Know Your Competition - What Are they Doing to Beat You
If you have a website and want to get targeted visitors to the website to generate leads, you need to consider how you will get those visitors. One short-term method is to use Google Ads; another is to think about organic SEO. This is known as the long-term method for marketing your website on Google.
But with organic SEO, you need to think about what ideal phrases you want to target, but how do you do that?
You start by thinking about your competitors and what they are doing; that's a good starting point.
We at SEO Auckland Chap understand that your online competitors hold the key to understanding your niche and the keyword phrases that can be targeted, so we take a look using our software.
Your Business Needs to Be on Page 1 – Period!
When you search in Google for a service or product, Google presents their best ten organic listings for your search. Each listing has its page titles and descriptions. As a searcher, it’s your choice to read through the description and decide which website looks to be the most relevant to what you’re searching for. Do you ever decide to go to page 2? Nope, well, you may sometimes if you cannot find what you’re looking for on page 1.
98% of the traffic stays on page 1 – you need your business to be on that page!
There is good news for you; as a business owner, the ten organic spots Google displays on its home page are not on page one by random. Oh no, their algorithm, which determines the rankings, is predictable when viewed by someone with experience. If you know what Google is looking for and give it exactly what it is looking for, guess what? Your website will rank highly in the search results, provided the phrases aren't highly competitive.
The Google algorithm looks at many different factors to determine where each website should rank. There are over 200 ranking factors. It doesn’t look at how ‘flashy’ the design of the website is. It doesn’t care what colour the website theme is. It doesn’t care what images are on your website or if the website is ugly or beautifully designed.
What Google does do is make sure its search results display relevant content that is useful to the search user. This is where we come into play, we find out what Google likes by examining competitors, and we look to use that information and replicate it:
Who are Your Online Competitors?
This is a question we always ask our potential clients – who are your competitors?
However, they only consider their offline competitors, who are, more often than not, larger businesses with multiple locations throughout New Zealand. Rarely do they think about their online competitors?
Businesses need to be aware that a sizeable offline business might not have an excellent online presence. Therefore, they can be beaten by utilising an experienced search engine optimisation marketers who understand how search engines work.
What Are Your Online Competitors Doing to Conquer Google?
An experienced and knowledgeable team of SEO consultants working for a digital marketing agency will know how to go behind the scenes of a competitor’s website. They will examine the inbound links of several websites and determine which links are the most suitable to copy for your website.
That’s exactly what we do – not only research the keywords but research the links for each competitor website.
By finding this vital information, we can place your website in a position to follow suit, then eventually do better than your competitors. Overall, this will give your website far greater exposure on the internet for targeted keywords, resulting in more customers and higher revenue for your business.
When compiling the list of keywords and phrases that describe your business, we’ll conduct Google searches. These searches provide us with a list of other websites ranking for your desired terms – these are your online competitors. We create a list of several websites ranking for your chosen keywords and add in a list of phrases that you may not have heard of.
Having created a list of competitors, we will then delve further into the phrases they are looking to rank for on their website pages – on-page analysis.
We’ll be able to pick out desired keywords and possibly additional ideal keywords that haven’t been previously thought of being targeted. Some of the long-tail phrases will be easier to rank for, and without targeting them, you will be effectively leaving money on the table.
This is where we step up a level in reverse engineering and put our experience to use. We use software to examine what keyword phrases each of those clients is ranking for and their methods to obtain those rankings.
NAP This is an acronym for Name Address and Phone. Google uses this information to see where your business is listed across several directories, and they are collectively known as ‘citations’.
We will research your competitors’ NAP presence and see what they are doing and where their citations are currently displayed for the Google bots. We can then determine what is needed to beat your competition.
These are just a fraction of the valuable services a good SEO agency can provide for you. The data available from our SEO Competitive Analysis Report will permit you to take stock of where your website is at the moment. It then gives you a road map of where it can go with our SEO services.
Also, by providing you with this information, we can see what your competitors are doing to rank in front of you. You will now know what needs to be done to move onto page 1 of Google and eventually take one of the top spots. With additional SEO work, you could think about having multiple properties help on page 1 for your targeted keywords.
Get in Touch and be Found Online!
If you’re a small or medium-sized business in New Zealand and want to expand your online presence, contact us. We have the knowledge and experience to put your website in the right direction and increase your sales. We’ll be able to find out where you sit in comparison to your online competitors. And most importantly, figure out what your competitors are doing with their websites.
If you’re a more significant business and have your website marketers in-house, you may consider our alternative or additional SEO services.
We provide daily consulting advice for larger businesses for an overview of the best way forward for your business.