Search engine optimization (SEO) is solely dependent on your competition, as it’s a fancy word for the hierarchy of link placement when specific keywords are searched online. This means that your SEO efforts are only deemed good if they beat your direct competitors in the fight for that sacred first place. That’s why any professional in the field of SEO will tell you that you should be highly invested in every action your competitors are doing to get ahead of you. They’ll also tell you plenty of strategies that could improve your chances of getting ahead of your competitors with your SEO efforts.
Identify Future Keywords
First of all, keywords are essential when it comes to your SEO efforts as they’re the ones that are going to get you any traffic from search engines. Keywords are essentially the most frequently used words that get typed on a search engine by your target audience to look for your product/service. Your competitors are already dominating the current keywords that are mostly used in your business’s field, however, finding new keywords that will potentially impact your business in the future can help you secure yourself the first slot on the search bar before your competitors can begin their SEO efforts. Always keep future keywords in mind whenever you’re expanding your business in any direction.
Check Your Competitors’ Backlinking Statistics
Backlinking is a very important aspect of SEO as it increases your website’s ranking in comparison to other websites by having your website linked from other 3rd party websites. You need to always keep both your backlinking statistics and your competitors’ in mind while you’re working on optimizing search engines in your favor. You can easily learn how to do an SEO competitor link analysis by searching for online tools that compare your backlinking efforts in relation to the number-one link holder from your competitors. This will display accurate statistics that can help you understand the amount of backlinking needed to beat your competitors. This can be great for any website as it helps you understand the difference in numbers to help improve your backlinking with relation to the most successful efforts currently being done.
Improve Your Website
The best way you can get ahead of your competitors is if your website looks better than theirs in the eyes of your target audience. If your website looks more stylish and trustworthy, chances are that your target audience will want to explore your website more than your competitor’s. You can easily make the changes necessary to make your website better-looking through many online tools and guides freely available or you can choose to spend a little money and get a website designer to handle that task for a fee that has an almost guaranteed return. Thinking from the perspective of your target audience should make the designing process a lot clearer as you’ll know which direction to take your website in.
Build a Wormhole
Once your target audience is on your website, you want to keep them there rather than have them go to your competitors instead. This means that you need to have a website that’s rich in information regarding your product/service to ensure that the moment a prospective customer is on your website, they can find all the information they need. This is done through internal linking to other pages on your website that contain articles, case studies, reviews, and general information. The key here is to have them enter your website and fall into what website designers call a wormhole that keeps them diving in deeper and deeper through the information your website contains. Build a strong number of pages with quality information and your website will flourish.
Use Different Platforms
Expanding the reach of your website can be done by utilizing different platforms to your advantage. The more popular your website gets, the better your chances are at improving your SEO efforts. Your competitors are probably running advertisements on many other platforms online, like using the best free press release sites to promote their business. So don’t let them get away with grabbing the entire potential market without putting up a fight..
Capitalize on Google Analytics
There are many online tools that can help you gather information about specific keywords and your website’s statistics. One of the most popular online tools to measure success on your website is Google Analytics as it shows you many different statistics regarding your website for absolutely no cost. Yes, it’s absolutely free and you can not only access statistics for your website, you can also access your competitors’ statistics to compare yourself to them without paying a single penny.
Remain Consistent
One of the most underrated strategies that professionals always emphasize on is consistency. SEO is a marathon, it’s definitely not a sprint. This means that you have to remain consistent with your efforts from all angles, including website updates, platform expansion, and content generation. Consistency helps you increase the chances of success as you remain relevant and available for any potential customer at any given time.
Improve Your Device Compatibility
Your effort in attracting more potential customers through SEO or any other online marketing strategies might not generate any results if you’re not equipped with handling the different devices that are going to be accessing your website. People use a very large variety of devices to surf the web and if a website isn’t compatible with their device, they’ll simply click away and go to another website that they can easily explore. Always keep your compatibility up to date with any new device that comes out to ensure that you’re not losing out an entire portion of your target audience.
Finally, the most important of all strategies is to implement all of them simultaneously as they all synergize together to complete the puzzle perfectly. Slacking on one of the strategies might be causing your other strategies to slowly lose effectiveness as having really strong backlinking means nothing if your actual website isn’t good looking. Utilizing all of the strategies will help you gain an upper hand on your competitors with ease, as long as you’re watching their moves closely.