Why would my different product pages with similar content have different search engine rankings?

Question

We have a product based automobile website where we publish content for cars and bikes. This includes automobile's images, videos, pricing, reviews, similar offerings.

We want to improve our Google SEO rankings for these product pages. To my surprise, few of these model pages rank 1 while others rank 5, although the content quantity and quality for these models are very much identical. Also, the ranking pattern is stable for months so it's not random. Also, I compared competition model pages for the same product page and that is also identical. Now I wonder why Google is ranking us low for few products while higher for other product. Is there any way by which I can spot the differences due to which this ranking difference is there?

I checked a few things but couldn't get a convincing answer:

1. Domain score - Though competition has better DA but that doesn't explain why they rank lower for some models with identical content.
2. Lighthouse / Google Page speed score - We have better scores and page loand time here as compared to competition.
3. Page score - I am not sure if we can get this kind of score for every model page.
4. Time spent, bounce rate and exit rate - All of these indicators which give cue about user feedback have similar numbers for both the models i.e. where we rank 1 vs where we rank 5
5. Images/videos are there with similar quality
6. Pricing information is available for both
7. Reviews are available for both
8. Similar offerings are available for both
9. Both have similar Structured snippet
10. Title description URL have been formed with identical logic for all products

What should I see to spot this difference to check how can I improve the rank of product pages with lower ranks?

Answer 1

There are a few big factors that you didn't mention:

1. External links to the pages. External links to specific pages can help a lot. Especially if the anchor text of the links contains some of the keywords. (This is why link building is such an important SEO activity. BUT it needs to be undertaken with care so that Google doesn't penalize spammy links.)
2. Internal links. Pages that are ranking well may be linked more often from other pages, or linked from more prominent places on your site. For example a link on your home page to a specific product can really boost rankings for that product in the right circumstances. Conversely, products that aren't on the first page of their category can really suffer.
3. Click through rate from Google. Google measures how many people click on different search results. They may use this data to change rankings. Your content may get much better or much worse rankings based randomly on how people have clicked from Google in the past.
4. Competition. Your rankings don't exist in your vacuum. You also have to look at the other sites that are ranking. The SEO of the other sites can also push your site up and down in the rankings as theirs changes.

For lots more advice, see our main post on the subject: What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?

Answer 2

If be honest no one knows how the Google algorithms work, but in your case it possible your other competitions have better pages on the same products, and because of that some of your pages have lower ranks.

You can improve those pages with good backlinks