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There are a lot of ranking factors that influence the ranking for a certain keyword, right ? Given that thought, there has to be something beyond the Page Title / Meta data. Think about some of these things: Extermal In-bound links Internal Links Size of the site / Number of pages within your website Nature of content Images, Image filenames, Alt Tags etc Any social media related to that keyword ? It's absolutely possible for a website to rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords but that does not mean if they are targeting another keyword, they optimize it, create a page and rank for it ? Think about it, if Amazon.com wanted to rank for Car Insurance (Extreme examples, super competitive keyword and an equally strong domain). The site may have lots and lots of pages somehow related to Car Insurance (Books, DVDs etc) with Page Titles, On-page content and so on, but they still probably would not rank higher then the competition even though the competition may not have anywhere close to the link profile as Amazon.com Does that make sense ? In my opinion, it's a combination of content and internal/external links. Maybe I am wrong and it's something else. Did you actually get any penalty ? Are/were any of your other keywords affected ? Keep in mind, your site is 6 months old. So it does not really have the age aspect as well as domain authority.

The person who captures the high ground early can hold a long term advantage. Since you are below them, crafting an extremely good title tag and snippet is essential to win clicks away from them.  Offer surprise, mystery, free shipping, kickass price or free beer in your title to win traffic into your site.