A Competitor Is Sitting Above You in Google. Which of the Three Problems Do You Have?

Every few weeks someone sends us a screenshot. Their business, position six. A competitor they have never heard of, position two. The message underneath is usually some version of the same question. How are they beating us when we have been doing this for twenty years and they turned up in 2024?

The honest answer is that Google is not ranking the business. It is ranking a page. Once you accept that, the question gets much easier to answer, because there are really only three reasons a competitor page sits above yours, and each one needs a different fix.

Problem one: they have a page for the search and you do not

This is the most common by a distance, and the easiest to confirm. Search the term yourself and look at what ranks on their site. If they have a dedicated page on commercial fitouts in Hamilton and your fitout work is one bullet point on a general services page, that is the whole story. There is no algorithm mystery to solve.

The fix is not subtle. You need a page that answers that search properly, written for someone with that exact problem, rather than a rewrite of your homepage with a fresh heading dropped on top. We have covered how to build these in writing service pages that rank and convert, and it is the work that moves the needle fastest for most of the businesses we take on.

Worth checking your own site while you are there. Plenty of businesses already have two or three pages half covering the same search, which splits the signal and leaves both of them stuck.

Problem two: your page exists but it is thinner than theirs

Sometimes the page is there and still loses. Open both and compare them honestly, side by side, the way a customer would.

Count what they answer that you do not. Pricing. How long the job takes. What is included and what is extra. Photos of finished work. Named suburbs. Reviews from people in those suburbs. A form that asks for the right details. Most losing pages are losing on substance, and it shows up as a two hundred word page competing against a nine hundred word one that answers the real questions.

A Christchurch builder we worked with had a renovations page that read well and ranked nowhere. The competitor above him had the same page with three renovation projects on it, a rough cost band for each, and a paragraph on how long the family was out of the house. Nothing clever, and no keyword tricks involved. He was answering questions the builder had left the customer to guess at.

Structure counts too. Headings that match how people ask questions, clear internal linking between related services, a sensible URL. Our guide to structuring an NZ website for SEO goes through how the pieces should fit together.

While you are comparing, check the boring technical things. Load speed on a phone, images that have not been resized, headings used for styling rather than hierarchy. These rarely explain a gap on their own, though they will keep you one place behind a competitor who has them sorted.

Problem three: they are simply better known

If your page is genuinely stronger and you are still second, you are usually looking at authority. Other websites link to them. They are listed in industry directories, quoted in local news, mentioned by suppliers and trade bodies. Google reads that as evidence the business is real and established in that market.

This is the slowest one to shift and the one most people jump to first, which is backwards. Sort the page and the content before you spend a cent on links, because authority pointed at a weak page still loses to a strong page.

When it is the real cause, the work is unglamorous. Supplier and manufacturer listings. Local sponsorships. Industry associations. Case studies that people have a reason to reference, which is why we push clients towards using project proof to win enquiries. It takes months, not weeks.

The question nobody asks first

Before any of this, check whether the ranking is worth having. We have seen businesses spend a year chasing a term that brings in tyre kickers while the searches their best customers use sit ignored on page two.

Position six on a term that converts beats position one on a term that does not. If your traffic is climbing and your enquiries are not, the ranking is not the problem, and traffic without enquiries is worth reading before you chase anything else.

Send us the search term and the competitor. We will tell you which of the three you are dealing with, and whether it is worth fixing.