2 Powerful SEO Strategies to Beat Your Competition

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one process that requires you to be, or at least try to be ahead of your competitors, always. To achieve this feat, you’ll need to continually improve your strategies and monitor your competitors’ SEO activity too.

Here are the 2 (probably) most powerful SEO strategies to beat your competition.

#1 Conduct Competitive Analysis (on the Macro & Micro Level)

Competitive analysis offers helpful insights on what your competitors are doing right and what they are doing wrong, and that information can strengthen your business’s strategy. In order to get a full understanding of your competition, you have to look at them both on the Macro and Micro level. 

Important Macro Metrics to Review: 

• What their local SEO strategy is if they have one
• If they have a mobile-friendly website.  
• The keywords your competitors are targeting.
• What their new content schedule is (and the quality of that content)
• How many backlinks they have.

Important Micro Factors might include:

• What their off-site marketing strategy looks like. 
• Which marketing channels they do or don’t use.
• Whether they’ve submitted local listings, optimized their Google My Business, etc.
• The quantity and quality of reviews they have.

Tools like SEMrush, Surfer SEO, and Ahrefs can help you analyze these macro and micro factors and determine a strategy that helps you tick all the boxes – especially the boxes your competitors haven’t ticked. 

#2 Create & Control Your Online Reputation

You should be taking multiple steps to circulate your content to multiple channels and actively build your online reputation in order to make sure that your business web presence stays positive and relevant. 

Reviews & Reputation Management

Keep track of your reviews on sites like Google My Business, Yelp, Bing Places, Yellow Pages, and other industry-relevant review sites. Be proactive about responding to negative reviews and actively encourage your users to leave positive ones. If you leave negative reviews alone then you lose your ability to shape your brand’s narrative, so be very careful about this. 

Multi-Channel Marketing

A large variety of signals influence your online visibility as well as the amount of traffic that’s being sent to your site, and it is best to be visible on as many platforms as possible to increase the odds of successful engagement. 

Social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and paid search marketing, and guest posting are all channels you can use regularly to

• Increase traffic to your site.
• Improve brand name recognition.
• Generate reviews.
• Influence your online presence.

These multi-channel marketing efforts will pay off, especially if you dominate a channel that your competitors don’t use. In addition, some of these strategies like guest posting are great for backlink generation. 

Stand Out in a Competitive Market

These two strategies will help you stand out in search, an essential factor to online success. Taking control of competitive analysis and online reputation will make your website the strongest it can be! 

Afonne.com has joined the Top 100 SEO Blogs, Websites & Influencers in 2021