How can such a small company out-rank the big players?

[GoMetrics]

I'm really puzzled how for many keywords the company www.leathersofaworld.com, a retailer of sofas is able to out rank very large companies such as DFS.co.uk and IKEA. They rank 1st for the phrase 'black leather sofas' and have done for a long time. They currently rank 4th for 'leather sofas' and don't seem to move.

Having looked at their back links, I can't see anything special and their domain authority is only 25 compared to DFS which is 45.

Can anyone help me with this?

[nedimtalovic]

Hi GoMetrics,

please check out this: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.leathersofaworld.com%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

and this: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ikea.com%2Fgb%2Fen%2Fcatalog%2Fcategories%2Fdepartments%2Fliving_room%2F10662%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

It shows only external links (filtered). IKEA doesn't have any external links, and if you see Leather Sofa World has many links with anchor "Leather Sofa World". For me, links are still the most important factor in SEO.

Please, don't forget that long tail keywords are about 70% of search traffic. So, I think for new websites is better to focus on long tail keywords instead keywords like "sofas", "beds"...

[GoMetrics]

Thank you for the quick reply Nedimtalovic,

Surely IKEA and DFS would be able to outrank this company easily by being so large and having many links to their root domain? IKEA and DFS are much more well known and have a much higher authority. I can see that Leather Sofa World so have some good external links but this only looks to be a few in comparison.

I would assume these really large sofa companies would have teams of people working on their SEO but this small company do not seem to lose rank at all.

[nedimtalovic]

From Moz's Knowledge Base we know this:

"Page Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given webpage is likely to rank in Google.com's search results."

There are two pages:

1. http://www.leathersofaworld.com/ (PA 36)
2. http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/categories/departments/living_room/10662/ (PA 46)

So there is no such big difference in Page Authority, but there is a really big difference in external links. I'm still sure that it is about external links, but let's see what other SEOs are going to say. Also don't forget that links are influencing on PA...

[kwoolf]

Did you need specific help to out rank www.leathersofaworld.com or do you just want to understand how they perform better than Ikea and DFS?

One question I have is where you are located. Google will likely show results based on location. Leather Sofa World has "leather sofa" in their domain name and in their product URL, plus they have structured data and Google authorship set up. Ikea's URLs are not as human friendly.

Compare: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/00214416/ and http://www.leathersofaworld.com/sofas/brown-leather-sofas/latina-3-1-1-seater-espresso-brown-leather-sofas

Just seems that Leather Sofa World is more relevant than Ikea for terms like "leather sofa."

Now I will say that Leather Sofa World could greatly improve their Magento e-commerce site, but it's generally a nice site.

[GoMetrics]

Thanks for the replies.

I can see that IKEA doesn't have such a pretty looking URL but other big companies do. Looking at what other companies show up for the phrase 'black leather sofas' there is SCS and Harveys which are very large companies here in the UK and leaders in their field. Using the Open Site Explorer the large compaines out do this cmpany easily with considerably more links. Surely its can't just be down to their pretty looking URL can it?

[kwoolf]

I can see the search results for "black leather sofa" and Leathersofaworld.com is the only one with black-leather-sofa in the product URL. So for relevancy search, I suppose Google gives them the gold for this term.

For popularity, I'm not sure. If you do a search for "red leather sofas", they are #3 behind two of the companies you mentioned. For "brown leather sofas" they are #4. I see this site is consistently ranked highly for this group of keywords, so the query isn't a fluke. I'd venture a guess that popularity helps the other sites rank better for the other keywords here, but for some reason all the factors just make it work for "black leather sofas."

I'm not pretending to know exactly how Google's algorithm works, but looking at this in terms of a relevance/popularity split does help explain some of what's going on.

[GoMetrics]

Can any one else give an answer as to how a small company can outrank large companies?

This is still unsolved. Thanks.