A dead cockroach outranks me

I'm fairly new to SEO and if I'm being honest, I don't like it. If I'm being even more honest, I hate it. I understand that it's not a precise science and there's a lot of nuances and in the end, it all depends on the algorithm, but I've spent a big portion of the last 2 years improving (or at least trying to, darn it) our on and off-page SEO, the technical SEO and all the other sh*t I've read in countless blogs and watched in endless videos. I get fairly good marks on all the "free SEO test" test but I still get basically no organic visitors, because I have next to 0 ranking keywords. And mind you, these are not extremely broad keywords and there's almost no competition. My website offers a great free alternative to my few competitors (Which I would defend with my life, teeth, nails and all, like the spanish say, that's not only a great alternative, but the BEST product overall) but still, after over 2 years I get about 30 organic clicks. But all this wouldn't bug me at all if I didn't have a comparison. A direct competitor, a small website just like mine, that started THE SAME MONTH as me, over 2 years ago, (I actually think it's closer to 3 now) that has had like 10000% more organic growth than me, with SEO, backlinks and content and functionality, that, in theory, and according to semrush, ahrefs and other, is worse than mine, both in quality and quantity. So it looks like to me that if a dead cockroach somehow, miraculously, managed to open a website tomorrow, it would outrank me next week in all my 4 ranking keywords. Which can be found the 69th page of google. That's all, thanks