SEO and Competitive Analysis – Know Thy Enemy
While your competitors may not be enemies in the true sense of the word they are still competing against you and need to be beaten. This means keeping an eye on what they are up to. Now, you might be thinking to yourself “But I’m already successful and my website is ranking high. Why do I need to worry about the competition?”
SEO practices are constantly evolving and what worked well yesterday may not necessarily be as successful tomorrow. Learning what those below you are up to will help you to keep on top of the search engines and your competitors.
What you need to figure out first is what elements of your particular service or product your customers prefer – what makes them tick? A lot of the time these decisions will be price-based whilst other times they will based on how they landed on your website and what they found there.
Part of competitive analysis involves looking at the content of your competitor’s website to see how they are ranking just below you and whether you need to worry about them catching you up. You should worry – if they are using the services of an SEO company you can bet that company is doing all it can to outfox you.
The more content you have the more opportunities you have to pepper it nicely with well-chosen and high ranking keywords. Look at the keywords your competitors are using and pay special attention to their title tags and meta data. Do they have a blog? A blog is a great tool for increasing traffic and rankings. Also, are they using social media in any way? Social media can be very beneficial for business when used the right way and it’s another section of your audience you might be losing out on if your competitors are using it and you are not.
Look at the quality of content on their website too. Just because they are using keywords well doesn’t mean their content is good. Is it engaging? Is it fresh? Is it a direct copy of yours? This does happen!
This type of analysis is important if you want to stay one step ahead or get ahead of your competition. Ranking positions change all the time and it’s quite an intriguing game of cat and mouse at times. By tapping into the best SEO services, you can ensure you are always the cat.
Competitive analysis is definitely one aspect of SEO you shouldn’t ignore. It’s vital to figuring out what to do and what not to do. We use competitive analysis every day. It’s second nature to our SEO experts to check up on who is who and what they are up to. We’d be delighted to tell you more so get in touch with the Jungle team today.