Smaller Competitor Ranking Better

Got an interesting situation. A smaller competitor is ranking better than us for specific, targeted keywords even though: 1. Their statistics are not better than us, we have twice the quality backlinks than us. 2. We target the page specifically using keywords, slug and title. They don't even do that and yet rank better 😭 I know that DR is a not reliable metric, but we are currently at 51 DR whereas, they are only at 26 DR. The age of the websites is also similar. We started around January this year, they started around September last year. We are also getting regular new backlinks as we have an agency doing blogger outreach for us.