Can you spot the differences?

[max.favilli]

Well, I have been scratching my head on this for days, I will try throwing the ball to you with hopes someone more experienced than me can help.

The scenario is: e-commerce -> brand page -> SERP -> comparison between how two pages rank; one from my website, one from a competitor website.

The brand is Michelin, the keyword is "pneumatici michelin" (equivalent in italian of “michelin tires”).

I am not looking at SERP first page, where competition is surely much more fierce. I am looking at position 11: http://www.cambio-gomme.it/marchi/michelin/

And my page (not in the first 50): http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/michelin

My page:

• MOZ Page Grade (for keyword “pneumatici michelin”): A

• External backlinks to the page: 1

• Domain Authority: 29

• Page Authority: 24

• On-page SEO optimization:

• keyword density: 0.87%

• internal links: 145

• external links: 3

• page size: 108kb

• html size: 24kb

• words on page: 2077

• link-words: 408

• non-linked words: 1669

• time to first byte: 0.419s

Competitor page:

• MOZ Page Grade (for keyword “pneumatici michelin”): A

• External backlinks to the page: 0

• Domain Authority: 26

• Page Authority: 13

• On-page SEO optimization:

• keyword density: 0.75%

• internal links: 70

• external links: 1

• page size: 31kb

• html size: 9kb

• words on page: 1521

• link-words: 168

• non-linked words: 1353

• time to first byte: 0.373s

Domain age is very similar, both websites launched close to each other in 2012.

Ideas? Suggestion on other metrics to compare?

[GPainter]

Back it up a bit, Have you tried spot the difference on the whole domain ?

http://imgur.com/N3eYh3N

http://imgur.com/65PcSSz

How about some other factors?

http://www.cambio-gomme.it/marchi/michelin/

Total words: 1527

http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/michelin

Total words: 1850

Also a PR difference and robots etc.  I'm going to be honest here there is no shortage of things that are different but I don't recommend looking at your competitors so much thinking what are they doing that your not not, if you do that you're constantly going to be following them and you want to be leading! (there is no harm in keeping an eye on what they are up to though)

you're going to get a headache if you try to work out why Google likes that site more than your etc. could be any number of things. Instead I suggest looking at ways to improve your site so its better than theirs, be it reviews, comparisons YouTube reviews etc. etc.

Make your site more unique better for users and share it a bit along the way and you will be surprised how quick it all falls into place once you start to (PPC can be a handy head start too!)

Short version

Other tools you can use :

• Majestic SEO
• Ahrefs
• Screaming Frog
• SEO quake

Hope that helps & Good Luck!

[max.favilli]

Thanks for your answer.

What is frustrating, and the reason why I am comparing our pages with competitors is that we already did that, we added user reviews to the page, we made the content more rich improving the writing and we added some external links where appropriate, but didn't change the position of the page in SERP. That's why I am trying to figure out what we are missing, what google loves so much of those competitors page.

[GPainter]

One thing you can check is the following -

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gomme-auto.it%2Fpneumatici%2Fmichelin

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cambio-gomme.it%2Fmarchi%2Fmichelin%2F

The rich snippets seems that you have not set them up...

[max.favilli]

My website is gomme-auto.it, the one with the rich snippets. The competitor doesn't have them.

[GPainter]

Ah Sorry, I got the two muddled up!  At least hopeful you've got a few more resources to use..