How To Learn From Your Competitors

14 April 2015 | | Internet, Marketing

Search engine optimisation is highly competitive and a constant race to stay one move ahead of your competitors. To win, you need to continually improve your own website and monitor your competitors’ SEO activity.

Understanding your competitors SEO performance and knowing what keywords your business should be targeting can be a crucial part of an SEO strategy. By knowing where your competitors search engine rankings are will help you determine if you should compete for certain key phrases.

Your competitors are crucially important as they hold new information about your target audience. So what can you do to learn from your competitors?

1. Content Creation

To attract new visitors to your website, the quality and amount of content matters. Producing relevant, useful and keyword-rich blog posts, articles and web pages is a way to win visitors to your site. High-value content can also lead to online sharing, which increases the number of external backlinks pointing to your website and further improves your SEO.

On a weekly or monthly basis you can review the types of posts you see on your competitors’ websites. So what topics are they choosing? Are they attracting lots of comments and shares?

For example, if you see a post getting hundreds of shares, consider writing an alternative, better version of it. The key is not to duplicate what’s working well, but to gain broad insights about your audience and customise your strategy to appeal to that audience.

As well as content, keywords are the foundation of SEO. First of all your need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting are giving the highest amount of traffic possible.

2. Backlinking

While it’s important to monitor your own website’s backlink profiles to prevent negative SEO, you should also keep a close eye on your competitors and the links they are building. There are plenty of tools you can use to research the link profile of your competitors. We use a site called Open Site Explorer where you can both identify potential linking partners for your site and uncover any new linking strategies your competitors may be using to try to beat you.

With these you’ll be able to see where your competitors are building links and what type of links they’re building. It’s not a good idea to copy your competitors’ link-building strategies directly, but you can use them as inspiration and borrow some of the same sources for your own efforts.

These days, link-building is a tricky business as Google is sharper than ever, and its search algorithm is constantly scouting for businesses trying to use unnatural links to manipulate their rankings. Finding high-quality sources in your industry can be a daunting task, which is why seeing what your high-ranking competitors are doing that has resulted in their high rankings.

3. Social Following

Don’t be afraid to engage with your competitors directly, especially in a social context. Take a look at the demographics that follow your competitors’ Facebook and Twitter profiles, and reach out to them on an individual level. On Twitter this is quite simple; head to your competitor’s follower list and start following some of their followers. Alternatively, you can take a look at the types of people who follow your competitors and gain insights about your key audiences.

4. Staying ahead of the game

SEO is a field that’s constantly changing. If you’re able to jump on a new technique or growing trend before your competitors, you may be able to cement your lead in the natural search results.

Once you’ve assessed your competitor’s rankings, linking building strategy, and analyzed their link juice, from there you can develop a strategy or plan that will out perform them in the long run. Be careful not to follow the competition with every idea they come up with is not always the right one for your business!

If you would like any further information then give the Dental Design team a call on: 01202677277.

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