What would it feel like to have a competitor beat you to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) after all your effort and hard work in search engine optimisation (SEO)?
What if you’ve applied all the SEO tactics you know, yet a competitor’s web page keeps ranking higher than yours?
You don’t have to hate a website for ranking higher than you or beating you in the SEO game. Hating a competing website is a thing of the past when it comes to the Internet. It’s true that having a higher ranking competitor could lead to not achieving target website traffic, more time, and extra expenses.
However, the online world today has made it possible to use a better ranking site to your advantage. Your SEO drive doesn’t have to dwindle. Instead, you should monitor and analyze your competition to get more and increase page rank. You should look at their content, keywords, and site optimization. You might wonder, “how can monitoring a competing website help me optimize my site?”
Let’s take a look at a few ways that can happen:
It Helps You Create Better Content
Content is king on the internet. Search engines primarily rank web pages and sites based on content. Google rates websites on E-A-T which means expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This rating guideline concentrates on quality and reputation of the entire website content, including blog posts and landing pages.
When a website is consistently at the top of the SERP, you can be sure the site is creating epic content that meets search engine criteria. You can look at such site’s landing pages and blog posts.
However, don’t copy their work and regurgitate it on your site. That is plagiarism. Instead, put a twist on the topic or find out a recurring question by visitors in the comment and write an article to answer the question. This means you can get content opportunities from this strategy. You’ll always have fresh content in the form of blog posts, articles, ebooks, and press releases.
It Helps You Find and Use Better Ranking Keywords
While analyzing the content of competing websites, you can find out their potential relevant keywords, domains’ link popularity, and page result characteristics. You will also need to use the Google Webmaster Tool to research traffic that your site gets for various search queries.
This will show you the most effective keywords that bring in traffic. Find out how your competitor ranks for those keywords. Then, you can use the keywords to create researched, high-quality content. Once a user types in the keyword in search engines, your web page will have a better chance of appearing in the results.
You Can Improve Your Branding
Your branding is what sets you apart from your competition. It can help drive your site to the top of your niche market and create customer loyalty. . A competing website will have its own branding and unique selling point too.
First, you need to research their website content. How do they promote their brand in each post? What is their brand strategy? Then, you can research their online presence, content output, and customer engagement. By doing this, you can identify the competition’s target audience, targeted niches, and customer attraction strategy.
With the information you’ve gotten, you’ll know what to do to strengthen your unique selling proposition. You can also find new methods of creating brand uniqueness and making your site more appealing to a shared audience. Through this, your online brand presence and search visibility can increase.
It Improves Your Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing and site optimization are intertwined. Let’s say your website’s profile has millions of followers, and your article has a hundred thousand shares on social media; if this is the case, your search rank will likely improve. You need to monitor your competitors’ social media activity by noticing how they interact with followers and what is shared the most. You can track their posts with tools like Hootsuite.
One way to take advantage of their social activity is to reach out to their followers with your content. Some of them won’t be following you. They can be interested in your content and visit your website, which can lead to increased traffic for you.
Another way is to analyze their marketing tactics and tweak your social media strategy to accommodate the successful methods they’ve used. You can also find out which content does well on social media. A post that’s successful on social media will rank high on the SERP. Once you identify the competitors’ content, write an article with a similar topic and mirror their content strategy on social media.
You Can Gain More Backlinks
Getting inbound links from authority sites can help your SEO drive. A competing website that is properly optimized will be building links, just like you are. You can reach out to those sites to get them to link to similar content. Also, you should track any new backlink they have and find out if they’ve adopted a new strategy.
The most important thing here is not to copy every detail of the competing websites’ link building strategy. Instead, use their methods to strengthen your SEO techniques. You can build on their strategies and incorporate yours at the same time. That way, you can have a better internet marketing campaign overall.
It Can Help You Improve SEO Activities
By examining a competitor’s SEO strategies, you’ll be able to keep up with industry trends and find out when something new is on the scene. For example, higher ranking websites may change their SEO strategy and style suddenly.
This can mean a few things. There could be a new algorithm update, and they’re adjusting their optimization strategy too. They might have found out a better way to make their web pages rank higher in the SERP. They might be trying to avoid a penalty or might be removing a black hat SEO technique. Whatever it might be, you can quickly learn from it and ensure your website benefits from it or avoids disaster.
It Can Help You Avoid SEO Pitfalls
By watching your competitors’ ranking and optimization strategies, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. You’ll find out the SEO tactics that are not yielding much result and will likely become obsolete. This takes a lot of effort because you’re recording every detail in terms of their optimization actions. On the other hand, it helps you avoid falling in the SERP ranking because you know what strategies to copy or not.
Final Words
Winning in SEO means ranking at number one in the SERP, having strategic keywords, and increasing your website’s online visibility. Analyzing a higher ranking website’s SEO style can help you create better content and give you insight into what optimization strategies work best for your industry. You should always research and monitor your competitor from all angles to improve your and to stay one step ahead.
The last few months have taught us a lot about business. Specifically, they’ve shown us which business models lend themselves well to change, and which do not. At a time when most of the consuming world has had to remain indoors, the retail sector in particular has had to face some particularly hard truths.
