Online marketplace is full of competition. SEO is what makes this competition more challenging and tricky. Anyone who deals with online businesses will confirm that search engine ranking can do much for your business growth.

For 61% of marketers, SEO is a key to success. The others also integrate SEO strategies to their marketing campaign. Imagine how many efforts you need to implement to outrank and bring your website to the first results of SERPs.

Optimizing your website and monitoring and analyzing your competitors are essential parts of your tactics. You can help your SEO ranking with different approaches, like:

• Making SEO and PPC work together
• Hiring a Professional Ecommerce marketing agency,
• Integrating Different Platforms and Marketing Tactics, etc..

All these will help your business, of course. Whatever you decide, you need to have working strategies, otherwise , you will get out of competition. Follow these three simple but effective ways for getting ahead of  your competitors:

1. Optimize Your Website

A well designed website is among the top factors to beat the competition. Why?

Modern customer’s demands are really high. If you do not manage to provide them with the positive UX they expect, then they will easily leave your website. There are many factors that can cause these process, including:

• Navigation: For speeding up the viewer search and making it easy for your users to understand what your website is about, you need to keep your website navigation simple to use.
• Speed: Websites with low load speed have high bounce rate, which is a potential loss of customers, sales and conversions
• Mobile Optimization: Mobile search has a tendency to dominate online market. Besides it is an important ranking factor for Google
• Irrelevant Content: Quality content is what greatly educates your customers and targets your searchers.
• Lack of Contact Information and Bad Customer Service: Being available for your customers is essential. Due to chatbots, you can answer their queries, even if you do not have 24/7 online service.

These and other details will not only take your customers to your competitors, but also will drop your website ranking.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

While new SEO trends enter our reality, keywords continue to dominate the online competition. Your customers’ journey starts with a search. If you do not manage to find out the search intent, then outranking your competitors becomes impossible.

Developing good keyword strategy is essential for reaching high results and targeting your paying customers. There are some steps, however, that you need to implement in order to succeed in your efforts:

• Find Competitor Keywords: Following your competitor’s keyword strategies is essential for developing your own. However, you need to develop their ideas instead of repeating.
• Pay Attention to Google Suggest: The options that appear when you make a search can become small hints for you.
• Find out Your Customers: If you develop a clear buyer persona, you can easily find out how they make a search and target them.
• Mix Different Keyword Types: For multiplying your SEO efforts, you need to take advantage of each keyword type that is relevant to your business.
• Analyze your Keywords: Using different tools you can evaluate your keywords’ strengths and weaknesses.

3. Develop your Content Marketing Tactics

In comparison to other strategies, content marketing is the most powerful way to win the competition in different platforms. A good content strategy has a power to engage, educate and bring the customers to a buying decision.

While quality, relevant content can bring you high ranking, increase sales and conversions, copied and plageries ideas will fully destroy your business performance. Hence, you need to create a great content for your users, keeping SEO factors and your competitors in your mind.

For beating your customers, it is better to keep in mind these small, but important steps:

• Follow your competitors’ content marketing strategies in Social Media ( you can even turn on Google Alerts or Social Media Alerts)
• Follow what type of content has the most shares, comments or discussions
• Research their link-building strategies
• Make use of content types that your competitors do not use.

Conclusion

SEO is an over-changing and evolving process. The strategies change and new trends enter the online marketplace. Google likes relevant and updated information, and through its Algorithm Updates, it can easily penalize your website if you fail in your strategies.

No less important than good strategies is auditing your website performance in order to find and fix possible errors. It will help you to understand which part of your tactics needs improvements and attention. You can get a free comprehensive checklist for making the process more effective.

With all these important steps do not forget about competitive analysis. Finding out your competitor’s strong and weak points, you can improve your SEO tactics and get high ranking.

Author

Tigran Mirzoyan is the CEO at Smarketa.com and also loves to share his experience and expertise in blogs. Since 2010, the year Smarketa was founded, Tigran has worked tirelessly to grow eCommerce businesses, and now he can share his experience with those in need of professional advice.