Most people now use search engines to look for information on products and services. So as a business owner, it’s immensely vital that you rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs). You need to outperform the search engine optimization (SEO) efforts of your competitors and outrank them in SERPs.
But you should know that your competitors could be one of your most valuable assets. You could analyze their SEO efforts to pinpoint exactly what they’re doing well and what they aren’t. With the help of experts in SEO services in Virginia, these crucial insights could aid you in reverse-engineering your competitor’s success so you could beat them at their own game. Here’s how.
Do Keyword Research
Determine keywords that you could “realistically” target. For example, if you sell t-shirts, you might need to rank for the keyword “t-shirts.” But unless your business has the resources to compete with more established t-shirt brands, you’d be hard-pressed to rank for this specific keyword.
So instead, identify long-tail, hyper-targeted keywords with low competition and high search volume, as these are more particular to a specific location or niche.
Figure Out Who Your Top Competitors Are
When you’ve finished identifying keywords you want to target, search them on Google to see which websites rank the highest using those keywords. Do this for all keywords you want to rank for. You’d most likely see certain websites that always come up in SERPs, which means that you should include these sites in your list of competitors.
Dissect Your Competitors’ Websites
When dissecting competitor sites, you need to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses. To do this, pay attention to the following:
- Keyword Density – Identifying the keyword density in a competitor’s site would help you determine how aggressive you need to be in your own site’s keyword placement. You need to figure out the average keyword density among all competitors’ sites to help you determine how many times you should utilize a specific keyword on your web page.
- Metadata – Check out all metadata that your competitors utilize. See if they use LSI keywords, alt text on all images, and meta descriptions on web pages. If they don’t use any or all of these, then you could try outranking them by ensuring that yours have all these.
- Backlinks – Identify how many websites link back to your competitors’ websites to figure out how many high-quality links you have to target.
Evaluate Your Competitors’ Content
Once you’ve completed your keyword research, determined your competitors and analyzed their websites, you have to evaluate their content as well as their social media marketing efforts. When doing so, keep in mind the following things:
- Average rate of engagement
- Number of active social media profiles
- Number of active social media and blog followers
- Frequency of blog and social media posts
- Frequency of shares on social media
- Domain authority
- Their overall body of work
The bottom line is aside from giving you ammunition to up your SEO game, spying on your top competitors would also save you a ton of resources to plan your SEO campaign. So take cues from your competitors’ SEO efforts and then do what they’re doing, but better.
