Whether you’ve just established a new business or are trying to expand your current products and services, you’ve likely already noticed that it can be a real challenge to get your business noticed online.
Depending on the industry your business is in, you may likely be up against a sea of competitors all working towards getting their webpages ranked as high as possible on Google. To make things even more challenging, some of these businesses may have been listed online for many years, meaning they already have a large amount of listings indexed and already ranking well.
When this happens, you may be tempted to invest in paid advertising campaigns in the hopes of gaining more attention for your site. However, these tactics are often short-lived since eventually your budgets can become quickly strained.
A better solution to have in place is creating an effective search engine marketing strategy that helps you not only increase the amount of organic (free) traffic your site brings in but also builds long-lasting brand credibility, making it even easier to outrank your competitors over time.
Below, we’ll guide you through nine key approaches you can take to learn from your competition while discovering helpful ways to improve your online visibility.
1. Understand Your Competitive Landscape
Before you’re able to compete with other brands online, you need to know who exactly you’re up against. This means taking the time to thoroughly research your industry, identifying the key players that dominate the search engines for the exact keywords you’re targeting.
Identify Who Your Real Competitors Are
When you start your competitive research, there is an important distinction you’ll want to make between “business competitors” and “search competitors.”
While you may have already identified two or three primary competitors for your products or services at the early stages of your business development, this doesn’t necessarily mean these are who you’re up against when ranking your pages online.
Your search competitors could be made up of brands, blogs, or even review sites that are targeting the same keywords as your own. You can leverage some well-known SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz to help you quickly identify who these competitors are and track their performance over your own.
Analyze Their SEO Strategy
After you’ve nailed down the top list of search competitors your business should be tracking, you’ll want to take the time to learn as much as you can from their online presence.
A good place to start is evaluating the type of content they publish. Since content is one of the largest components of why sites rank for various keywords on Google, the length and structure of their content, as well as how frequently they publish, can give you some clues as to how you should format your own pages.
It’s also important to pay attention to the type of backlinks your competitors are bringing in. Backlinks are an important signal to Google of a site’s overall authority. If you find that your competitors have a large backlink profile pointing to specific high-ranking pages, there's a good chance that the amount and quality of these links play an important role in ranking well for those specific keywords or phrases.
Find Strategic Gaps You Can Exploit
An important element of evaluating your competitors' site content is to try to locate potential gaps in their SEO strategy. Maybe some of their pages have broken elements, aren’t formatted optimally, or are lacking depth in writing.
Take note of any of these situations as you come across them. Chances are, by filling these gaps within the content you create, you’ll be able to start outshining them as Google’s web crawlers look for in-depth information on specific topics.
2. Build a Unified SEO Strategy That Aligns With Your Business Goals
Your SEO efforts shouldn’t be considered an individual element of your overall marketing strategy. It should be the glue that holds all of your efforts together and helps you to make more informed marketing decisions that align with your short- and long-term business goals.
Integrate SEO with Inbound and Demand Gen
To make sure you’re getting the results you want from your SEO efforts, you’ll want to make sure all your approaches are closely integrated with any inbound and demand generation goals you have in place. This includes using it to support other SEM efforts you might have, including paid advertising campaigns on social media or Google, email outreach programs, and your social media strategies.
A common denominator behind all these initiatives is ensuring that the type of content you create supports each independent stage of your marketing funnel. Anything you create should be purposeful and designed to increase awareness about your brand without compromising topical authority and showcasing your unique expertise in the industry space you represent.
Set Clear, Trackable Objectives
Setting measuring goals for your business is an important element when trying to outrank your competitors over time. It can sometimes be tempting to try to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks when making improvements to your site. However, taking a more tactical approach by establishing, monitoring, and improving on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is often the best strategy.
When aiming to increase your online visibility, focusing on metrics like website traffic, click-through and conversion rates, and your keyword rankings is a good place to start. These metrics are easy to benchmark and can easily tell you if the changes you’re making are having a positive or negative impact on the amount of engagement your website is getting.
The important thing to remember, however, is that you’ll want to have these metrics pre-established before making any changes. This will give you a much more accurate picture of what strategies are working well and which will need to be improved.
3. Master Keyword & Search Intent Optimization
Although it’s important to know the type of keywords your competitors are performing well with, it’s also crucial to understand what people are really looking for when they enter those queries into Google. This means looking past simple keyword matching and discovering the actual intent of your site visitors.
Prioritize Intent
In the past, getting your pages ranking well on SERPs simply required a good site design and the right keyword density in each of your content pages. However, Google has significantly improved its algorithms over the years in an effort to bring more value to user experiences.
Part of these improvements has been to focus rankings on websites that show they’re speaking to a user’s search intent. This means classifying certain phrases based on whether they’re concentrating on locating informational articles, specific product purchasing pages, local businesses, or something else completely.
By understanding “why” your audience makes certain queries in Google, you can help create content to address their needs directly. When you show Google that you’re not only listening to user needs but acting on them accordingly, it can give you a significant edge over your search competitors that aren’t paying close attention.
Use Semantic SEO and Entity-Based Targeting
Google’s algorithms are now much more adept at understanding different connections between search queries and information that can support them. From a business’s perspective, learning what these connections are likely to be can be a game-changer when creating high-value content for viewers.
Semantic SEO and entity-based targeting help to showcase a much deeper scope of knowledge on specific topics and subtopics. When you achieve this, it helps you to create a much more credible foundation of information that’s worth linking to and ranking higher in search engines.
One way to apply this to your own content strategy is to create clusters of content surrounding a main idea. This allows you to build strong topical authority, showing you as a credible resource in those particular areas and enabling you to answer deeper, more meaningful questions from users.
4. Optimize and Expand Your On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is one of the most important elements of a holistic SEM strategy. Making meaningful adjustments to the look and feel of your website is what helps to keep it more engaging for site visitors, while also signaling to Google you’re deserving of more organic web traffic.
Improve Key HTML Elements
Your website’s HTML is an important element of your site that needs to be regularly evaluated and optimized over time. These optimizations often relate to how your content is structured and presented to viewers while making it easier to find and index in Google.
It’s important to make sure your title tags provide a compelling reason for viewers to click on them to learn more. They should be highly relevant to the content contained on the page while also including the main keyword or phrase you’re trying to target.
Similarly, you want to make sure the meta descriptions of each page are drafted well, as these will be an important element used to gauge the relevancy of the content in line with users’ search queries. Keep each of your pages easy to read and skim through by making use of bullet points, numbered lists, or key point summary sections.
Use Internal Linking Strategically
Internal links play an important role in your SEO strategy. They not only make it easier for website visitors to locate helpful supporting information, but are also an important tactic for spreading your link equity across multiple pages of your site.
One thing to consider when adding new internal links to your pages is that you want to make the anchor text as relevant as possible to the content you're redirecting readers toward. This helps to improve the user experience and adds more weight to your links.
You should also consider linking your highest authority pages to any assets that will be used to drive new conversions. This can help you to improve your lead generation efforts and support your business’s revenue goals.
Format Content for UX and Engagement
UX (User Experience) design elements are another critical component of building more engagement on your site. UX focuses on the visual and navigational components you use to simplify a user’s journey while making it easy for them to complete various actions on your site. This might include creating helpful content summaries, incorporating eye-catching visuals, or embedding videos throughout the site.
The more visually engaging you make your site, the less likely that your site visitors will become fatigued by reading long lines of text. Another element you should focus on is making smart decisions regarding where and how you place your CTAs.
You don’t want to come across as being overly pushy when trying to convert new leads or sales, but you don’t want CTAs to get lost either.
5. Create and Promote High-Value Content Assets
The content you create on your site is one of the most important assets on your site that actively contributes to your online visibility. In order to ensure you’re constantly outranking your search competitors, it’s important that the content you create is in-depth, high-value, accurate, and original.
Focus on Content Depth, Not Just Length
It can be tempting to think that the longer your article or blog content, the more opportunities you’ll have to rank for certain keywords. While having longer content can definitely give you more opportunities to optimize for search, how long your articles are isn’t as important as the depth of your topic coverage.
Instead of focusing on a specific word count, try focusing more on providing well-written, high-value content assets that thoroughly cover a topic or subtopic. This typically means using a wide range of sources when developing your content, including relevant case studies or white papers that help to give your content real substance and credibility.
Another thing to consider is that while one of your content pages might be centered around a primary keyword or topic, there is a good chance that your site visitors may have additional questions surrounding your talking points. This is why applying semantic keyword research can be really helpful. This allows you to track related keywords or topics that are closely associated with the main idea, giving you an opportunity to discuss those points in your content as well.
Build Topical Authority with Supporting Content
Topical authority has become really important for modern SEO campaigns. You can establish this type of authority by creating content clusters that connect multiple interrelated topics together, creating one comprehensive resource for visitors.
For example, you might want to create one main commercial page focused on a specific product or service. This then becomes your pillar page that can link out to other relevant blog posts and informational articles that help to support different ideas or talking points mentioned on the main page.
This tactic can strengthen the authority of your main pages, making it easier to rank for higher-value keywords.
6. Strengthen Your Technical SEO Foundation
The technical SEO of your website isn’t necessarily something your site visitors might notice, but it can play an important role in the rankability of your site. When you optimize various technical elements of your site, not only does it perform better, but it’s easier for Google’s crawlers to locate and understand your content.
Site Performance & Mobile Optimization
The performance and speed of your website play a big role in the type of experience your visitors have. This includes how fast the website loads from page to page and also how well it performs on mobile devices.
Make sure you’re compressing the images listed on your website, as these can quickly lead to performance loading issues. There are several plugins you can use to do this, or you can use third-party tools to reduce image sizes before publishing on your site.
You should leverage tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights & Core Web Vitals to test the performance of your site and each of your URLs. These tools can help you pinpoint specific optimization areas you may want to focus on and will ensure you’re applying best design practices moving forward.
Structured Data & Schema Markup
Structured data, also known as “schema markup,” can make it easier for search engine crawlers to classify and organize your content in SERPs. Enabling these features involves applying specific HTML code to each of your content pages that communicates these values.
By prioritizing the use of product, FAQ, article, and organization schema, you make it more likely for this information to populate as a rich snippet that’s displayed on the first page of SERPs. This helps to increase your site’s click-through rates and can help you significantly improve your site traffic volume.
7. Build a Resilient Backlink Strategy
Building backlinks for your site is essential when trying to create more credibility for your brand. The more high-authority sites willing to link back to yours, the more it signals to Google that the content you provide is helpful and authentic, which only helps to improve how those pages rank on SERPs.
Use Authority-Driven Outreach
You never want to create backlinks to your site using cheap, spammy link-building techniques. Instead, create a comprehensive outreach program to reputable blog owners or organizations and establish a guest posting relationship with them.
This allows you to provide them with helpful content or linkable assets like calculators, infographics, or free marketing tools in exchange for a link back to your site.
Monitor and Maintain Link Quality
When creating backlinks to your site, quality is always more important than quantity. Try to avoid building links on questionable sites that don’t really provide much value to their own users. Instead, focus your attention on highly relevant blogs that complement the topics on your own site and help you to create a more natural connection back to your site.
Also, when you establish backlinks from another site, it’s important to track the quality of these links over time. If the referring site changes considerably over time and no longer provides the same value it once did, be sure to use Google’s disavow tool to signal to them that these links shouldn’t be considered as part of your backlink profile.
8. Enhance UX to Improve SEO Signals
With user experience playing such an important factor in your site’s ability to rank well on Google, it’s important to track key metrics in this area to help ensure your site design is moving in the right direction.
Reduce Bounce Rate & Improve Dwell Time
As soon as someone navigates to your website, it’s important to make sure they’re able to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. This means focusing on different ways to reduce your bounce rates, such as putting quick answers to common questions above the fold so visitors don’t have to scroll down too far to find them.
You should also try to incorporate as many engaging elements on your pages as possible without slowing down your site. The more visual and interactive elements you have, the higher the likelihood of visitors staying on your site longer, improving your dwell time metrics.
Ensure Mobile and Accessibility Standards Are Met
With the majority of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, placing high importance on the accessibility and responsiveness of your site is essential. Regularly test your site’s mobile performance, ensuring it displays correctly across different screen sizes.
You should also be incorporating accessible design features such as alt text for images, keyboard navigation capabilities, and optimal color contrasts so that all types of site visitors can gain equal access to your site, regardless of whether or not they have certain disabilities.
9. Continuously Monitor, Report, and Iterate
You never want to forget that your SEO initiatives are an interactive process that will never really cross a finish line. It’s important to regularly evaluate and improve your approach depending on the ranking performance you see with each of your website pages.
Set Up a Robust SEO Dashboard
To track your SEO progress, you want to use a quality SEO solution to monitor your site's performance over time. Set up a dashboard that lets you pull data from various sources so you can have a single view of all your important site metrics.
Be sure to track critical metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic, click-through rates, and user engagement KPIs like bounce rate and session duration. You can also leverage Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for traffic/behavior, Google Search Console (GSC) for crawl errors/indexing, and platforms like Semrush or Ahrefs for competitive search analysis.
Schedule Quarterly SEO Audits
Investing in a quality SEO audit can be invaluable when helping you to achieve your long-term visibility goals. You should try to schedule quarterly audits that give you a comprehensive review of your website's technical health and content effectiveness.
Be on the lookout for unexpected ranking drops or even new keyword opportunities worth exploring. Based on your audit results, reprioritize any SEO tasks based on importance and adjust your strategy to address performance issues.
Final Thoughts: Commit to a Long-Term SEO Mindset
Getting your site to rank well on Google isn’t something that happens overnight. Depending on the level of competition you’re dealing with, it can take several months before you start to see real, tangible results from your efforts.
However, by following the important strategies discussed, you can effectively create a strong SEO foundation that will help you to consistently outrank your competitors while bringing you more organic web traffic over time.