Possible reasons for being outranked?
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Suppose you are being outranked for a keyword phrase by a competitor but you have a significantly higher page authority and domain authority. 9 out of 10 people would consider the content better on our page. We have more links pointing to our page from highly authoritative sites than they do.
What other reasons could explain why we are being outranked?
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I'd say one thing that could be causing this is domain age. Is the competitor's site significantly older and more well-established? Another factor could be your engagement. What's your bounce rate? This is definitely part of Google's algorithm. Are people finding what they want? Do you have on-site search? If so, are you getting a lot of searches with "zero" results? One last thing could be the number of years you've registered your domain. If you've registered yours for 2 and your competitor has registered their's for 10, that could be a factor.
One last thing. Where is your site hosted? Are you on a shared server? What is the reputation of the other sites sharing that server? If your competitor is on a dedicated server and you are on a shared server with other sites with questionable or low reputations, that could be dragging your site down.
I know that's a lot of factors, but each one could make a significant difference. Hope that helps a bit!
Dana
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