The question every owner asks
“Why are they above me in Google?” You search for your own service, find yourself on page two, and sitting above you is a company you know doesn’t do better work than you. Their prices may even be worse. And yet the customer sees them first.
The good news: it isn’t chance and it isn’t a conspiracy. Google ranks results by fairly readable logic — for every query it tries to serve the page that answers a person best and that can be trusted. When a competitor is above you, their site does some part of that better than yours. And because it’s readable, you can read it: in one afternoon you can work out exactly what they have that you don’t. Only then does it make sense to decide what to do about it.
This article is a guide to that reading. No tools costing thousands a month, no jargon — just your browser, a sheet of paper and an hour.
First, look at who is actually above you
Search three to five queries that matter to you — ideally in a private browser window, so Google doesn’t feed you results based on your history. Not company names, but what a customer types: “boiler replacement cost”, “electrical inspection house”, “custom kitchen Brno”.
Now separate out what you’re actually seeing on that results page:
- Ads — labelled “Sponsored”. Those positions are bought and have nothing to do with the quality of a site. Don’t mourn them.
- The map with business listings — for local services, often the first thing a customer sees. What decides here is a complete profile, reviews and distance, not your website.
- Organic results — the websites themselves. This is where the game described in this article is played.
You’ll often discover something surprising: what’s above you isn’t so much a competitor as directories, lead-generation portals and comparison sites. That’s a different opponent and a different calculation. But if a specific company from your field and your town is above you, read on — their site can be taken apart.
Read the competitor’s site through a customer’s eyes
Open the page that ranks above you and go through it as if you were a customer enquiring about that service for the first time. Don’t judge the graphics. Look for answers to four questions.
1. Does the site answer the questions a customer asks? Count how many specific questions the competitor’s site answers: what the service involves, how it works, what it costs, how long it takes, what happens if it isn’t done. Every answered question is a page or a paragraph that someone can arrive at from search. A site with nothing but “About us”, “Services” and “Contact” has nothing to answer with — and the machine has nothing to show.
2. Do they have pages for individual services, or one general list? “Electrical installation for a family house” as a standalone page with the process, the scope and an indicative price beats a bullet point in a “Our services” list. If a competitor has ten pages for ten services and you have one page for everything, they’ll beat you on service-specific queries almost every time — they have a more precise answer. How to build such a page is covered in the guide to a service page that actually brings enquiries.
3. Do they show their work, or only talk about it? Photos of finished jobs, written-up projects, numbers, names of satisfied customers. Examples of work aren’t only for people — they’re pages full of specific words, places and situations that a site can be found on. And above all, they build trust that general phrases can’t replace.
4. How long have they been doing this? Look at the dates on articles and news posts. A site that has been publishing answers for five years has hundreds of chances to be found and years of accumulated signals that it’s useful. That’s a head start you can’t erase over a weekend — and it’s fair to know that up front.
The fifth thing isn’t on their site: mentions elsewhere
Part of a competitor’s head start you won’t see on their site at all. Google also assembles trust from what other people say about a company: business listings, reviews, links from other sites, mentions in the media, industry directories, supplier and partner sites.
A quick test: search for the competitor’s company name in quotation marks. How many different sites mention them? Now do the same with your own name. If the ratio is heavily in their favour, you’ve found another piece of the answer. For local services, reviews play a big part in this — why they matter and how to collect them systematically is covered in the article on Google reviews.
Where exactly you stand: two numbers from Search Console
Before you start closing anything, look at how big the gap actually is — from data, not from a feeling. Google Search Console is free, it belongs to your site, and its performance report shows two things that are enough for this decision:
- Which queries you already appear for. If you show up around position ten to twenty for “electrical inspection house”, you’re within reach — one better page separates you from the competitor above, not a miracle. If you don’t appear for a query at all, you’re missing the page that answers it and you’re starting from zero.
- Where you get impressions but no clicks. These are the places where Google shows you to customers and they pick someone else — often exactly that competitor with a more tempting title or a more specific answer. That’s usually the fastest win.
The result of this half hour is a list of queries split into three piles: “within reach”, “no page yet” and “shown but not clicked”. With it, you stop chasing the competition across the board and start where the gap is smallest.
What you can close yourself — and how fast
Now you have a list on paper of what the competitor has that you don’t. An honest sorting looks like this:
| What the competitor has extra | Can you close it yourself? | How fast |
|---|---|---|
| Answers to customer questions | Yes — you know them from phone calls better than anyone | Weeks |
| Pages for individual services | Yes — one page per evening or two | Weeks |
| Complete business listings and profile | Yes — one afternoon | Days |
| Customer reviews | Yes — but they accumulate over time | Months |
| Examples of work, case studies | Yes — they’re on your phone and in your invoices | Weeks |
| Years of published content | Only gradually; the gap shrinks month by month | Months to years |
| Links and mentions from other sites | Partly — directories and partners yes, the rest grows with content | Months |
One important thing follows from that table: most of what puts the competition ahead of you wasn’t created with money, but with persistence. Someone spent five years answering questions and photographing jobs. You can’t buy that in a month — but you can start doing it this week.
The first step for this week
Don’t start by “redoing the website”. Start with a single query.
- Pick a question your customers really ask and where you’re within reach in the results — page two, say. If you don’t know which one, the method for spotting the topics customers search for will help.
- Look at how the competitor’s page above you answers it. What’s missing there? What do you know from practice that they don’t say — numbers, lead times, mistakes you keep running into on jobs?
- Write a better answer. Not longer — better: more specific, with a price range, with the process, with a photo from a real job. What such a text needs to look like to lead to an enquiry is covered in the guide to articles that bring enquiries.
One honest answer a week means twenty-five pages in half a year that a competitor has no way to stop. That’s exactly how their head start came about too.
What you won’t close — and what to do about it
Let’s be honest in the other direction too. If you’re up against a site with ten years of content, hundreds of mentions and a strong brand, you won’t close that with your own evenings in a quarter. That’s not a reason to give up — it’s a reason to play elsewhere: on more specific queries, on local services, on questions the big player considers too small to bother answering. A small query with buying intent brings fewer people, but the right ones.
And here is also the honest point at which to decide whether to do it yourself or get help. If you don’t know which queries are within reach and which are hopeless, we’ll do the comparison for you — the initial analysis compares your site with competitors on specific queries and tells you what to close yourself, what to outsource and what to leave alone. That’s cheaper than a year of writing in the wrong direction.
One thing you won’t hear from us, or from anyone honest: a guarantee of position. Google ranks the results itself, and nobody can see into it far enough to promise first place. Anyone who promises it is selling something they don’t control — and that, incidentally, is a good test when choosing any supplier.
Summary: a competitor’s head start is readable
The competition isn’t above you because they know a secret trick. They’re there because their site answers more questions, has more specific pages, shows their work, collects reviews and gets talked about by more websites. All of it can be read in an afternoon, and most of it can be closed under your own steam — in weeks for answers and service pages, in months for reviews and mentions.
Start with one query and one better answer this week. And if you’d first like to know where catching up makes the most sense given what your jobs are worth, that’s what the analysis is for — or take a look at the range of services and indicative prices so you can do the maths in advance.
