How To Outrank Your True SEO Competition - Semalt Expert
We all have a desire to outrank our SEO competition. That's the only way we can beat and get ahead of our competition. Every time a client walks through our doors, this is usually their request. They want to be better, so we figured we create a post to show them how we can help.
In our studies, we have discovered aspects you can improve to score more SEO traffic and succeed in your industry. The fundamental step to performing better than your competition is to understand what they are currently doing. We must study their strategy to see their strengths, weaknesses and understand how they operate.
To beat your opponent, you need to be able to see your opponent's moves and devise a strategy to beat them.
Understanding Who Your True Competition Is
Many SEO professionals make the mistake of assuming who their competition is for organic traffic, and they leave their real competition to go unseen. Oftentimes, these professionals end up learning the strategy of the wrong competitor, and they are left guessing what the true threat is doing.
Going about your optimization this way not only makes outranking your competition difficult but also makes it seem impossible. As long as you're headed in the wrong direction, you will never arrive at your desired destination.
If you want to know who you should focus your attention on, this is where you need to be. In this article, we will be showing you key tips you will need to keep in mind.
Discovering and Outranking your True SEO Competition
Outranking your online competition means you get to poach a large share of their online traffic which spells a lot of good things for your business. To successfully do this, you'll need to focus on these SEO plays:
Discover your Competition
The first step in the right direction is to learn if your completion is a brand competition or an SEO competition. Reliably naming your competition is the first step in this process, but it isn't as easy as it may seem.
In many instances, your brand competitors can differ from your digital competitors. In every line of business, brand competitors change regularly for a number of reasons, and not all brand competitors are your actual SEO competitors.
Discover who your true SEO competitors are:
- The first step is to create a detailed list of who all your competitors are. Once you do, it is easier to see how well they perform at SEO.
- At this point, you can break your list into two segments. In one, you'll have your brand competitors, and in the other, your digital SEO competitors.
- From here, you know which brands to keep on your radar and pivot your SEO strategy, so you're solely focused on your true SEO competitors.
Bonus Tip
While you're researching your competitors, it might be helpful to look into their marketing channel performance. With this, you can gain insight into how fierce your competition is and where they focus their efforts. This data can also help other departments of your brand, such as the PPC team.
Understanding which of your SEO competitors aren't worth the effort
Because a brand made it on your SEO competitor's list doesn't mean they are significant enough to worry about. SEO traffic and trends are constantly changing, so when you identify your SEO competitors, the next step is to identify their organic search trends. What this means is that you need to know if these brands are your consistent competition or they only recently became one.
As SEO trends change, it is common to see come brands fall in and out. While they may be your competition today, they can easily become insignificant the next. Knowing who these brands are will help you spend funds wisely as you will only focus on your true competition.
How to Identify Low-Trending Competitors:
- To do this, you must research, plot, and compare every competitor on your list. Study their traffic trends over time, and you will be able to identify who are your true competition.
- If you discover that your competitor is constantly trending high or recently saw an increase in their search traffic, you should look into them.
- However, if the competition is usually trending low, then they are not worth your effort.
Bonus Tip
Figuring out what makes your competitors gain or lose traffic gives you insight into what they are doing that is working or failing.
Identify your Competitor's Powerhouse Content
Knowing who your competitors are is no longer enough if you must outrank them. In your research, you must also learn what strategies they use to drive traffic and what they focus on now and in the past.
Looking deep into how your competitors operate allows you to identify which pages draw in the most traffic. With this, you can create better content and improve your digital strategy.
How to Identify your Competitor's Power House:
- Research your competitor's top-performing pages.
- Discover what keywords they rank for and cross-reference every content and its keywords in a trend analysis tool. This way, you learn all you need to know about how their content and pages perform.
Bonus Tip
This information not only shows you what they have done up to that moment, but it also helps you predict your competitor's next move. Analyze the products and topics they promote, and you will discover a pattern. Look at the frequency with which their trends change. Is it monthly or yearly. Little things like this make the difference.
See Where Each Competitor Focuses Their Effort
Ranking matters a lot, and one way to rank better is by observing your competition. When you look at the rankings of your digital competitors, you will learn not just what they are doing but also what search engines like and dislikes.
It's simple when they make a move and rank better on SERP, you learn that the search engine likes what they've done, and if they lose their rank, you know that you shouldn't make that move.
How to get ahead of the top 3 Rankings:
- Compile a list of the top 3 ranking keywords in your industry.
- Analyze your SERP and identify which three websites rank the highest for those keywords.
- Identify the type of content that ranks highest for these keywords
- These three simple steps will help you calculate which positions your competitors hold and how you can use these keywords to drive traffic.
Bonus Tip
This is a very important step in your analysis because it shows you where your competition focuses its efforts. You also learn what type of content is most favorable. You will know if you should create different types of content to drive high-impact results or if you should create strong assets to maximize performance.
Put it all Together
Now, your competitive analysis is complete. Now you must apply what you've learned and improved your SEO strategy. Remember that the main goal of your analysis was to understand what your competitors were doing and then create an actionable plan from the keywords and strategies you've learned.
Now you have the knowledge of who is your true SEO competition, and you can make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy.
Now you can go back to how to create quality content for your website. Bridge the keyword gaps in your content and ensure that you work on your strengths and make your weaknesses less visible.
Conclusion
SEO is ever-changing, and search engines continually update their algorithm. As SEO experts, we must stay on our toes and research non-stop. If you stop learning, you start dying. It is always important to learn new ways to improve your strategy, and we are glad to have helped you with this.
You can visit our website to learn more about our services or our blog to learn more interesting things about SEO and how you can improve your ranking.