Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm new to SEO, and am stubbornly trying to educate myself. I have a telescope shop in Canada, it's a small business that we run on the side. We're driving lots of traffic through FB and our outreach programs but I really want to increase our presence on search. We released a new website back in January and it killed some of our rankings. We're working our way back with a very specific set of efforts on regular SEO:

1. Metadata and titles, although it seems that's not super relevant
2. Building high quality backlinks and eliminating any spammy backlinks
3. Rewriting product listings so that they are original content though I'm not sure how important this is in e-commerce
4. Writing high quality articles and blog posts
5. Working relevant keywords into our product pages and titles

I understand that good SEO is about pushing on all the levers, and trying to make sure that your site is as valuable to the end user as possible. We're making some good progress, but I'm puzzled by the #1 shop in Canada. They don't put any apparent effort into SEO and they still rank #1 on every key product we compete with them on. I've worked with two separate, highly ranked and regarded SEO firms on this and neither has been able to tell my why this other site ranks so highly. Here's a specific example on a popular product that we both sell, the Celestron NexStar 8SE.

Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE:

https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069

Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website:

https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope

Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page.

Here is our page:

https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se

We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the Telescopes Canada page. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page.

But they keep ranking ahead of us, and right at the top of google search. Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). Our text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. According to Moz's page ranker it's 20 points higher than Telescope Canada's page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here.

Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product:

Celestron NexStar 8SE
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada

I have a feeling it's something technical that I'm missing, but I'm not sure how obvious it is with two 'professional' firms not finding it. I'd really appreciate any help or insight that you can offer.