Analyzing Your Online Competitors in 3 Easy Steps
With the ongoing advances of the digital world, more businesses are seeking a greater online presence. It’s getting harder for a new businesses to establish themselves in the SERPs as a result.
Thankfully, there are three ways to improve the ranking of a website and they all involve building an effective digital marketing strategy.
Let’s learn how to do this.
1) Backlinks
When ranking in the SERPs is your goal, backlinks play a vital role. They not only help you reach more visitors, but they also increase the authority of your site through referencing a website with good URL and domain authority.
Therefore, when you start analyzing your competitors, find out the sites where they are getting their backlinks from. You may not match the number of backlinks that they have, but you can try getting recommended by high authority domains instead.
Tools like AHREFS, SEMRUSH can give you a lot of information about the backlinks of your competitor’s site.
2) Keyword Connection
There was a time when marketers had to use word-for-word, the exact keyword on pages, body and even in the domain name. Not doing so would hurt the site’s connection to the keyword. But, now things have changed. Google has become smarter and it can identify related terms, including any synonyms. However, even with the changes, you aren’t finished by just purchasing a domain with a relevant keyword. The entire site needs to have some relation to the keyword(s) that you are targeting.
Google also suggests using related search terms that you might be looking for while you search a keyword. Let’s say, you are searching online for the keyword, “digital marketing”. Searches like, “digital marketing course”, “digital marketing salary”, digital marketing strategy” will also appear. You need to choose the terms that best suit your business.
Do a thorough competitor analysis and look for the synonyms and related search terms that you can add to your site for better search engine visibility.
3) User Friendliness
User friendliness is another important factor to get your site ranked well. In this area, your competitor’s websites can also help you.
Surf various websites to get ideas on web designs and content strategy. Learn what users feel about those websites, analyze the social media pages and profiles. Find out about their bounce rates if you can. Keep a close eye on websites that get a lot of likes, shares and comments and keep them in mind while designing your own website.
Competitor analysis can prove to be time-consuming, sometimes a boring task. But, this is where the foundation of your online marketing lies. Doing this will give you insight as to why and how the digital marketing efforts of your competitors’ is successful. It will also reveal which methods to avoid as they could be harmful to your business. Research your competitors and build a solid digital marketing strategy with which to grow.