Dealing with a Competior in Google SERPs

Even if your competitor's site rank higher than your site, remember not to resort in any negative SEO. It will do more harm than good. Focus on how you can further promote your website. Diversify your SEO strategies, do on-page and off-page optimization. Engage in social media and content marketing. Additionally, learn competitor links analysis and reverse engineering.

You need to out think them, better links and ones that nobody else in your industry is getting.

An example as I don't know your industry...

A client of mine, sells gas and oil training courses.

Every single competitior has the same links that we do, from blogs about the industry.

What links can I get that they don't have that are still related?

Education, job sites, career progression blogs.

How did I get the links?

Created documents on how to get started in the gas engineering field, what money can be made, basic info on career progression, timescales and estimated earnings, approached job sites and offered them a copy of the PDF and and more info they might be interested, said they should also link to our courses pages for people who were interested in what they had just read.

Outcome:
1) a ton of links, authoritative ones too, improved rankings and organic traffic. (kind of important)
2) referral traffic from these heavily used sites, extremely relevent and targeted and send ing people who were actually interested in these courses clicking through to that page. (more important than the rankings)

Think of ways in which your industry can be linked to others and then create somethign that they will find useful. Ask them if they'd like to look at it and if they do perhaps they would like to either publish it or use it as inspiration, tell them if they find it useful you would appreciate a link as it will help their visitors.

Competitors above you in search, doesn't matter as you are generating referral traffic. The links will also take care of that position 2 spot after doing this for some time.

Rinse and repeat for every course and angle and type of blog you want links from.

When brand awareness is your goal, PPC works in increasing awareness effectively or you could implement local business listings for your website and comment on blogs and articles with high domain authority. Do these along with other SEO strategy I've mentioned above.

Having a keyword in the domain has been discounted by Google. It used to be of value years time back but doesn't work now from a seo perspective.