Yes, you can beat your competitor.

Check your on page factors, if your are satisfied with on page go for below process. If you feel to work on on page more, first complete all on page factors and then start below process.

Start working on content promotion strategies, share your content in top site

Build quality back links (Check your competitor back links and send mails to them asking back links- favoring some thing to them)

Social media promotion, promote more in social media (Don't spam) and participate in forum discussion and get back links from them

That is not difficult, but time taking.
Use these tactics and beat your competitor.

1-Start your Title with your competitor's domain name. (Your title should be like "Painting Contractor somerset west" .....)
2- Use your competitor's domain name in your (Hom page) Content with different variations.
3-Use your competitor's domain name as an H1 and you will see the magic of these tactics.
4- Create an article and article title should be started from your competitor's domain name and post it your own blog.

You need to analyse your competitor to see if there is any chance to beat him. I have done the analysis for you and some values I found interesting include:
DMOZ, Yahoo listing
Social activity like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, etc
There are some meta tag errors but they are not too much. Your competitor has already done great on page SEO work.

You can try to focus on these aspects to enhance your chance but you must do your best, really.

Yes, you can beat your competitor easily.

gain quality back links (Check your competitor back links and send mails to them asking back links- favoring some thing to them)

Your competitor has an exact match domain which doesn't mean much in today's SEO landscape. Get high quality backlinks and optimise your site properly and you'll have a good chance of superseding them. It may take quite a while though.

yes it is possible... google now ist focus on title and description instead of domain name....

BTW OP your domain get's a boost for the keywords Pro and Painting, so you have a better domain than your competition for painting SERPs.

Domain name isn't a particularly big ranking factor.

I'd suggest ignoring all the responses to this thread (other than mine :-), the SEO advice is poor.

See the page you have targeted to the SERP as shown here

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...merset+west%22

I would suggest adding some high quality content your potential customers will find helpful rather than the current poor quality content you have now.

Didn't check if you've linked to the page internally, add internal links with the keyword phrase you want ranked for and related phrases as anchor text. Work on backlinks directly to the webpage.

David

Hi,

Just because they have a keyword within their domain does NOT make them invisible. There are 200 ranking factors so focus on the things they are not doing. If they lack content, then write more content or build better links which are more relevant and have higher authority. There are websites all over the internet which are beating "keyword" domains. The key is to be smarter than they are...

EXACT match domains have been devalued for sometime and they don’t have any power like they use to. Don’t be fooled just because they have a keyword in their domain. If this was the case, then websites with shitty content would be able to manipulate search engines.

1) Start by fixing you on-page SEO factors to reflect those of the keywords you wish to target. Next, use tools like OpenSiteExplorer to find some evident of their backlinks and where they are getting most of their links from. I like using Alexa.com as well because if you scroll down to the bottom you can find a backlink profile.

2) I would start by building the same links from those websites and add a twist by building some unique ones through PBN's, etc.

3) Don't SPAM and make things looks natural.

4) Write high quality content. I've ranked for keywords without any SEO just because my content was better and more in-depth then others.

u can best it if u use quality contest and good backlinks

Here is a quote about what Google thinks...

"The EMD Update — for “Exact Match Domain” — is a filter Google launch in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content — or those previously missed by EMD — may get caught.

What Google does "LOVE" is HIGH quality content and this is what really makes EMD rank. Don't think that because you registered an EMD you are automatically rewarded. If you are going to register an EMD make sure you have a "HIGH" quality content mind-frame ready to take action. Don't be fooled by what everyone else is saying.

You could only wish for competition that has the idea of an EMD being SEO. Walk in the park...

It would be hard, but it's possible... Don't forget to build HIGH quality backlinks and you should also analyze your competitor's backlinks!