Why competitors rank with no content & filters

[Jseddon92]

We're investing a lot in on-page content and creating categories/sub categories to target relevant keywords. Although it seems competitors with high domain authorities are clearly dominating in the SERPs and the pages have NO content. They are literally filters that create landing pages.

For example when you search "Kaydian Beds", Debenhams rank below the manufacturer with just a filtered page, this page has not been optimised with content to target the keywords, only the META title changes depending on the chosen filter.

Link: http://www.debenhams.com/furniture/beds/kaydian

Our link: https://kontenta.co.uk/brands/kaydian-beds.html

This is very frustrating as quality content should beat pages with little or no content, we will spend some time and get some inbound links to the page to try boost the rankings but does anyone have any similar experiences with anything like this?

[HiveDigitalInc]

Thanks for the great question! A lot of webmasters see the exact same problem, but I think there are some fairly clear answers.

**What is "Good Content"? **
Good content is what the user wants, but it can take many forms. Good content could just be a video, or an image, or in this case, a list of products. Most e-commerce users are not interested in all in learning about the year that a particular brand was established. They want to look at pictures of the product and purchase them. Now, this is not to say that good textual content won't be useful to the search engines to understand the page, but it isn't going to be a silver bullet. 140 words shoved in a box at the bottom of the page just isn't going to really improve the user experience.

What to do?
You generally have two options - either increase your authority overall, or really blow the competition out of the water in terms of quality textual content. I don't want to see 140 words of text, I want to see a wall of really great textual information about the product and manufacturer. You could start by listing off their accreditations, which are available on the brand site, explaining why those make the beds a superior product. You could have images which show off some of the design and manufacturing processes that make the beds durable or design features that make them desirable. There really isn't a fixed word limit here, it should be about providing exhaustive research on the product line.

Unfortunately, you have an uphill battle. Succeeding in the ecom space is very hard when you don't have exclusive products and/or a great deal of pre-existing authority. You have to go above-and-beyond to prove yourself and your site. Good luck!

[MattRoney]

Hi Joshua,

I see that you're a Moz Pro subscriber, so something you might try is running those search terms through the Keyword Difficulty Tool's Full SERP Report. You might be able to get a sense of what's bumping up those competitors.

There's a video on the tool here.

[EGOL]

I believe that most people see similar cases.  I see "stub" pages on wikipedia beating me and skinny content on other domains above me.

I do not believe that there is anything that I can do about it directly.  Google isn't going to change their algo if I complain.  So my best weapon against it is working on my own site.