Effective SEO Strategies From Semalt To Beat Your Competition


The internet is like every market place. It is full of competition, and to be able to sell your products or stay on the first page in SERP, you must do better than your competition. Staying on top is difficult, especially in a market as competitive as yours. Here, Semalt will be giving you some tips on how you can up your SEO performance using the tactics we will be giving to be able to beat and take the lead from your competition. 

Are you trying to dominate your market? The chances are that you are. Squeezing into a competitive market is never easy. As a small or medium scale company, the odds are naturally stacked against you. And it only gets tougher as you try to rise above larger and more established competitors. 

Getting to the top wouldn't be easy.

In a typical marketplace, the website or business currently topping your market have a good idea of how SEO works. They have a good sense of marketing, and they have created a strong reputation in the industry. This makes it virtually impossible to beat them, relying on only the basic SEO tips.  

To beat your competition, you need a competitive SEO strategy that is well-tailored to help your business gain visibility in even the most saturated market place. Here are some SEO strategies that will help your business outrank the top-performing 
competitors in your market place. These SEO secrets will put your website on the map and attract more traffic to your site. 

SEO Secretes that will help you outrank your competition

1. Pair Up Consumer and Industry marketing

When you are fighting for first place in a competitive market, your business needs to gain visibility in your industry and customers. Brand name recognition at the customer level is critical for the success of any business. Your brand's reputation in your niche also plays an important role in the success of a business.  

In terms of SEO, you can achieve this by targeting informative and transactional keywords and commercial keywords.

- Understanding the nature of Keywords

Basic SEO research tells you that keywords are important. What you wouldn't learn from this is that there are different classifications of keywords. These keywords are:
  • Informative 
  • Transactional 
  • Commercial 
Most businesses already know how to target informative and transactional keywords as they are the terms we rely on to draw prospective clients. That is why you see a lot of terms like "what is" and "where to buy" scattered through a site where the target audience has a search intent to: 
  • Find out more information about certain services.
  • Compare the costs of goods.
  • Discover new brands 
Commercial keywords, on the other hand, are the keywords that require a level of brand recognition. In competitive niches, you should have some sort of household name and recognition. Your household name and recognition is your brand image, and it holds a place in the search results. To survive, need to find out how to position your brand against the big names in your market. 

- Branded content

One option that we have discovered to be very effective is to target keywords that allow you to compare your brand and content to other well-known brands in your industry. Smaller brands looking to rank quickly should have several articles comparing their brands in the form of reviews. For example, you have Brand A VS Brand B. or articles like is Brand C truly the best? In each of these articles, your objective is not only to highlight the lapses of those big brands but to show the world the characteristics you possess that make you stand out in your market. 

Even if you are yet to have any form of brand recognition, you can create content specifically designed to target the keywords your competition uses and then position your brand as a contender to your competition.

Using this method helps you steal some of the attention from your competition. Slowly you start getting the attention you desperately crave. While doing this, you can capitalize on your growing brand recognition by creating content around the terms that give you the little recognition you have. This ensures that it is your site that gets ranked and not your competitors by association. 

For example, big companies such as Google target the word google and its top ranking option. This is beneficial to us because even though the search intent of a user might be to read up on the company google, a site like Semalt still gets indexed. After all, we use the word Google all through our site. In a situation where you are comparing your brand to that of your competition, you can control the narrative of your website. Let's say you're an e-commerce site that offers services similar to amazon. When the word Amazon is typed as a search query, your web article pops up, and then readers can see that indeed there is an excellent alternative to amazon, even if that wasn't their initial intent for the search. 

- Do not forget Submarkets

Tapping into the submarkets in your industry is another excellent strategy. In most submarkets, the competition is less stark, which makes it easier for businesses to grow and build a reputation. With a more accommodating market place, you quickly gain traction, and when you move to the big leagues, you have a fair shot at thriving.
Using the example mentioned above, if you are a new eCommerce platform in a crowded market, you can choose to target a specific type of eCommerce business, such as wholesalers. If you can dominate that submarket, you get your name out, and you have business owners recommending you as a great agent on the platform. With time, you can grow and expand to other niches.  

2. Runa competitive assessment at Macro and Micro levels

To beat your competition, you must first understand your competition. Competitor analysis is an important component of any SEO strategy. In competitive niches, the value of competitor analysis skyrockets. That is because your success highly depends on understanding what works and doesn't work for your competitors. 

In running a competitive assessment in your niche, you should look for ranking signals at both Macro and Micro levels. At the Macro level, this is important because they will likely contain the primary ranking signals. You should also pay attention to the micro because they contain fine details that become the competitive difference makers. 

Macro vs. Micro signals 

At the macro level, you should be looking for what all of the top-performing websites are doing. This information is key as it helps you set up a baseline for what your site needs to do if you hope to rank. These top-ranking signals may include: 
  • The keywords that are being targeted by your competitors 
  • The site structure used by your competition
  • Understand the nature of their local SEO
  • Mobile optimization 
  • User experience
  • The number of links on the site
At the micro-level, you should be focused on the less obvious ranking factors. These micro factors may include: 
  • How they use headings, featured snippets optimization, and more to develop their site structure.
  • The nature of their internal linking structure
  • What are the sources of their inbound links?
  • Do they run any off-site marketing strategy, and what is it like?
  • Any partnership they may have with local companies.
  • Voice search optimization. 
When fighting for your survival in a competitive market, it is important that you leave no stone unturned. When studying your competition, look for the "best practices" on both micro and macro levels used by your competition.

Tools you can use to get accurate data on your competitions to include SEMrush, Surfer SEO, and Ahrefs. You can rely on the data these tools provide to determine your SEO strategy. 

3. Create and control your online reputation

In a competitive niche, things are fond of changing and moving quickly. You can be #1 by 8 am but fall to #3 by midnight. These changes occur so rapidly because you and your competitions are competing for neck-and-neck with your SEO and digital marketing efforts. In such a tight race, you can't afford to wait for google to index and rank your website accordingly. 
To survive, you will need to take multiple steps in order to circulate your content to several channels in an effort to build your online reputation. You can do this by
  • Managing your reviews and reputation
You should keep track of your reviews on popular websites like Google My Business, Yelp, Bing Places, Yellow pages, and other leading directories. Be proactive in responding to negative reviews and put in more effort to get positive reviews. To do this, you will need to monitor reviews and engage with followers across social media platforms.
  • Multi-channel marketing 
You should stop trying to fit your SEO strategy into a bubble. Having your brand mentioned on several marketing channels goes a long way in influencing your online visibility as well as the amount of inbound traffic your site enjoys. This method of marketing provides your brand and customers more opportunities to interact.

Conclusion 

You need to go beyond the basic SEO approach to get results that are beyond basic. With the number of resources describing SEO, you still find a particular group of websites dominating the first page of SERP when you search for specific keywords. That is because they've understood that staying at the top requires far more knowledge than basic. 

Semalt is here to help your website become better by taking your SEO efforts beyond basic. We are your safe bet to beating your competition, and we have thousands of clients to prove that. Get in touch with us today, and let's begin this great journey together.