To make a business stand out and transform it to a well-known brand in 2024, a good SEO strategy is must needed. Having a clear and detailed understanding of the competitors operating in the similar niche is the very first step anyone needs to take. If the brand is new and just started its operation, in that case, competitor analysis becomes even more necessary. Implementing a perfect SEO campaign can effectively result in organic traffic that takes the brand at the top of the search engine pages.
Here are some of the most effective techniques of improving SEO to outrank your competitors.
- 1. Identify Competitors
To exceed the competitors, the first necessary thing is to have a compact list of all your competitors. Competitors can be of different types- other brands who provide the exact same products and services, brands who offer similar kinds of services and then comes the brands whose products and services can be a good alternative for your own services. Focusing on these three types of competitors, can provide you with the correct and detailed information about what you’re going against.
- 2. Auditing Competitor’s Website & Finding Lacking Points
Next big step is to conduct a thorough audit of the competitor’s websites. An audit is the perfect mechanism to find out the strength as well as obstacles that others are facing in the market. Knowing what the customer’s expectations and also having the idea of where other brands are lacking, will give an edge to the brand to better cater to the growing demands.
- 3. Auditing Own Website
Competitor analysis can only be helpful if one also analyzes their own website. This analysis will provide necessary information such as if the website contains relevant search keywords, whether the content is thorough enough, if the backlinks are trustworthy and are working perfectly, checking if the meta tags (meta title & description) are relevant for the customer query, whether the images and videos are optimized according to the webpage, etc. Only after one has the knowledge of what is wrong with their website, can they begin working on it.
- 4. Perfect Keyword Research
Keywords are the route to reach out to the most effective audience. Website audit provides a list of keywords where the competitors are ranking high and also keywords that are not properly utilized by them. With this understanding, optimizing your own website and its content thoroughly with the high search volume keywords will ensure organic traffic to the site.
- 5. SEO friendly (Meta Title and Meta Descriptions Tags, Header Tags)
To make a website SEO friendly, one needs such a site that will be technically sound, and properly optimized for search engines for the audience to find it easily. Having sound internal linking between different web pages, properly optimized visuals and images, unique titles, optimized headers- all these eventually makes a website SEO friendly.
- 6. Relevant and Authoritative Content
Content is the king of SEO. Providing relevant and better content than competitors ensures the audience keeps coming back to the site. Here the keywords researched earlier plays an important role. When the content is rich with appropriate content according to the customer query, the audience finds a reliable source and this increases the return rate. Building authority in the niche of products and services that a brand sales, enhances the success rate of SEO.
- 7. User Friendly Webpage
For a good SEO, it is imperative to cater to the target audience appropriately. For this, an user-friendly website is a must to have. Website that has easy navigation, readable fonts, reliable animation, clear concise content, and that answers the user’s question point by point – is a user- friendly website. The initial stages of website audit, one can gather whether their website is user friendly or not. Accordingly, work is done.
- 8. Technical SEO
Improvising the technical aspects of SEO, leads the path to have a good outcome of the SEO campaign. Replacing broken links, putting in place a clean URL, on page optimisation of visual creatives etc. ensures a good degree of crawlability which in turn makes it easier for the search engine pages to index the site.
- 9. Mobile Friendliness
When a user browses a website through mobile phone, their attention span is even lesser. In this scenario, google will rank those sites higher that are optimized for a mobile user. Using fonts that are readable without being zoomed, providing specific information at the front pages, having a page with fast loading speed- all these steps help in improving the SEO of the website.
- 10. Building Strong Backlinks
With the help of many tools, one can have a thorough knowledge about the backlinks used by their competitors that are working very strongly. With this information, one can effectively build backlinks for their website that will increase their authority and also audience engagement and have to create better backlink than competitors.
Conclusion
With these 10 top most proven strategies, one can very effectively improve their SEO strategy compared to the other competitors. But one thing to always keep in mind is that not one size fits all. Based on the brand goals and objectives, the final strategy should be built up.
If you run a business, you can follow these strategies otherwise you can hire a SEO agency to implement these strategies.