Did you know that a crucial part of your website work should be done through assessing your competition to make SEO improvements?
Most business owners assess competition as part of creating a business plan. But for SEO, it’s different…
To shape your SEO and stand out above competition, you have to research and assess your competition’s keywords and web health. This is everything from determining the keywords they’re using, to seeing how they rank in comparison to you, to cross-checking what you can do differently based on what they’re not talking about.
It’s helpful to utilize SEMRUSH to not only polish your website’s keywords and see errors on your website, but to also compare yourself to your competition. More reporting functions are available there to allow even more to be done for SEO!
Here we’d like to focus on assessing your competition to make your own SEO improvements!
How to Assess Your Competition to Improve Your SEO
Who Are They?
If you haven’t taken the time to recognize this, then now is the time. It could be as simple as finding out who in your field/industry is in operation locally. If your business is meant to thrive online on a larger scale, then determine who has the same specialty and offerings as you.
Evaluating yourself through this step sometimes gives cause to consider what your niche is. Because if you don’t have a niche, you may have a long list of competitors. Anytime someone has a long list of competitors, they quickly realize how easily they can get lost in the crowd.
At this point, you only want to recognize and make a list of these businesses.
There’s a spot inside SEMRUSH where you can enter your competitors’ websites. Upon it analyzing them, it’ll show you how they rank in comparison to you and what keywords they’re using… and you can begin your assessment!
What Makes You Different?
This is how you begin to separate yourself from your competition. What do/can you offer that they don’t?
If there’s no clear and obvious difference, you want to evaluate the selling points of why someone should choose you instead. When you’re both clear and confident on this, you should integrate it into your copywriting – across all content.
Let’s not forget that reviews are one thing, but confidence is everything! There are businesses that thrive on copywriting alone and sell their services before their leads even see their client testimonials/reviews. Sometimes it’s as simply as telling the story and showcasing the results customers can achieve.
Don’t forgot that when it comes to a solution, people are willing to pay whatever it costs. Keep this in mind if a reshaping of your offerings and rewriting your content is a conclusion you’ve reached. As much as we want to cover the technical aspects of SEO, it can all fall flat if you overlook this consideration.
Master your Keywords & Copywriting
This is something to look out for, and SEMRUSH will be able to give you more content suggestions for. We now live in a world of storytelling and where experience & expertise is more important than the number of certificates on someone’s wall. So sharing your personal experience and achievements can cause a positive attraction. Especially when you share how that connects to why you have your business.
Focus each page around high ranking keywords (remember to not duplicate across pages!), and revolve your newly mastered copywriting around them.
It’s easy for customers to tell who has a business because they’re passionate about what they do, and this causes more cold leads to convert quicker. The key here is to decide on your keywords, and revolve your writing around them.
Ask yourself, again, what you can share with the world that will cause you to stand out. Share advice and information about your services or products that your competition isn’t sharing, but is important to what you offer. When you do this, you’ll attract customers and immediately convey your value while utilizing the applicable keywords.
Keep An Eye On Your Stats
Some may have been misled to believe that once you’ve optimized your website, the work is done. This misconception often comes from being presented with “one time” SEO plans; thus questioning why companies like ours only do monthly SEO maintenance plans. Unfortunately, it’s rarely true that one-time work on this will create significant change, and we want to tell you why…
Once you’ve chosen high ranking keywords for yourself and completed all your updates, keep an eye on SEMRUSH. Over time, trends will change. Keywords that were commonly searched for when you first researched them might not be as common months down the road. It’s as much a learning process for your business as it is a development & improvement process for your website.
So you’ll want to check how your keywords are doing and make changes accordingly. The same applies to the content idea suggestions it can provide; because these will change according to trends.
There’s also a very real possibility that your competition might have this know-how on SEO too. So if they catch wind of you surpassing them in rankings and they make changes to “uprank” you, you have to figure out how to improve. It’s easy to see these changes between yourself and competitors within SEMRUSH – which is why we recommend it even though there are other great on-page SEO tools you can utilize.
If you don’t have time to fully research and utiliz the steps we’ve shared, ceonsider one of our monthly SEO Plans – where we’ll do all of this for you!
Northnet Media is your web team, providing your business with customized web solutions including website design, SEO (search engine optimization), WordPress development, online & marketing strategy, and website & email hosting.