Why is this site ranking higher?

[Paul730]

We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here:

https://lewescountycars.co.uk/

But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us:

https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/

As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done?

Thanks in advance - Gerard.

[Paul730]

Many thanks to both of you for your very helpful responses. I'll get to work on improving things as suggested.

[paupastorlopez]

Hi Gerard,

Google sometimes does weird things that is very difficult to understand. I've seen and compared both sites and yours at Seo Onpage is much better, because the other one is very poor at content and number of pages.

The only 2 things that can make sense are the domain name (your competitor's domain name includes "taxis") and the backlink profile, so like you cant do nothing about the first thing, I recommend you to replicate the links they created that you don't have:

https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/overview?site=www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk&target=domain

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/v5/external-per-domain/subdomains/live/all/all/1/ahrefs_rank_desc?target=www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk

Maybe that helps.

Good luck!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Gerard

Oops - yes I was looking at the top one - but it is valid that the top one has so many backlinks and I think that this is what you should be aiming for so if you looked at a citation burst first you could easily add 30+ good backlinks which will help you. I have updated my first answer.

I would consider putting your phone number in the SEO Meta title for the home page.

Google measures Click Through Rate (CTR) and I can imagine that their click-through is higher than yours because someone sees the result and calls them. You could easily leapfrog them I think.

1. Add phone number
2. Get lots of good backlinks
3. Try not to keyword stuff the page - you have 232 mentions of the word Lewes in the html which is a lot! they have 98 which is still a lot but fewer than you - keyword stuffing can harm a page.

Good luck with everything and apologies for the mix-up - it was actually good though as you can see the value of a lot of backlinks!

Regards Nigel

[Paul730]

Hi Nigel

Many thanks for your response.

I think you have the sites mixed up - I was referring to https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk not lewestaxis.co.uk, as the site that is somehow ranking above https://lewescountycars.co.uk

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Gerard

I have looked at the URL and backlink profile for starters. So these are my observations:

1. https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ was registered in 2012 yours in 2008 - Looking at Moz their Domain Authority is 10 and yours is 14 so little difference

2. You both have very few backlinks 7 vs 8

3. Lewstowntaxis is quite skinny and your is better defined. Plus you rank for around 4x the number of keywords they do.

4. You've got better GMB reviews than them too!

If it was me I would.

Work on your local backlinks from Yelp, Yell and Thompson to local news sites - get those links! - this is not difficult. You can use Moz local or Bright Local is good - you can do a 35 site citation burst for $100 https://www.brightlocal.com/take-contol-of-your-citations/
Get more reviews on GMB - talk about yourself and add photos, links & posts
https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038063?hl=en-GB
Set up Google maps and embed one in your site - 'How to Find Us'
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6139433?hl=en

That really is just for starters and the best things you can do to bump your site upwards.

I hope that helps,

Regards Nigel