Our site being outranked by competitors with lower "moz" scores - due to on-page SEO?

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Howdy,

Our SEO efforts are doing well, but for a few keywords it seems we cannot budge one of the competitors sitting in spot #1.  Through some competitive analysis I've noticed that our website has a much higher mozRank with regards to both page and domain compared to the current #1 spot.

My question is what kind of factors could be the issue as to why we are still being outranked.  Is it simply a case of poor on-page SEO at this point or should I be taking the mozRanks with a grain of salt.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Definately a good point by costume

[costume]

I am having the EXACT same issue with several of the sites I manage.  One thing I found is that the "Social Signals" (i.e. Tweets, Likes, +1) for our competitors are almost twice ours.  You many want to compare social signals.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

MozRank and domain level MozTrust are great indicators for how a site 'should' perform, however you need to bear in mind that google's index is much, much larger than linkscape and therefore, MozRank is only an indicator. There could be lots of sites that google know about but that are not in linkscape that may explain your competitor's advantage.

Google also have other ranking factors and may be disregarding some of your site's links for example because they don't recognise them as good sources.

Aside from this there are many factors including the content which you mentioned. You'll need to produce high quality content now that Panda is on the scene.

[RikkiD22]

Things to also consider are user metrics, how a user responds to your site, such as bounce rate and non measurable factors such as trust.

[irvingw]

mozRank is a great indicator how you fare against your competitors in  terms of external links and it's rank is based on the link quality of the links. Google's SERP algorithm goes way beyond at just looking at the external links and I recall Matt Cutts saying that there are over 200 factors in the algorithm.

[johnshearer]

mozRank, DA, and PA are just measurements. Generally having higher scores for all three are a good indicator that you should rank higher...however in my own experience it took months for this site

Seattle Painting to take over the number one spot from http://www.seattlepainting.com/  for the keyword "seattle painting" despite the fact that all three metrics favored the first site; in a very lopsided way. I believe Google grandfathers in a site if it has historically remained in the top spot....a "grandfather effect"

Be patient, build good links, create compelling content.