Ways to outrank your competitors
SEO tricks: 16 ways to outrank your competitors
Learn how to tweak your SEO strategy with this guide.
A competitive analysis is a critical part of any businesses marketing plan. A well-reasoned competitor analysis will structure your whole marketing strategy and position your business for future success. Having a better understanding of the competitive landscape, an insight into what your competitors are doing well, and how you compare, will ultimately help you capitalise on it.
Whether you are upscaling your existing website environment (here are the latest web design tools to help you out), developing a new marketing campaign, or launching a new product or service, you need to know how your competition is performing in the same field.
This tutorial will explain how to gain insight into your competitors’ positioning, efficiency, traffic sources and how they got there. This includes their keyword targeting, social media presence, content marketing efforts, PPC targeting, position in SERP’s, backlink profile, reviews, differentiators, Call To Actions (CTA’s) and page traffic.
By identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, benchmarked against your own, you can effectively capitalise on new opportunities for growth. Striving to do one better than the competition, standing out and increasing meaningful engaged traffic to your website domain.
01. Identify and qualify your competitors
It’s important that you understand who your competitors are, not only from an industry perspective, but also online. Start by Googling your product or service, and review who appears within your competitive space.
02. Investigate online presence
Detail how the competition appears online; are they in the local pack, do they pay for advertising (PPC), do they take advantage of rich answers, do they use schema data, do they have multiple landing pages, who are their referrals. Identify strong and weak points in your competitor’s marketing.
03. Analyse reputation and reviews
Analyse customer opinions of your competitors, from online reviews such as ‘Google Reviews’, product reviews, social reviews and comments left on blogs. Read both the positive and negative comments, learn what your shared audiences find positive and negative, then capitalise on it.
04. Track mentions of your competitors
Track and monitor online mentions of your competitors, as well as your own business, with a Google Alert. You can also monitor the web for new content created around your products, services or anything else.
05. Analyse your competitors’ PPC efforts
Gain insights into what keyword terms your competition believe are worth bidding on. Utilise both primary and secondary keywords within the search engines. You can also use third party tools to save time – it will break down which ads are image, HTML or text. Analyse the pages that the ads lead to.
06. Find out competitor keyword positioning
Having an insight into what keyword terms your competition is ranking for can give you a huge advantage. Review what keywords your competition appears for in the top 100 results with ‘ahrefs’.
