Getting Higher Ranks in SERPs

Why is my competitor’s site getting ranked higher than mine?

It’s every online marketer’s dream to be the highest-ranked site in search results. In fact, it’s the Internet equivalent of the “Holy Grail.” And most site owners who are serious about social media marketing will go to phenomenal lengths to achieve the highest possible rankings.

If your site is ranked highly, but your competitor’s site is higher, several things might account for this disparity. But a word of caution should be mentioned before you try to knock your competitor out of that higher position:

Just because another site is rated higher in the search engine landing page than yours doesn’t necessarily mean that site is making more money than yours. In fact, the other site owner may be paying a lot of money for search terms that result in a top ranking. But this doesn’t provide any guarantee that qualified prospects are actually being delivered as a result.

It’s also possible your site has fewer links than your competitor’s. Remember, links are important to search engines because they serve to validate the relevance of your site’s content. If this is the case, Google SEO Database Consultants suggests a campaign to increase the number of thematically appropriate links could cause search engines to take a second look at your site and increase its ranking.

Los Angeles SEO warns that if your website has multiple listings with search engines (several different URLs or domain names with the same content), Google and others may flag those redundant pages as spam. Google defines spam as: “pages that deliberately trick the search engines into delivering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality results.” Eliminating these redundant domain listings can increase the ranking of your page.

Unless you’re in a market segment that survives on razor-thin profit margins, getting from a good ranking to a great ranking can be more expensive than the results would warrant. Certainly, if you’re in the “Top 10,” it may not be worth the time and money required to get from there to the “Top 5.”

Remember, many people have lost the battle—and their lives—in search of the Holy Grail. It’s wise to do all you can to position yourself as highly as possible, but getting to #1 may be a costly, time-consuming waste of effort. If you keep your SEM efforts consistently moving ahead, you’ll stay close enough to the top of the rankings to be highly successful. And you can let the other guys spin their wheels going after the Grails.

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