How to overtake a seemingly impossible competitor with lower authority score and worse metrics

[ruruuu99]

Hello,

So after some recent technical work and the effect of the newly acquired backlinks finally kicking in (I think!), our website has moved up 1 position on the first page. However the competitor right above us is almost impossible to overtake - I have ran a few SEO audits and reports and all of them show that their metrics are worse than ours. On Semrush their authority score is 2 points lower than ours. Yet they still rank above us. The reports also show that they use a SEO agency to purchase backlinks - we haven't purchased any, our backlinks are genuine and from niche websites.

The only difference is that on SERPs, Google's always showing their cover image and sitelinks, whereas we don't have any rich results displayed. Could this be the reason why they're ranking higher due to a potentially higher CTR? Google used to display our cover image and sitelinks, but completely got rid of them at the beginning of the year. Any best practices on how they could be recovered, or is that totally down to the algorithm?

Many thanks!