When a website is stuck in a "tight spot"....

I don't care that much about word counts. I think It's worth noting if the page has a long quality article, or if the page contents change all the time. However, I'm interested about the relevancy and accuracy of Google's result. Can I make an educated guess on why did the algorithm place that particular page so high? Why does it match the query?

Often the answer boils down to backlinks including the ones coming from the site itself.

I'm personally skipping social media at this point because it doesn't seem to influence the results at all.

This is actually a very good question. I also have a website that was stuck on the second page. I did an analisys of the link profile and found some spammy links. After removing and disavoing those links my site shot and is now on the first page.

This is why we do SEO, to out rank our competitors.

Part of your SEO should be to analize competitors to see what they are doing to rank where they do. Some times you can get ahead of then simply by editing your content.

Google doesnt always provide relevant results for the search term. I often see websites with less relevant information ranking lower. That being said what are the things I look at when doing competitor analysis?

1. Domain Authority and page Authority

How old is the domain? How many links does it have? Where are those links coming from and what quality are they? An older domain can rank higher but it is not impossible to overtake an older domain.

2. Content

What keywords are they using in their meta titles, meta descriptions, headings and content? Is their content unique and how much text do they have? A page of 600 words has a better chang of ranking higher than a 100 word page. Sometimes you can overtake your competitor by adding more text or more keywords or more variations of a keyword. Its trial and error. Sometime you can make your meta titles better.

3. Mobile responsiveness.

I dont know how much of a difference this makes but it is a good idea to make your site responsive if it isnt. I must also say that there is one particular site that out ranks us and their site isnt responsive and ours is.

I know that out of 200 things, there are at least 3-5 factors that really impacts SEO. It just baffles me because I can see sites outranking other sites for different reasons. I always ask myself "ok, which factor (or factors) is this site doing well at that is making Google like it so much?"

I had a facebook page that would prove you wrong. Was in rank 1 and beating a bunch of other websites for a keyword. If you have a page that is hugely popular, has engagement and a following, and targets a specific keyword or keywords, it will help you out. It contributes to engagement. If people like something, why wouldn't it rank well? After all, Google does its best to find the best content people want to see.

Backlinks, last time I checked counts as 30-40% of what makes your site rank. But yes, crappy links could bring you down even with the best on-page.

If you have a title like : The best and funniest shirts ever seen on the internet

and your ranking at the top of page two for the keywords best funniest shirts, you might want to take out some of keywords, by reducing it to. Best Funniest Shirts On The Net, you might find you move up a slot. Moving up one slot is usually a pretty simple thing to do.

Other than that, back-links, dropping the keywords onto the page a bit more etc...

People are mentioning Description and Content, most of the time these days neither are used for SERP, even though they probably should be, description is supposedly never used anymore so.... with content. paste your content into Google and see if your page is even indexed that deeply before you go bothering to edit it. If it is not indexed into your content, you probably need more links before that will start to happen.