Why is this site ranking so well

[BeardoCo]

I just took over an SEO campaign for a company we recently did a website for.  The old company created individual landing pages for each city they service, but they didn't have any original content except replacing the city name.  We are in the process of creating completely unique content per page.

My main issue is that there is a company with no link profile, duplicate content on every page, no social media presence, etc - but consistently ranks for city + fence company

The company we are starting to work with is: http://betterdecksandfences.com/

The company that is ranking for everything is: http://www.alcovyfence.com

Any ideas?

[BeardoCo]

Thats odd because when i view them up in OSE I only see two root domains linking.  Red Beacon and their domain.  I don't like what the old firm did for BDF and were definitely going to make some changes on their inner page locating cities.  I would of preferred to rank the homepage for all the cities rather than individual city pages.  Just adds to my work.

Better Decks & Fences seems to have a higher quality backlinks and obviously it has a nicer design.  I'v never been this baffled by a website ranking like this.

[Doc_Sheldon]

Odd, at first glance. The first thing that comes to mind is the history behind both sites. It would seem that neither of them has had any real SEO effort yet. Alcovy is apparently in need of a good bit of help, judging by their meta data (which may end up being to your advantage, since it seems that Google is forced to extract a description from the page, as a result). I see they both have a presence on Yelp, but Alcovy has mapped a large service area, while BD&F just plotted their location. The competitor also put up a number of pictures there, whereas your client has none. That would only affect leads and traffic, though, not rankings. I guess what I'm getting at is that Alcovy seems to be more aggressive, They may have published a lot of articles, gaining decent links and citations, they have quite probably sought listing on other trade and review directories, and seem to be generally more active and aggressive in promoting their business. If it were my client, I think I might do an audit on Alcovy and see what they've been up to... you're likely to find some opportunities there.

[AubbiefromAubenRealty]

Hmmm, interesting.

Well they do have Snellville GA and fence company a ton in bold in the page content.  This is an anomaly to me. My first thought was that this keyword must not be very competitive but once I pulled keyword analysis, this was not the case. Is it possibly that they ran a successful adwords campaign in the past and this catapulted them into a high  SERP ranking and now they are just riding the waves of past successes. My explanations are completely exhausted.

I am curious about what someone more knowledge than myself has to say about it.