Search engines are playing a crucial role in enhancing the online presence of businesses or brands and driving digital marketing and sales. For this reason, understanding how the search engines work will be crucial to enlighten you on what is needed to make your website appear not only on the first page of search engines but come at the top of Google and other search engines.
Despite the benefits of search engine optimization that many entrepreneurs now know, many of such entrepreneurs still do not value the power of SEO or simply ignore it believing that it simply impossible to get to the top of search engines. This is actually true even to the most successful brands out there.
It is true that SEO needs some considerable investment in terms of time and money to get things moving and getting your website ranked at the very top of search engines so as to attract a good amount of traffic to the website. It has become even more complex with the high competition in the industry with many businesses now tapping into highly sophisticated tools and expertise to ensure they are better in terms of SEO in their niches.
Here are the five essentials to help beat your competitors at SEO
Using the basic operator and focusing on content creation
This is a free “site colon search” that will help you to find out the specific pages on your website that are live and optimized in Google search for effective content marketing. SEO experts will always want to know whether Google search results represent a business’s delivery. The same will be used to find out the irrelevant pages that need to be either edited or got rid of. Any brand always wishes to achieve the best in publishing pages that relate to typical searches made for their specific products and services.
The page contents need to present common search terms efficiently for your website to be termed as being SEO friendly. In case this is not achieved, your website will be pushed down in terms of ranking until you edit or change the website content using various content management tools that are crucial in ensuring the published content matches up with the search terms you want.
Using both paid and free Links
We have noted that the published content is crucial in boosting your website’s SEO. However, links are also considered as the most important factor in search engine rankings. The more authoritative sites link to your website, the more Google will note that your site is important and notable. This is also the same case with sponsored blog posts that are relevant to your specific niche, brand and products or services.
However, you need to understand that quality of links is what matters most when it comes to ranking of websites. This is unlike many of the websites that concentrate on quantity of links including links that are barely related to their websites. Many of such websites that concentrate on quantity rather than quality have been penalized by Google which has pushed their ranking down. Penguin, one of the latest Google Algorithm updates is now used to check the quality of links pointing to specific websites and rank them based on their quality.
It is, therefore, crucial to understanding the various quality links used by competitors using such tools as Majestic so that you can easily emulate the kind of quality they exhibit on their websites. This way, you can easily come up with even better quality links that will help you beat your competitors.
Besides exhibiting authority of the specific niche, quality links should also be relevant to the specific niche. For this reason, it is important to source for quality referral links from specialist directories, or a top 10 list of products relevant in your sector, to point to your pages. Here are the effective tips for the link building.
Using free and paid analytics
The competition in any industry or niche is quite high these days. Before you roll out your best strategies, it is crucial to analyze and find out what your competitors are doing. There are several analytics tools that can be used to find out the various keywords and pages that drive the most traffic to a brand’s competitors in a particular niche. You need to determine what keywords and opportunities competitors are using to get results.
Another great tool that you need to consider using is the Google Analytics which offers crucial insights regarding the incoming traffic to your website. Google Search Console, on the other hand, is necessary to enlighten you regarding the right keywords that should be used to boost your website’s ranking.
Using free topic analysis to help in planning various keyword targeting strategies
Page titles and topics are becoming crucial considerations in SEO today. Keyword density in topics is of great concern especially with such tools as Google’s Hummingbird update that provides insights into the relevance of various topics used in website content.
You can use density tools to understand the relevant topics used by competitors to help them have a better ranking. You can do this by copy-pasting the specific competitors’ website into a density tool to get such insights. With the topic ideas, you will then easily emulate what the rest in the industry are doing and do it even better to beat them at SEO.
These strategies are essential in restructuring your otherwise poorly ranked website to improve the position by search engines for better visibility by web visitors. The various strategies will enable you to change the specific parts of your website including the page headers, site sections, topics and sub-heading among others.
Google ranks a single page for about 10 relevant keywords. For this reason, you need to understand the relevant terms used by your competitors so as to increase the effectiveness of the content published on your website.
Using paid and free insights
There are expert insights that you need to get ahead of your competitors. However such insights are paid for. A good example of such insights are the paid keyword insights that offer the best examples of most effective keywords from the millions of keywords available relevant to your industry. Use AdWords is crucial a great campaign that will help you to realize the most effective keywords that not only drive traffic but also provide conversions.
Conclusion:
There are quite a number of such keyword insight tools such as KeywordSpy, Keyword Tool and WordStream among others that will help you to understand the various keyword variations to try out. Having considered the various essentials outlined above and achieved a better ranking, you need to learn on how to protect your website search ranking so that your website is not pushed down the research results after a short time.
