How Competitor Analysis Can Help You Boost Your Search Visibility

If you are running a startup company (and have a decent common knowledge), chances are you have heard about the story about David and Goliath and are familiar with its use in modern contexts – denoting an underdog situation, a contest where a smaller, weaker opponent faces and beats a much bigger, stronger adversary. This is exactly what can happen to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), if you are willing to explore a bit, change your SEO tactics and start using competitive analysis.

Using competitor analysis to better understand the success of your competition can be vital when it comes to boosting your SEO. Grasping the tactics and marketing methods of bigger companies can significantly help you make the right moves and will certainly nudge you in the right direction toward higher search visibility, thus putting a bigger chunk of the online market on your plate. Sounds yummy, doesn’t it?

Tangible Benefits of Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis provides you with valuable information you can use to your advantage. Everything you glean can be helpful in your quest to re-strategize your SEO plan and get the upper hand by knocking out your competition, no matter how small a company you are running. Let’s take a closer look at 3 main advantages that make competitive analysis so beneficial to your search visibility. These insights can provide you with all kinds of advantageous data you will subsequently use in your new and improved strategy.

Improved Structure – you will see the way your competitors have set-out their websites, which can be pretty useful when regarding your insight in what kind of design is appreciated by your target audience. Also, you will see how searchers treat the companies according to the way their sites are organized.

Incoming Links Placement – also known as backlinks or inlinks, incoming links are quite important for SEO boost. You will be able to see if your competitors have incoming links in certain places you failed to cover.

Engaging Content – you will get the chance to take a sneak peek at the type of content your competitors use to engage with their audiences. Once you see what kind of content “brings all boys to the yard”, you will be able to provide your audience with similarly engaging posts.

The best place to start is with the web pages with the content closely related to yours. Make sure you choose the ones that have high traffic with a similar amount of content you have, as they must be doing something good. Once you find those, do the following:

• Search by targeting your keyword and find the pages that rank best for different terms
• Take sites that are ranked high and examine the way they use title tags, meta descriptions, domain names, etc.
• Make sure you don’t use only one search engine (Bing and Yahoo are also useful)
• Finally, examine and compare the way your competitors are using their social media pages. Glean all the useful info on how they are integrating their content into these platforms and what are they doing to engage with their customer base.