Outranking competitors product pages

Recently a Shopify store owner was asking the golden question of SEO:

How can I get my product pages to rank higher than my competitors?

To out-rank a competitor you really only need one thing, a better webpage.

Pack it in kids, we're done here.

But seriously, the entire point of existence for Google, LLMs, Bing, and the others is to show the best pages to people based on their searches.

How that happens... well now we get into something more interesting (and less snarky too... but you win some, you lose some).

Ranking factors

There are a huge number of factors that make up the "better webpage". Let's call them quality factors, they often go by the phrase ranking factors too.

The big important ones right now are:

• content quality
• content size
• page speed
• page popularity

Content quality

Having high-quality content has and will always be a quality factor. Useful, helpful, informative, entertaining, etc content are all part of quality. You don't need all of them at once. It does, however need to be remarkable (as one marketer described remarkable: it's something that a person makes a remark about)

If search engines could perfectly analyze content quality, this could be the only ranking factor. They'd know exactly what the best page to send you to and you'd just go there. No more lists of search results to find what you're really looking for.

Search engines aren't there yet though. They can get close and they promise AI will get them closer, but finding the perfect page for every search will likely end up being an impossible task.

Getting close to detecting a perfect page, when combined with the other factors, has made them billion-dollar businesses. So they really don't need perfection here. They just need good enough, meaning you need just enough quality.

Content size

How much content you have is also a quality factor. There's a fine line here that runs along side content quality.

If the content quality is the same, a page with more content will typically be considered a better webpage.

On pages with lower quality but more content, well it depends.

Google and the others go through cycles. Sometimes more content will outweigh quality (because quality is hard to detect). Other times quality wins even over larger pages. Every few years the algorithms flip-flop around this.

That's why you'll often see recommendations that you should have X words on a page.

Usually it's safer to err on the side of more content than less. Most Shopify stores seem to be allergic to writing longer pieces of content. So if you're looking for permission to write more, you have it. As long as it's not AI slop or other copied content.

Page speed

When mobile became popular, faster webpages became much more important. Phones are, relatively-speaking, slower, smaller, and just don't run as fast as full computers. If a page loads too slow on mobile, it crashes, or otherwise was crappy then it would fail to live up to the better webpage quality factors.

These real-world performance metrics translate to speed scores and odd sounding things like LCP, TTFB, and BBQ (ok not that last one). All they are doing is measuring how fast the webpage or parts of the webpage perform.

Speed is always a concern because most websites get slower and slower over-time as more is heaped on.

It's rare to remove features or components from a webpage. It's much more common new things get added on. That's why so much time should be given to coming back and fixing performance issues over and over again.

Page popularity

Google's original Page Rank idea was that popular pages are better webpages.

That idea still holds true, but how they figure out which pages are popular has evolved dramatically. Links to the page help, as well as important 3rd party pages, how old the page is, etc.

At the end of the day, having a more popular page will help that page be considered a better webpage.

Relative importance over competitors

You'll notice I haven't mentioned anything about competitors or how much you need of each of these factors.

That's because these factors are all relative.

If your competitor has a webpage with two sentences on a 90s-style product page with no-one linking to it, you don't need much to outrank them.

If your competitor is an award-winning publication with a fleet of writers and volumes of press, you're going to have a long road ahead.

I like to ask myself, how do I stack up compared to this other competitor? Can I get 20% better than them in each of these factors? If so, outranking them might be a possibility.

Adjacent instead of outrank

Alternatively, if you just cannot defeat those huge competitors, what if you were right next to them?

How much work would it take to get to the #2 spot?

You might find taking over the weaker competitors spots easier and a better return on your work.

When it's all said and done, the point of ranking is to get traffic so you get orders.

Imperfect rankings while attracting new orders is a much better option that obsessing over perfect rankings.