It's one of the most common questions clients ask us. Their own site is new, cleanly built and fast. The competitor's looks like 2012, wobbles on mobile and takes four seconds to load. Yet it ranks higher on Google. That feels unfair, but it's logical once you know what Google actually evaluates.
The most important point first: Google has no taste. There's no criterion that sorts pretty sites to the top and ugly ones to the bottom. The search engine reads text, structure and links, it measures technical values, and it observes how people interact with the results.
What Google wants to answer is a single question: which result best solves this searcher's problem? A page that does exactly that wins even if it looks like a printout from a fax machine.
Design still has an effect, just in a different place. We'll get to that further down. First, let's look at why the other site ranks ahead of you at all.
Anyone typing something into Google has an intention. Someone is looking for costs, for a process, for a provider nearby. Google tries to find the best-fitting page for each of these intentions.
Many company websites, however, are self-portraits. They tell you how long the company has existed and how important quality is. The competitor's old site, on the other hand, has a subpage that literally states what a renovation costs, how long it takes and what happens during it.
From the search engine's point of view, that's not a close call. One page answers the question, the other doesn't.
A website can only be found for terms that actually appear on it. If you summarise all your services in three sentences on the home page, you have exactly those three sentences in the race for each individual service.
Over the years, the competitor created a dedicated subpage for each service and often for each location too. Each of these is its own entrance. Together they cover hundreds of search queries, while your home page tries to be everything at once.
This is usually the single biggest difference, and it has nothing to do with technology. It's simply a question of how much someone has written down.
For searches with a local reference, the map section with three businesses sits above the normal results. Whoever appears there gets a large share of the clicks, and Google makes this selection not based on the website but on the business profile.
Different things count for that:
A business with a hundred reviews and a well-maintained profile therefore ranks ahead of one with four reviews, even if the latter's website is clearly better. For many trades and service businesses, this is the fastest lever of all.
Links from other websites are a kind of recommendation for Google. A domain that has existed for fifteen years collects such links along the way: the trade guild listing, the local newspaper report, the club sponsorship, the supplier listing its partners.
A new domain starts without all of that. Not because it's worse, but because it has no history yet. On top of that, Google has to get to know a site first. It usually takes months for a new website to find its position.
What matters is what this doesn't mean. It doesn't mean you should buy links. Bought links are a risk and don't solve the problem. It means that your own mentions in the region need to be collected and maintained.
We see it regularly. A company has a new website built, everything becomes prettier and faster, and nothing happens to the traffic. Sometimes it even drops.
The reason is almost always the same. During the relaunch, content disappeared, subpages were merged, URLs changed without the old ones being redirected. The new site is better designed and at the same time knows less than the old one.
That's why every rebuild needs an inventory. Which pages bring visitors today, which terms are they found for, what of that needs to move over. It's unspectacular work, and it decides whether a new site stays ahead.
Technology counts, but it's not the reason the other site ranks ahead. For Google, load time and usability are more a proof that a page is usable. They don't turn a weak result into a strong one.
They take effect when two pages are equally good in terms of content. Then it comes down to which one loads faster and which one works on mobile. That's the case more often than you'd think, and that's exactly where a clean site gains its edge.
The second point is the click-through rate in the search results. Title and description are what people read in the list. A result that answers a concrete question gets clicked more often than one that only shows the company name.
Visibility and conversion are two different things. Google brings visitors to the site. What happens afterwards is decided by the site itself.
Of two businesses with the same number of visitors, the one whose site is clearly structured, builds trust and makes getting in touch easy gets more enquiries. That's why a well-built site with less traffic can end up bringing more jobs than the old one with a lot.
The ideal case is obviously both. The content you get found for, and the site that turns a visit into an enquiry. One doesn't replace the other.
If you're currently behind your competitor, an honest inventory helps more than a new design. This order has worked well for us:
This isn't a weekend job. But it's work that lasts, and it has an effect regardless of how often the design changes afterwards.
Before we build, we look at who ranks at the top for your most important search terms and what those pages do differently. That shapes the structure of the new site, not the other way round.
When moving, we take along what already works today and redirect old URLs so you don't lose the head start you've built up over the years.
If you want to know why a particular competitor is currently ahead of you, send us both URLs. You'll get an honest assessment, even if it's that your website isn't the problem at all.
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