There’s a reason why many successful enterprises look to their competition. After all, they can learn new things that they wouldn’t have on their own, which can elevate their business to new heights. When it comes to local search engine optimization (SEO), a crawl of your online domain can reveal helpful information. However, when paired with competitive analysis, you’ll get a much better handle on your website’s health and have a clearer roadmap of the best digital marketing services or strategies to take. It’s also why hiring a Seattle SEO agency is a good idea for entrepreneurial ventures based in the area.
With that said, we’ll discuss how you can take the competitive landscape in its entirety into view so that you can see how your brand measures up in comparison in this article. As a result, you’ll have a clear idea of areas of your business that may have opportunities for improvement and address them accordingly.
Determine who your competitors are
Before you begin to perform a competitive analysis via SEO, you must first determine who your rivals are. You’ll need to consider your direct competitors and the indirect ones to gain a more holistic perspective of the situation. In other words, the businesses you’ll need to look into are industry competitors and those that rank high on the SERPs or search engine results pages for your targeted keywords. Next, you may ask yourself why you need to factor them in. The answer is simple – to understand users’ options and why they show up for similar queries.
There are many reasons for this. They could be new players that are rising the ranks in the industry. There’s also a possibility that the search tags may have different meanings. Whatever the case might be, their identification will enable you to prepare for the following step, which is researching keywords.
Conduct keyword research
There are keywords that every brand or business must target to elevate their inbound Web traffic in any industry. If your top-ranking rivals are making use of search tags, make sure that you do the same. If you haven’t incorporated them yet into your content strategy, start doing it as soon as possible. As you get into keyword research on your competitors, there’s a good chance that you’ll discover phrases and terms that present opportunities for your business. For example, long-tail keywords specific to location, brand, offerings, or area of expertise have a better chance of capturing user queries than short-tail keywords. And you’ll want to take advantage of it and make good use of them.
Collect competitive data
While the right keywords can make all the difference in an SEO strategy, many other insights result from competitive analysis. For example, by using specific tools, you can check the SEO health of your rival’s website. In doing so, you may find certain elements that you can incorporate into your own, whether it’s the speed of the site, backlinks, domain authority, and many others. And all of these can be used to refine your SEO strategy by studying it carefully or getting SEO services.
With all of the factors that Google’s algorithm considers when ranking in search results, you’ll want to address all the technical and on-page SEO concerns of your online domain. Since it isn’t an easy task, hiring search engine optimization experts from Seattle makes sense if you’re within that vicinity. In this way, you’ll be able to achieve better results than you would have on your own.
Final thoughts
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. In business, the more information you have, the better your chances of success. You can learn many things from your competition through local SEO, from effective practices you can adopt to weaknesses to shy away from. For this reason, you must always make it a part of your marketing strategy.
