Why does this site rank above us?

[BobAnderson]

We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..

[Davenport-Tractor]

Bob,

The answer is an easy one. "Quality of links!"

look at this:

Our competitors out ranks us at times as well, so we did some research into the ratio MozT/MozR. In your case 5.9/5.57=1.05924 your competitors MozT/MozR is 5.57/5.19=1.07321 which is .01397 better than yours!

So their ratio is much higher than yours which we presume means that someone may have more links but their just junk links as shown by the ratio. You can see this ratio come into play at MOZ Tools rank checker.

We will kill John Deere in everything but still rank lower because of their MozT/MozR ratio.

[Carson-Ward]

Looking at the links, there's definitely some unnatural linkbuilding going on with both sites. Google is likely discounting many of the links that Moz has found. Theirs appears a little more unnatural, but without a link-by-link review, it's hard for me to say which of your link profiles is being discounted more. I'd encourage you to seek out a more strategic method of getting coverage where your potential customers are online.

Google incorporates a lot of data into their decisions, so it might not be all about links. We should not assume that PA/DA has all of the answers. Link metrics is one of the larger factors, but it's certainly not the only one.

Google does seem to incorporate user metrics to a greater degree lately. The most well-known result is a Penguin penalty, but the less-discussed action is that Google will actually reward sites that seem to satisfy the user query well. In any case, you can't go wrong by giving the user what they want. I think this is one area where you can improve.

Make the purpose and customer action on the page clear. For example, compare http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html to http://www.signfirm.com/banners/printed-pvc-banners.html, and ask yourself, "what is the function of this page?" My answer on the first one would be, "to learn about what a vinyl PVC banner is." The SignFirm page's function seems to be "to buy a PVC banner." I understand that the CTA is to get a quote, but we should also understand that most of the sidebar content will be ignored.

Also consider a re-design to make the site simpler. Make the things your customer wants stand out. Right now everything stands out so much that nothing does. It's quite busy with tons of colors and a lot of text.