Competitors have a very ugly website with bad UX but still ranks on the first page

Hey, awesome r/SEO folks out there!

My experience as new to SEO is very interesting so far. I started learning and applying SEO just 6 months ago when the client asked to do so.

Last year I redesigned my client's old flash website into a modern one with great UI and UX practices. Before this, the domain was down for many years since the web developer closed the business and then later domain was let free.

I knew that the competitor's website was very old, slow loading, lots of performance issues, not responsive blah blah but surprisingly still outranks mine. Interestingly mine sits on the 3-4th page.

I have not put enough content as the client was not interested in that. In addition, all of the competitor's websites didn't have any content, just a heading and a couple of lines. However I made sure all the pages had minimum contents, title, meta, h1,p, alt-text, all were fine. And I hoped that with a very solid technical SEO and okayish on-site SEO, I could easily rank on top organically.

In the first few months, I saw the website showing up on the first page and on GMB listing too but it started to draw back and now the keyword with most impressions sits on 15th position, average ctr was 0.8% and even worse - the average position: 36.

This surprised me a lot and so will you if you see the competitor's website. I felt how come Google does this as I learned and applied most of the SEO from Google Webmasters Starting Guide. Later I came to know about backlinks and when I checked, interestingly my domain has got just 51 backlinks(21% dofollow) and my competitors have got 85 backlinks(89% dofollow). In addition, my Domain Rating is 0 while competitor has 3+ (Source: Ahref)

I now understand that's where competitor outranks but this one made me realize the power of Backlinks! While google always educates about technical and on-site SEO, it's off-site that eventually matters though the former may matter in a very competitive environment.

So the search for backlinks begins...

What could increase Domain Authority? Are DA and DR the same? In this scenario, are there any other means for me to outrank other than link building? Let me know your comments in comments :)

submitted by /u/zeshhaan
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