How Is It Possible That I Rank O Above Large Competitors?

[TP_Marketing]

Hello!

Ive noticed that on some terms I am ranking above my competitors who are much larger, older, and have many more links. How is this possible?

Thx!

[NakulGoyal]

For a lot of niche products / categories, it can be better. The rankings are dependent on multiple factors and although a site like wikipedia could be ranking for everything towards the top...similarly like amazon or pinterest or ebay and so on. The stronger authority domains do have that advantage, like a brand would. But then a niche product/category might have much better focused copy, a lot of internal links to this page from within the website, making this a stronger page.

Does that help and make sense ?

[TP_Marketing]

It does, but they have a TON of links, Stronger authority than me, could it be the copy?

THANK YOU!

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, it syre can be the optimized copy, internal links, theme of your site. So if your site is only about Widgets, you have 100 different kinds of Widgets and that's all you sell. In that case, all your internal links, categories are focused around Widgets. That gives you an edge if your other factors are strong, you could be ranking better then your competition, the stronger competition.

Also, the volume of links do not matter. In this case, you might have 10 Widget related links from other Widget sites, which the bigger competition does not have, making you a better suited site ranking for that term. This logic might be totally different for another term.

[TP_Marketing]

was VERY surprising to me to say the least, to rank on page 1 and beat out a HUGE HUGE competitor.

[MarieHaynes]

Are you absolutely sure you're not seeing personalized results?  Log out of Google and do the same search.  Then type &pws=0 at the end of the end of the url and hit enter.  Are you still number one?

[KeriMorgret]

Another similar thing to do is open up a private browsing / incognito browser window and try the search.

[MarieHaynes]

Yes...I often use Pagewash.com to make sure I'm not seeing personalized results as well.  It's not always the best for locational queries but good for most SERP checks.

[TP_Marketing]

acutally what I was using is the SEO moz plug in to show a non pers. search.  Although I am not #1 I found it odd that I was ranking above a HUGE website.

Thanks for all the help!!