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The online marketplace is full of competition. SEO makes this competition more challenging and tricky. Anyone who deals with online businesses will confirm that search engine ranking can significantly affect business growth.
For 61% of marketers, SEO is a key to success. The others also integrate SEO strategies into their marketing campaign. Imagine how much effort you need to put into achieving an outrank and bringing your website to the first results of SERPs.
Optimizing your website and monitoring and analyzing your competitors are essential to your tactics. You can help your SEO ranking with different approaches, like:
- Making SEO and PPC work together.
- Hiring a Professional E-commerce 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 the competition. Follow these three simple but effective ways to get ahead of your competitors:
1. Optimize Your Website
A well-designed website is among the top factors to help you beat the competition. Why?
Modern customer’s demands are high. They will quickly leave your website if you do not provide them with the positive UX they expect. Many factors can cause these processes, including:
- Navigation: To speed up viewer searches and help users 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 rates, which is a potential loss of customers, sales, and conversions.
- Mobile Optimization: Mobile search dominates the online market and is an important ranking factor for Google.
- Irrelevant Content: Quality content greatly educates your customers and targets your searchers.
- Lack of Contact Information and Bad Customer Service: Being available for your customers is essential. Chatbots allow you to answer their queries even if you do not have a 24/7 online service.
These and other details will lead your customers to competitors and lower your website’s ranking.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
While new SEO trends enter our reality, keywords dominate 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.
A good keyword strategy is essential for reaching high results and targeting your paying customers. There are some steps, however, that you need to implement 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 them.
- Pay Attention to Google Suggest: The options that appear when you search can become slight 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: To multiply your SEO efforts, use each keyword type relevant to your business.
- Analyze your Keywords: Using different tools, you can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your keywords.
3. Develop your Content Marketing Tactics
Content marketing is the most powerful way to win the competition on different platforms compared to other strategies. A good content strategy can engage, educate, and lead customers to a buying decision.
While quality, relevant content can bring you a high ranking and increase sales and conversions, copied and plagiarized ideas will destroy your business performance. Hence, you must create great content for your users, keeping SEO factors and your competitors in mind.
To beat your customers, it is better to keep in mind these small but essential 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 ever-changing process. Strategies change, and new trends enter the online marketplace. Google likes relevant and updated information, and its Algorithm Updates can quickly penalize your website if you fail in your strategies.
Auditing your website performance to find and fix possible errors is no less important than good strategies. It will help you understand which part of your tactics needs improvements and attention. You can get a free comprehensive checklist to make the process more effective.
With all these essential steps, do not forget about competitive analysis. You can improve your SEO tactics and achieve high rankings by identifying your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Author
Tigran Mirzoyan is the CEO at Smarketa.com and 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 needing professional advice.