Ranking way worse than competitor even with better SEO metrics

[marc_steen]

Hello Moz Helpsters!

I write you since I feel I'm missing something BIG and I'm sure that with all your experience you can find easily what's wrong.

Here is my situation:

We rank pretty bad on several KW and our competitor does well. BUT:
- our pages are graded higher
- our pages load faster
- our pages have more more links
- our pages have more popularity

I feel there is something BIG I'm missing but I can't get to it. Can you have a look and see if you find any BIG issue we could have missed?

Here are two pages for a good comparison. Both are ranking on "medecin generaliste paris" (translation: "general practitioner paris"):
- our page ranking #90: https://www.keldoc.com/medecin-generaliste/paris
- our competitor ranking #11: https://www.doctolib.fr/medecin-generaliste/paris

Any help on this is veeeeryyy welcome

[David-Kley]

Your competitor's domain is trageted directly at France. Look at their domain name:

https://www.doctolib.fr/medecin-generaliste/paris

Even if your site is based around a directory, I would add some content to that page about what you are trying to rank for. The MOZ tools are just that, TOOLS. The purpose is to point out any shortcomings that could be dragging you down.

Let's make a short checklist of items to check:

1. You state that you have links, but where do they link to? Do they link to the home page, or are your inbound links pointed at the pages and keywords you want to rank?
2. Description (translated) "Find your General Practitioner in Paris, check available slots and make an appointment online". This could be worded a bit more convincingly, since this is most likely what shows up in search engine results with your link. 
3. Google is most likely looking at the interactions of traffic with the site i.e. on page time, clickthrough ratio etc. These are the metrics that the MOZ tool will not show you, but that you can see in in your GWT report. Look at your analytics and GWT profile to see if there are any weak areas where people leave.
4. Having more links isnt enough on it's own. Where do they go? Do they make it as easy as possible to find a doctor, and once found, easy to contact them?

[benji1]

*I bet if you put 1000 words of content about medecin generaliste paris on the landing page you'd get closer to your competitor!

*Internally link to your landing pages using real and helpful anchor text (negative and positive anchor text)

*Your using a .com address. I notice that most the SERPs on google.fr are .fr domains. I have the same issue on google.co.uk with .com / .co domains. I've found including the country name in the page title and h1 tag helps.

*Google Webmaster Tools also has a geographical target zone, set it to "France" (I've never noticed a massive impact from doing this - but it can't hurt).

*Keep building links to this page AND THE PAGES LINKING TO IT

And yes, your link Metrics are better from what I can see. But your competitor might just have more content on their pages?! And your domain is over 11 years old!