Time to Take On Your SEO Goliath

Every successful business needs a robust SEO strategy encompassing competitor analysis.

A business success strategy, it is not just about financial security, great sales teams and processes, branding or marketing in isolation. Whilst they are some really important parts of a successful business, they are not in isolation the only key success determinants within a business.

Enter what is known as, in SEO land, as competition analysis. 

Now you may be wondering why we shifted our focus from the fore mentioned business success strategies to Search Engine Optimisation, it’s really quite simple. They are all related and dependant for growth on each other.

As a matter of fact, there is no way you can scale up your business and grow to optimal heights without leveraging SEO! And, a key component of SEO success lies in analysis of your competition.

However, before diving into the process of competition analysis, here are a few things that will help you wrap your head around the entire rationale for leveraging this strategy for business growth optimisation.

Just What is Competition Analysis?

A textbook definition of the term, competition analysis can be defined as a process where you use SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to check every on-page element of your competitors’ SEO, including their website pages, quality of backings, domain authority etc...Basically what makes them rank and outrank your business, that you can be using to your advantage.

The process provides you with an understanding of how optimised your competitors might have their websites and where exactly they lack so that you can take advantage of gaps and optimise your website accordingly, to outrank your competitors in the SERPs.

No matter how wonderful and professional a page might look, every page has the potential for improvement. Some might not have many backlinks pointed at them yet have great content, resulting in a decent rank on the search results.

On the other hand, some pages might have great backlinks adding to their page authority and thus, enabling a higher ranking. Whatever the case might be, competition analysis sheds light on the drawbacks of a page so that you can draw on these.

Why is Competition Analysis So Important?

Before we talk about why competition analysis is important, it is crucial that you understand what exactly it is about SEO that has taken the digital world by a storm! SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a way of optimising your website using calculated strategies to gain the top ranks in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The biggest search engine is Google. Therefore, if you can analyse how Google’s algorithm of ranking works, and have a good ranking, you shall by default, rank in the results of every other search engine. Applying effective SEO techniques to attain this ranking increases the visibility of your website and thus, brings customers to your products and services. This also helps you in tweaking the traffic to your website and eventually, the conversion rate.

SEO is that one weapon that businesses cannot afford to give amiss. SEO analysts and experts are engaged by organisations because it has become almost impossible to optimise a businesses growth fully without them.

Coming back to competition analysis, in order to optimise your website to suit the needs of Google, you need to carry out an extensive research process. You need to ascertain and check all competitor websites in your niche and see why they are ranking.

You also need to understand how you can manoeuvre their flaws to benefit your website rankings. Whilst this process looks tedious is actually relatively simple if you have the right tools. It just takes time.

The best tools, as recommended by SEO experts all across the world, are Ahrefs and SEMRuas in our opinion. They are paid tools, and rightly so. The features and services that these tools offer to its users are fantastic. Now as an example, let's look into how you could go about the process of competition analysis using Ahrefs.

Using Ahrefs for Competition Analysis:

There a few basic steps that you need to follow while looking into your competition, and the best way you could do that is by using Ahrefs. Here is how.

Are Rankings Unbeatable?

Government-owned pages and pages of some high-end organisation are unbeatable to date. This is not because they have some miraculous SEO hacks in their bags, but simply because they serve as the most relevant pages in the domain of that particular keyword. Take, for example, the keyword ‘business grants’. You cannot hope to come up with a site that has boatloads of information about ‘business grants’ and outrank the government site that deals with the same keyword. Therefore, it is vital that you choose a niche that has better chances to rank. This is the reason why competition analysis is required from the very beginning.

You will get an insight into which keywords to target and which niche to choose. This way, you can check for the authority of the page in Ahrefs before giving up hope to outrank it.

Page Authority Analysis

In order to analyse the page authority, you need to place the link address of the website in Ahrefs. Doing this, gives you all the information you require about q website’s URL rating (UR), Domain rating (DR), the quality of backlinks, the number of Referring Domains (RD) and several other elements. The most important of all these is the UR. For instance, if a website’s UR is something like 50, this is a challenging figure, and the site might be difficult to beat. However, if the UR is somewhere in the range of 20 to 30, you have fair chances at outranking the site relatively quickly. You will need to look into other factors as well, but the UR is a good head start.

Finish the analysis of one site and then move on to the other top-ranking sites. Once you have an idea of the page authority of all these sites in the topmost ranks, you will start getting insights into how to optimise your website.

Look for On-Page Optimisation Factors

This is the place where you look for all the other elements of the page like its meta-tags, quality of content, content structure, H1, H2 and H3 tags, images and multimedia. If a page has poor quality content, this is an opportunity. No matter how strong a page might look, the audience will always leave the page if the content is esoteric or grammatically erroneous. Therefore, make use of this flaw and optimise your content with the right sentence and paragraph fragmentation, grammar and information.

Google holds great content highly. Check how many images or multimedia your competitor has used on their page to support their content. You have a high chance of outranking them by outnumbering these. Finally, use your target keywords in the first paragraph of your content, in the H1 and H2 tags and also in the meta-description of the page. This is one of the best tried and tested methods of ranking higher in the SERPs.

Wrapping Up

The greatest of pages always have drawbacks. These may not seem obvious but they are there. As you analyse more pages, you shall get better at doing this part of SEO, however experiential expertise cannot be quantified. However, if you employ the appropriate techniques of competition analysis, it's a great place to start for your business growth.

How to use SEO as a Strategy in Your Business

When it comes to marketing the websites of some areas you can meet a vast army of what look like Goliath competitors. These will be challenging for you in working towards the top of the coveted Google search rankings. 

Any internet search these days could potentially yield you millions of hits, but these are unlikely to be to the second page. And the fact of the matter is, it’s primarily the first handful of websites that will be visited. So, if you are not punching into the top couple of results on any search term that you are linked to, you are going to struggle to get the visitors that your business needs. 

Getting up into those top results is an ongoing battle. You will constantly need to work at pushing your website to get it and keep it there. You can guarantee that there are potentially many others doing the same for their company. The fact of the matter is that you can’t all be top of the search results so you need to pick well. 

Search Engine Optimization Should Be The Central Tenant Of Your Marketing Strategy 

Search Engine Optimisation is essential for any business website, that relies on Google searches to draw their visitors in. Having an SEO strategy to market your website is essential. And ensuring that this strategy is continually worked, and adapted as Google’s algorithms change is vital. 

Utilising an SEO expert services will allow you to get the best position in the search rankings as possible. 

There are three main areas that SEO focuses on. Firstly, on-page SEO looks at how your page functions, how it looks, and the information that is contained within it. Keeping all of this to the right standard is the bottom line when it comes to finding any success for your site.

The next area to look at is off-page SEO, which looks at taking your website and sharing it on social media, linking it to more influential websites. Lastly, local SEO can be particularly beneficial if you need to get your customers to find you in a physical location. For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar store or an office. 

Keyword Analysis Is Essential 

Your customers will go on a journey to find your product. But that journey starts with the empty search box. Knowing the types of words and phrases they are using in their searches will allow you to implement those words and phrases within your content. 

Having as much relevance to any potential searches is vital. Your content needs to be written in a way that is rich in the types of keywords that people use in their searches. 

Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can measure the frequency of specific searches bringing people to your site. 

Google’s AdWords is an excellent way of making sure your site features at the top of any search terms. Having a sponsored link does cost you money, and can be a good short term option. However, it needs to be a small part of a much bigger puzzle. 

Quality Content Leads To Being An Authority

Letting Google’s automatic web crawlers hunt for information from your website is one thing, but having a website that is designed for a machine to read is not the ultimate aim of the game. You need to make sure that you are creating content for humans. Keep everything grammatically correct, and make sure that the material can be scanned by the target audience. You can use tools such as Grammarly, or Hemmingway to determine the reading age of your text. Keeping everything as simple as possible will help your readers engage with your content, and remain on your site. 

Having relevant, well-researched information is crucial. Your site needs to be reliable and trustworthy, and if this is the case, you will be able to demonstrate to the search engine that your content is valuable. 

Having just your product or service on your site might not be the best plan for your business. You will need to create a high degree of organic traffic to your website, that is not coming because they already know your name. You want to attract people that have never heard of you. You can do this by creating compelling blog posts about innovations in your sector. You can link this back to your products by all means, but these posts should not just read as though they are an advert for your services. Try and keep a balanced viewpoint that is of value to the reader. Once you’ve piqued the visitor’s interest, then you might be able to win them over with your products. 

Optimized For Speed And Mobile Browsing

The use of mobile technology, such as smartphones and tablets, has far surpassed that of computers when it comes to internet searches. With so many people now accessing the internet primarily through other devices such as phones, your website needs to be designed in a way where the pages load and look good on any screen.

Having a clunky, or slow loading page will be an immediate turn-off for many visitors. If the information is not displayed in a way that makes it easy to read, people will rapidly disregard your site. 

Google understands the importance of pages that load quickly on all devices, and as such will favour sites that can be loaded quickly, and will display well. 

The internet of things is a rapid growth area, with many homes now owning artificial intelligence devices such as Google’s Home Hub and Amazon’s Alexa. As the demand increases for these products, so does the need to optimize your content for them. It’s always worth keeping an eye on the technology trends to work out ways that your business can interact with these as early as possible. 

Have An Off-Page Strategy 

Every website has something called domain authority. These rankings are provided by Ahrefs and SEMRush and change according to any updates to your site. This is a score from zero to one hundred, which determines how influential your website is. Sites with higher domain authorities will have a high volume of traffic and will sit much higher in results. For example, Wikipedia is primarily seen as an authoritative source of information which covers every topic. It’s structure relies on internal to other pages, and external links to provide references. As such, Wikipedia has a domain authority of 100.

Your domain authority can be improved through backlinks. By having your website linked on multiple high authority sites, you will rise in influence. It’s like getting a job reference from someone with greater importance when they vouch for you; your status can increase. 

Guest blogging or high traffic sites linking to you is an excellent way of improving your stature. Many pages and bloggers are happy to link other companies, and there are a couple of avenues you can go down when it comes to getting onto other peoples websites. 

When you create new content for your site, including internal links to previous pages you have created helps to build up your authority too. 

A Local SEO Strategy

If you have a physical store or office and you want people to visit, you need to be listed on sites such as Google Maps and any listing sites. Make sure that the information that you submit is consistent. Your name, address, and phone number should all be accurate and up-to-date. 

Having your page listed is great, but people will need to know what you do, or they won’t visit. Have a great blurb about your business and what exactly you offer. Don’t overwhelm people at this stage though, keep it simple. Make sure your website is linked to these services, as this will be a massive benefit in driving traffic. 

Having an SEO strategy is vital for your business. Keeping on top of the changes to Google’s search algorithms and what they mean to you is another key area. With updates being added frequently, the way in which you will manage your search engine optimization will change from time-to-time. Even if you are outsourcing your SEO needs to another company, you should still keep an awareness of how the changes will affect your business.

Now if you are ready for help with your SEO, let's book a time in for a call and overcome your Goliath's.