In that earlier article, we found that when you ask “which Beijing XX company is the best,” not a single one of the top 20 results is a company’s own website — they are all Q&A pages, roundup lists and directory listings. Our conclusion at the time was that this layer of official websites cannot help you.
That conclusion was half right. Today we searched again with a different phrasing, and we found a counterexample — and that counterexample happens to be the most useful part.
First, let us correct what we said last time
This time we searched for “Beijing XX company ranking list top ten.” Among the top 20 results, one company’s own website accounted for 3 of them.
One click made it clear. The titles of those three pages were:
- “Besides us, what other Beijing XX companies are there?”
- “Which reliable XX companies are there in Beijing?”
- “Which XX company is the strongest?”
These are not “About Us” pages, not service descriptions, but list-style articles, one after another — just published on their own domain.
So that sentence from last time needs to be sharpened:
It is not that “official websites cannot get in,” it is that “the company introduction pages on official websites cannot get in.”
Switch to list-style pages hosted on your own domain, and they get in just the same.
This is the same principle as the qualifications discussion in the previous article: what determines the questions a page can answer is what that page is actually about, not whose domain it sits on. Changing the domain does not solve the problem; changing the genre does.
But before you act, look closely at where those “Top 10 rankings” come from
We picked one of the higher-ranking “Top Ten XX Companies Ranking List” pages and clicked in. A few details:
| What we saw | What it tells us |
|---|---|
| The author is a personal self-media account, and the place of publication does not match the city the article discusses | Not a local industry practitioner, and not an institutional review |
| The bottom of the page states that “the views in this article represent the author alone” | The platform has already declared that it does not endorse the content |
| The opening says “rankings are in no particular order” and “information comes from the internet” | The author himself does not intend to be responsible for the ranking |
| Two little-known companies top the list, ahead of several leading industry players | The order is clearly not based on scale or capability |
| In the profiles of those two companies, an entire paragraph of business scope is repeated word for word | They were filled in from the same template |
The last point is the most telling. We casually searched for the same company on several other platforms and found that identical introduction appearing verbatim on four different websites.
So most of these lists are not “reviewed,” they are “assembled” — find a ready-made self-introduction, copy it into a template, then hang a “Top Ten” or “Ranking List” title on it.
Two practical conclusions:
① If you see a competitor on a list like this, there is no need to worry — it most likely means nothing.
② If you are thinking of paying to buy a position on one, first think clearly about whether it is worth it. The same copy spread across four sites leaves traces that are easy to identify; and as the previous article noted, once a certain kind of information is judged untrustworthy, what suffers is the credibility of your entire body of material, not just that one item.
A pit we fell into ourselves: we wrote “recommendations” without a single name
After reading other people’s, we went back and checked our own. And we found something rather embarrassing.
We had in fact long ago written a vendor selection guide, with “recommendations,” “how to choose a service provider” and “6 hard criteria” right there in the title. By any reasonable standard, that is what a list-style article should look like.
But reading it through from start to finish:
The entire article mentioned two peers only inside a single pair of parentheses — beyond that, not one company name appeared.
A subheading read “the common types of service providers” — and it talked about types: project-oriented ones, staffing-oriented ones, on-call visit ones. The types were explained clearly, but who specifically belonged to each category was essentially left blank.
And that is exactly the problem. It answered “how to choose,” while the customer was asking “who is out there.”
“How to choose” is a method; “who is out there” is a list. When someone asks “which Beijing XX company is the best,” what they want is a few names they can look up and call. An article that talks almost entirely about selection criteria cannot catch that question — even if the title says “recommendations.”
This also explains the result from the previous article: it is not that we never wrote this kind of article, it is that what we wrote does not match the question.
So what is the right way to write it?
A fake list that puts yourself first is out of the question, and one that only preaches principles without giving names is useless. There is a path in between:
| Do this | Why |
|---|---|
| Group by type, and give real representatives in each group | The question “who is out there” is only answered when there are concrete names |
| Explain clearly who each type suits and who it does not suit | This is your real professional value, and the part template articles cannot produce |
| State plainly that you are one of them | 🔑 See below |
| Honestly write what you are not suited to do | A list where everyone claims to do everything reads as an advertisement at a glance |
| Do not rank, or state clearly the basis for the ranking | A ranking you cannot justify is better left unranked |
The point about “declaring who you are” deserves a little more attention.
Many people worry: if I admit I am a vendor, do I lose my persuasiveness? The opposite is true. Pretending to be a neutral third party while ranking yourself first is the easiest pose to see through; whereas “we work in this field too, and here is the market landscape as we see it, including the scenarios we suit and those we don’t” — that stance is both genuine and turns your identity as a practitioner into a source of credibility. You understand this industry better than anyone who merely compiles a list, and that is your advantage. It should not be hidden.
The headline decides which question it can catch
The first article in this series covered headlines and why to avoid catch-all words; today let’s add one more, more specific point: the headline of a list-style article should look like the very sentence your customer says.
What customers type into the search box is “which XX companies are there in Beijing,” not “an analysis of the XX service provider landscape.” The closer the headline is to their actual words, the more precise the topical match. Here are a few patterns you can use as-is:
| Pattern | Question it catches |
|---|---|
| City + industry + which companies are there | “Who does this in Beijing?” |
| City + industry + how to choose + what categories exist | Delivers both method and list — the widest coverage |
| Specific scenario + who to hire E.g., “our company is moving to a new office — who should we hire for network cabling?” |
🔑 Least competition, strongest intent |
| Two types of solutions + how to choose E.g., “hire IT in-house or outsource — how do we work out the cost?” |
The stage where the customer has not yet decided whether to buy |
The third row deserves a note of its own. List pages for broad keywords were crowded long ago — for a term like “which IT company in Beijing is best,” a crowd of aggregator sites built up over many years stands in front of you, and a newly written article will struggle to break in.
But for something like “the company is moving to a new office, how do we handle the network, who should we hire,” almost nobody writes seriously for that kind of scenario-specific query. Fewer people search it, but nearly everyone who does is about to spend money. These topics deliver far more value per unit of effort than brute-forcing a broad keyword.
Spend 5 minutes checking whether your “recommendation” article passes
If your website already has an article of this kind, run it against these three checks:
| Self-check | Signals that it fails |
|---|---|
| How many company names appear in the article? | Only your own = not a list, but a promotional page |
| Does the headline ask “how to choose” or “what’s available”? | Only “how to choose” = it cannot catch questions like “which one is best” |
| Is there a sentence stating who you are? | No = it reads as a disguised neutral review |
Our own article failed all three, and we are going to rewrite it. This is work you can finish yourself, with no favors to call in and no money to spend — and that is the part the previous article did not make clear: within that third layer, a good half really is stuck in other people’s hands (wrong information on third-party platforms, coverage in industry media), but the “list-style content” piece is one you can fix on your own.
Update (2026-09-04): After this article was published, we rewrote that piece along the lines above — adding real representatives for each of the four types of service providers, stating clearly which type we belong to, and the scenarios we are not suited for. While rewriting, we also found that the original said “founded in 2014” and “10 years in business,” which did not match the company’s actual 2011 founding and 14 years, and corrected both. Contradictions within your own materials are a problem more worth fixing first than a few missing names.
We are Beijing Siwenlide, focused on enterprise IT services for 14 years, with 1,000+ enterprise clients served to date. This series is about the pitfalls we hit as we go, including our own cautionary example in today’s article. You can copy the approach directly; if you would like to talk about your company’s situation, take a look at About Us, or just call 400-686-2011.
