Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.

[Deacyde]

Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be

oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/

Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type

**theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ **

The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours.

I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well.

How do you feel about that?

[LoganRay]

It's not recommended to change URLs for the sake of rankings. Check out this article for a comment straight from Google on this topic: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html.

[ClaytonJ]

I concur with Logan - it is a risky business.

There is lots to review, so I am only making one suggestion which is contemporary to what i am seeing now. I would look more at how they are driving traffic.  Is it referral traffic from facebook, etc. Several of my clients have had big jumps in the last month if they have strong referral traffic from high domain locations.  I have seen no data on it, just a personal observation at this stage...

[Deacyde]

I do understand that it's not a good recommendation, however, our site hasn't been ranking better than 15 to 20 for longtails and for the major keyword, we rank 45 to 60 often, the biggest thing I see missing, is the keyword in the url structure, this keyword is basically our whole business. So seeing that this new site pops up, with 47 pages, ranked poorly for these keywords before and jumped from last place to 4 pages ahead of us in such a short period of time, with a DA of 9 and 10 less backlinks than us, and they have the keyword we want to rank for in all urls that matter, really makes you wonder, if all the standards being followed are really what works.

We also have a bigger social media following / engagement than our competition, and I've seen that really have no affect on rankings so far.

[MattRoney]

Personally, I'd hesitate before attributing their jump to your URLs. Have you ever run a Full SERP Report on your keywords in the (Moz) Keyword Difficulty Tool? It might give you a sense of what you'll need to do to boost your rankings. There's a video on how it works here: https://moz.com/academy/competition-keyword-analysis

[Deacyde]

Yes I have run a full report, but thank you very much for the resource, I'm sure others will find it very helpful.

From the report I've seen that our backlink profile seems to be our biggest issue of ranking, especially since we lost one of our biggest. And for a niche industry eCommerce site, it's very difficult to find backlink opportunities.

Hoping that after this site redesign we will of increased out DA and PA some, but won't see that change for a few more months at best.

Again thank you for the resource and response everyone!