One of the best ways to defeat your opponents is to watch what they do and improve.
However, it is not always easy to understand what your competitors are doing. Where do you start your search? Is it the same process for new and old websites? What is the best way to conduct competitive analysis?
Try the following actionable and repeatable competitive analysis methods to outperform your competitors on Google by using your strategies against them. They have to do the thing.
1. Analyze competitive keywords
Other companies have already ranked on Google for services or products similar to yours. So why not look at the keywords they are ranked by?
You can identify keywords that everyone in your industry is trying to rank using Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends. You can filter by location, business value, objective, and search volume.
Third-party analysis software can also help you with your keyword strategy. SEMRush and Ahrefs are essential tools for understanding which keywords your opponents are using. With their help, you can further refine your searches.
List your competitors in a spreadsheet of your best internal sites, including the homepage. You can manually go to any of these pages and open the source code to check the title, metadata, headlines, and content. It allows you to quickly discover the keywords that your top opponents are using to drive traffic to your websites and landing pages.
Write down your competitors’ keywords and enter them into your spreadsheet.
Now your page marketers and SEOs can customize your content and pages based on these keywords.
2. Write high-quality informational content
Creating great content that your current and future customers want to read is one of the most important things you can do to beat your competitors on Google.
Take a good look at Google and social media to get a clear idea of what people want. Focus on creating content that satisfies users’ search intent, that is, content that helps users reach their goal after typing the keyword into Google Search.
Be sure to include useful information in your content and try to answer questions comprehensively. You can easily find topics you want to discuss in more detail using Google’s People Ask Ask boxes and related keywords.
3. Master on-page SEO
On-page SEO, which includes elements of your site that affect search engine results, is another important aspect of Google ranking. Page SEO is affected by several factors:
Title tags must identify the subject of the page and contain keywords.
- The Meta description of each page should explain what it is about. Meta descriptions appear in search engine results (SERPs).
- Titles divide content into sections and contain keywords.
- URLs should be easy to read and descriptive and should contain your keywords if possible.
- Alternative tags should be added to all photos that identify the image content in a nutshell.
- Loading speed is considered by Google when ranking sites because users expect pages to load quickly.
- The internal link between pages on your site gives users a direct path to the details they need. Note the broken links.
4. Create backlinks
There’s no better strategy for outdoing your competitors on Google than going back.
Your on-page approach will take you to the point where you improve your organic rankings. Create backlinks to take it a step further. Pay attention to the number of backlinks your opponents have to a specific page that is better than yours; you have an idea of how many backlinks you need.
Creating backlinks is not easy. Google rewards backlinks from sites with high domain authority (DA), so it’s critical to prioritize the quality over the number of links.
Create great promotional materials to help you get high-quality connections. Infographics, blog posts, and video production are all great examples of outreach that can lead to backlinks.
Always be on the lookout for linking opportunities to related sites. There are also CRM tools and software available that help with SEO and SEM.
5. Optimize your page speed
Page speed affects your SEO rankings in the same way as your PPC campaigns. Let’s say you see competitors outperforming you with keywords that have the same number of backlinks, domain authority, keyword density, or on-page variables. In that case, it’s time to take a look at the speed of your mobile and desktop page.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to monitor the speed of your website and find out what factors are slowing it down.
Text compression, server response times, unused CSS, and off-screen images are all potential issues that can result from slower loading speeds.
Following the tips in this article will help you outperform your competitors on Google. However, applying the right tactics is not a foregone conclusion. You need to stay consistent and keep up with current marketing trends to maintain your top position.