Previously people suggested to use Google Ads to counter it.

But it's extremely expensive. I am paying sometimes $20-40 per click. Just to sell a $5 product.

It's insane.

Just don’t pay for it.

What you said implies your competitors pay the same $20 per click to sell a $5 commodity. You win

Isn’t it a reverse auction, so presumably your competitors would have a lower cost per click if they had a higher click through rate?

All of the top 10 Google search results are third-party articles that link to my website. However, my actual website doesn’t even appear in the top 40 results.

As a result, I’m losing sales — people keep telling me they can’t find my site directly. The only current solution seems to be paying Google $5–$10 per click to show up in search.

Is there maybe something more banal here? Like the google robot looking at your website and not seeing content so assuming it's not ranked?

I would scour the Google Search Console to see if there's just something off about your pages. Totally could not be this, but it could be!

Seems surprising if you have a bunch of third-party links that you wouldn't rank higher.

I am not able to rank for my own brand name, it's not crowded. All the pages that are ranking from other websites (linkedin, facebook, x) are owned by me.

The website is 1 year old.

Why would you think that a new website with no history is going to outrank a facebook page etc? It will take time for the website to establish as the authority and then place alongside the social pages etc. At this point you're lucky the social pages etc show up so at least you have something representing in the space.

Why would you think that a Facebook page should outrank a website? I would think that a Facebook page SHOULD be considered only slightly more authoritative than a youtube comment.

Why shouldn't a facebook page be ranked similarly to a website? Why should having a domain different than facebook give some arbitrary advantage?

If a Youtube comment happened to give the best explanation to my query, I'd want to to show up at the top of my search.

The same reason that I'll click on a restaurant in Yelp or Google reviews over $RestaurantWebsite.

domain names don't weight as much in search ranking it used to be

So then... what is the problem? Pages you own are being returned in results. Sounds like you are doing fine. Don't jump into the "SEO" snake oil game. Just put your content where the traffic is going anyway, and focus on actual business metrics.

All pages that rank are for my own business, but all are above me.

How new is your site? The domain might just need to mature a little bit.

Other than that I would add some organization schema to your site to help confirm that your site is the canonical 'home' for you business, possibly a Google MyBusiness profile as well.

https://schema.org/Organization