Navigating the world of digital marketing and SEO can be a complex and overwhelming experience, with search engines consistently changing and adapting to provide a better user experience. It can sometimes feel like your competitors are miles ahead in terms of their exposure on Google, but they may just be more clued-up on the best SEO practices. This article aims to provide you with guidance on the most effective strategies so you can begin the journey to outshining your competitors.
Staying Updated with Search Engine Algorithm Changes
When attempting to understand if your site aligns with the latest search algorithm updates, it is crucial to maintain regular close monitoring of its analytics and performance metrics to quickly identify any changes in the rankings. Following digital marketing and SEO blogs on social media platforms can help you to stay on top of the latest trends and search engine algorithm changes, whilst also gaining insights and a range of expert opinions on how best to comply with them.
SEO is an ongoing learning process, so investing time into consistent education to keep ahead of the evolving SEO landscape is the best practice to ensure you can reflect this knowledge into your site. Keeping up with official search engine announcements is a great way to prepare yourself for upcoming changes; search engines, such as Google, will often release pre-announcements.
An Effective Keyword Strategy
An in-depth, comprehensive keyword research is critical to your site’s SEO success. In fact, it should be the first step in your SEO strategy – providing the foundation to the rest of your SEO tasks. This process involves identifying relevant, unbranded keywords that a substantial volume of users are searching for. Your site may resonate with some high-performing keywords and phrases, capable of drawing in a high volume of users on a monthly basis. Further to this, if these keywords foster a low rate of competition with other sites, you have a stronger chance of ranking on the SERP.
Regular keyword monitoring can also help to monitor competitor performance and provide insights on what keywords are working for their rankings. Keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush are great methods to uncover relevant keywords, and keywords that your competitors are ranking for but are missing on your site.
Create Valuable Content
Another great way to stay ahead of your competition is writing valuable, helpful content for your site, or optimising existing content. Not only does creating content provide your site with more keyword ranking opportunities, writing original, useful content will align with Google’s most recent ‘Helpful Content’ update, pushing content to its users that it believes holds more value.
Comprehensive, informative content will not only attract more users, but will also be more likely to hold their attention and prevent them from requiring to look elsewhere for the answers they need.
It is important to structure your content logically and clearly, ensuring to include:
- Clear headings, H1/H2/H3 tags
- An introductory paragraph
- The main body of the content
- A conclusion/call to action
Evaluating Competitor SEO Methods
As previously mentioned, it is important to identify your own competitors and recognise how their SEO strategies are working for them. Begin by running searches on keywords related to your site on the search engine, and see what other companies are ranking on the first page.
Analysing your competitor’s SEO performance is key in determining where your own site may be lacking in performance. Whilst ensuring your site is providing a unique take, it is worth considering adopting SEO strategies that are working for direct competitors.
Here at Verto, our team of SEO experts are well-versed in an effective SEO strategy. Our goal is to optimise your online presence, and help stand you in the best stead to climb the rankings.
Please get in touch today to discuss how our team can help you achieve your SEO goals.
