Contents05 sections
Your competitors are outranking you on Google because their sites tell Google a better story, and Google knows nothing else. You do better work and you have been around longer, and none of that is on the page. Four things usually are.
01Is Their Site Faster Than Yours?
Speed is a direct ranking factor. If their site loads in 1.5 seconds and yours takes four, they are ahead before Google reads a word. Run yours through PageSpeed Insights. A mobile score under 70 is costing you rank, and most template sites score in the 30s and 40s.
02Do They Have More Pages?
A competitor with a blog, a page per service, location pages, and an FAQ has far more for Google to index than a five-page site. More pages means more searches you can appear in. Google cannot rank you for a topic your site never mentions.
That does not mean 200 pages. It means that if they have 30 useful pages and you have five, the gap is the problem, and the way to close it is a page per service and answers to the questions customers ask.
03Do They Have More Reviews?
The map pack, the three businesses at the top of a local search, weighs reviews heavily. 120 reviews against your 15 reads as more established to Google. Count, recency, and average rating all matter.
Ask every happy customer for a Google review and make it part of the job: a follow-up text with the direct link. It is one of the fastest gaps to close.
04Was Their Site Built for Google to Read?
Plenty of sites are built to look good and nothing else. Heading structure, meta descriptions, alt text, clean URLs, and internal links are the basics that tell Google what a page is about, and many sites skip all of them.
05What Should You Fix First?
Speed, because it is measurable and everything else sits on top of it. Then pages, then reviews, then structure. Your competitor has a better website, and a better website is something you can buy. Send us your address and theirs and we will tell you where the gap is.