing is focused on that stuff and use Arthur's Mindset Minute for a minute to make sure that mobile is considered too. So that is the potty for this week. We'll be back with another episode next week. Until then. Happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: Happy SEOing.