How to beat your SEO competitors
SEO competition is huge. Everyone wants to beat their competitors and rank higher, but that is not easy. The sites that are ranked higher than yours already are the ones that have done massive amount of hard work to have reached there, so they are not going to make your life easy at all. And especially, when you have just started out SEO, the job will be even tougher for you.
However, beating competition is not impossible. With a foolproof strategy, great deal of consistent hard work and patience, you can beat those competitors sitting on the top and rank higher.
This post is going to teach you about competitor SEO so that you can learn to expose the competitors’ faults that have been hidden so far, and form a strategy to take advantage of them and perform better than them.
Test your own site’s performance first
Before exposing the issues hidden on your competitor sites you must make sure your own website is error-free.
- For this, you need to run a few different tests on your website. Test your design, user experience, loading speed, and all the on-page elements that your prospective customers see at the first glance. Look at your social media accounts to see users’ activities there.
- Next, you must do the keyword research to find out the best keywords in your niche and check out your website’s current ranking for those keywords.
- Then you need to open your analytics data sheet to see your website traffic flow and behavior. These are the things you need to do step by step without skipping any step. Note down the test results on a sheet and move onto to see how your rivals are performing.
Find out your actual competitors
When finding out competitors, you can manually search for the top 5 search results for the most profitable keywords in the niche. This means you must have done your keyword research before this step. If you start with 10 different target keywords, you may have a list of about 50 websites and if a few of them are common for some keywords, you might have an initial list of say 25 competitor websites that you can target to outrank. Sometimes, you may discover the fact that not all of them are your real competitors that would steal your customers, so you can omit those websites for the time being and start targeting those that are actually influencing your potential customers.
With your final list of competitors ready, you can act like a fake customer visiting their website to see the design and overall user experience. While doing that you can inquire how their product or service is helping the users. Look at their social media accounts and the content they publish on different platforms. That will give you a good idea of how their marketing campaign is running and where you can perform better than them.
Save the information you get from your competitor analysis. Remember, a thorough competitor analysis can turn very useful for you. The only purpose is “Adopt their strong points and exploit their weak points.”
It’s not easy to outrank the websites that are ranked on the top. But it’s not impossible.