Why Is My Competitor Above Me on Google?

There’s a particular kind of annoyance that comes from searching for what you do, and finding a business you know is worse than you sitting in the top spot.

You’ve seen their van. You’ve heard what customers say. Their website looks like it was built in 2014 and never touched. And yet there they are, above you, taking the calls.

I hear this constantly, and the good news is it’s answerable. Google isn’t making an aesthetic judgement about which of you is nicer. It’s running a calculation, and you can reverse-engineer most of it in about an hour with free tools. Then you’ll know exactly what to do.

The thing to understand first

Google isn’t ranking businesses. It’s ranking pages, against one specific search, for one specific person, in one specific place.

That matters, because “my competitor is above me” is usually less absolute than it feels. They might beat you on “bathroom fitter Preston” while you beat them on “wet room installation Lancashire”. They might win on a phone in the town centre and lose on a laptop three miles out.

So start by being precise. Write down the three or four searches you’d most want to win, the ones where the person typing is ready to spend money. Not “bathrooms”, which could be anyone browsing tiles. Something like “bathroom fitters near me” or “bathroom installation Chorley”.

Those are the searches that matter. Everything below is about those.

Step 1: Check whether they’re actually above you

Do this in an incognito window, because your normal browser personalises results based on your own history and will flatter you.

Be aware that Google also personalises by location, heavily, for anything local. Standing in your own premises you’ll see yourself higher than a customer across town will. If you want to check how you look from a different part of your patch, that’s worth doing on a phone with location on, from that part of town.

Write down where you and your competitor land for each of your key searches. Now you have a baseline, and in three months you’ll be able to tell whether anything you did worked.

Step 2: Look at what they actually put on the page

Open their page. The specific page that’s ranking, not their homepage, unless the homepage is what’s ranking.

Then look for four things.

What does the browser tab say? That’s the page title, and it’s one of the strongest signals there is. Theirs probably says something like “Bathroom Fitters Preston | 20 Years Experience”. Yours might say “Home” or “Welcome”. That difference alone moves rankings.

What does the main headline say? Same question. Does it name the service and the place, or is it a slogan?

How much is actually written on the page? Don’t count words obsessively, but notice the gap. If their page answers fifteen questions a customer might have, covering what it costs, how long it takes, which areas they cover and what happens on day one, and yours has three sentences and a gallery, that’s your answer. Google reads the page to work out whether it satisfies the person searching. More useful detail usually wins.

How many pages do they have? Click through their menu. If they have separate pages for each service and each town, and you have one page listing everything, they’re fielding a team and you’re fielding one player.

This step alone explains it maybe half the time.

Step 3: Compare your Google Business Profiles side by side

For anything local, this is where the calls are won, and it has almost nothing to do with your website.

Search your main service plus your town. Look at the map box with three businesses in it. Click your competitor’s Google Business Profile listing and then yours, and compare:

If your competitor has 94 reviews and you have nine, you’ve found your problem, and no amount of website work will fix it. Asking every happy customer for a review, every time, consistently, for six months, will.

Step 4: See who links to them

This is the part most business owners have never heard of, and it’s often the real reason an ugly old website outranks a beautiful new one.

Google treats a link from another website as a vote of confidence. A business that’s been mentioned by the Lancashire Evening Post, listed by three suppliers as an approved installer, thanked by a local charity and featured in a trade association directory has a stack of votes. A brand-new site has none.

You can see roughly who links to a competitor using a free backlink checker. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz all offer limited free versions that are fine for a look. Put their domain in and see what comes back.

What you’re looking for isn’t the total number. It’s the type:

• Local press and community sites. You can get these too. Sponsor something, do something newsworthy, talk to the paper.
• Suppliers and manufacturers. If you’re an approved installer for a brand, get listed on their site. Free, and often surprisingly powerful.
• Trade bodies and directories. Checkatrade, Which? Trusted Traders, your industry’s association.
• Anything that looks like a random foreign blog. That’s bought links. Ignore it. Don’t copy it.

That last one matters. If a competitor’s link profile is obviously purchased, resist the urge to match them. It works until it doesn’t, and when Google catches up the recovery takes longer than the shortcut saved.

Step 5: Check how old they are

Put their domain into a whois lookup and see when it was registered. If they’ve been running the same site since 2012 and yours launched last spring, some of the gap is simply accumulated trust, and you’re not going to close it in a month.

That’s not defeatism. It’s about picking the right fight. You may not beat a fifteen-year-old competitor on the single most competitive search in your sector this year. You can absolutely beat them on the twelve more specific searches they’ve never bothered to target: the particular service, the smaller town, the urgent version of the query. Win those, build up, come back for the big one.

Step 6: Load their site on your phone

On 4G, not wifi. Then do the same with yours.

If theirs loads instantly and yours takes seven seconds, that’s costing you. Google measures how people behave when they land on a page, and someone who taps back before your page loads is a signal that you weren’t the right answer.

Putting it together

After an hour you’ll usually find one of four stories:

1. They have far more reviews. Most common for local trades and services. Fixable, free, slow. Start today.
2. They have a page for the thing, you have a bullet point. Most common where there are several services. Fixable in a fortnight of writing.
3. They have local links and you have none. Slowest, but the most durable advantage once you have it.
4. They’re just much older. Pick more specific fights and stack the wins.

Most businesses I audit have two of the four running at once.

What this is called, by the way

If you’ve done the above, you’ve just carried out a competitor analysis, which is one part of search engine optimisation, or SEO. That’s the trade name for the work of making Google choose you instead of them.

I mention it mainly so you know what you’re buying if you ever decide to pay someone for it, and so you can tell the difference between someone who’ll do the work above and someone who’ll send you a monthly PDF full of graphs.

What to do first

If you take one thing away: go and ask your last ten happy customers for a Google review. For a local business it’s the highest-return hour you’ll spend this month, it costs nothing, and it’s the single biggest visible difference between you and the business above you.

Then fix your page titles. Then write a proper page for your best-selling service.

If you’d rather have the answer than the hour, send me your website and your competitor’s and I’ll do the comparison properly. It’s free, and you’ll get a straight list of what they’re doing that you aren’t. If the honest answer is “get more reviews and stop worrying”, that’s what I’ll tell you.