Feeling stuck – 3 years in and still way behind competitors

[onel-romaric]

The goal isn’t traffic, but revenue.

You can generate traffic, but only for non-commercial queries.

I wish you’d asked for help when your competitors are selling more than you.

[Classic-Owl-9798]

3rd party applications like SEMrush don’t really know how much traffic your website generates, it’s guessing by algorithm. I bet you your competitors have same traffic or less if your positions on search are the same. 

[WebsiteCatalyst]

Where is the traffic from?

I saw a UK company the other day wanting to sell their products in the UK getting 90% of their traffic from Bangladesh.

[SignalVolume]

Comparison is the thief of joy.

[connor-bringas]

Hi OP, from your list it seems you are covering your bases. At minimum review competitor landing pages and make sure you have the same pages to compete in the space. SEMRush provides a good keyword gap tool where you can compare a competitor domain to yours. This would help see what keywords they rank for that you don’t. I wouldn’t concern yourself with them being 100x bigger. There are many different factors such as brand strength and backlinks that could make these competitors much larger.

It sounds like you have an ecommerce site. I recommend building out collection/category pages depending on what products you have as well as optimizing PDP’s. For PDP’s, make sure the product name is targeting the keywords the product should rank for, the description of the product includes the target keywords and you have an FAQ section targeting PAA’s and keywords for each PDP. I personally always look at misen, they have the best PDP template I’ve seen around.

[ililliliililiililii]

You’ve posted this on a SEO sub but I think this is more of a business problem. I don’t know of course, no one here does either.

You should take a step back and do thorough competitor analysis, as well as an audit on your own business. Figure out where they are getting their customers. Since you say you can’t use ads, you are relying on organic and SEO.

 

> making all images unique

This is a bit vague. Good photos and images depend on your audience, and will usually need to have a strong consistent style. Consistency is extremely important.

So making images ‘unique’ may not be achieving what you think it is.

 

> rewriting content to be more customer-focused

What does customer focused mean? Good content should be primarily useful. If you are putting out genuinely useful and helpful content, SEO will naturally be improved.

This would fall under content strategy which should have a defined plan for execution and monitoring (metrics).

> How long does it usually take for changes like this to move the needle?

All we can say is this shouldn’t take 3 years to have an effect. No one can give an actual prediction because it’s impossible without knowing anything about your business.

Content strategy – probably budget 3-6 months from starting a plan and seeing meaningful changes. You need to adjust on the fly though. If daily posting isn’t working then try fewer more high quality posts.

[BakingWaking]

Hard to say without an audit of your site but your competitors are likely investing a couple grand a month into it from the sounds of it. How much are you putting in?

I helped some local breweries and they wanted to be the top-ranked in the region; their main competition was putting in $3,000 a month. They were putting in next to nothing. The problem was clear.

I’d be curious to take a look; but I think the easiest answer is that you have to step up your efforts. However, without an audit I couldn’t begin to tell you how.

If you want, I can do a free audit.

[PickleballHerd]

You need someone to do a competitive analysis audit.

[web_designer_ashish]

If compare you will always find someone doing better than you instead compare your past and present results.

I think you headed in a right direction. Some show instant results and some take their own time. Check for errors in search console on a regular basis. The trustpilot profile act as an backlink for your website but the reviews are just for conversions only.

[sonikrunal]

You’re doing the right work, it’s just compounding slowly. SEO’s like farming, not fishing. Trustpilot helps trust more than traffic, but both matter in the long game.