We talk a lot about rankings in search engines. Keywords are a pivotal aspect of your search engine rankings. Outranking other businesses in search engines is likely to help earn you more customers. So, how can you outrank your competitors? Use keywords to your advantage! Here are a few tips from Rank Fuse.
Determine Your Competitors
Creating a list of competitors is the first step to outranking them. If you don’t know who you are competing with, it is going to be hard to beat them.
Here are the three different types of competition that you need to be aware of:
- Direct: Direct competitors sell the same product or service that you do. These are often the most obvious competitors.
- Indirect: These competitors sell other products or services but have a product line or supporting goods that compete with what you sell. Think of coffee. McDonald’s sells coffee, but that isn’t their main product. Starbucks probably considers McDonald’s a competitor.
- Perceived: Perceived competitors offer a different product or service that can be an alternative to your product or service. For example, a toy manufacturer might decide that a mobile gaming company is competition.
Once you have defined your competitors, you can start to research how they are ranking and utilizing keywords. This can help you with keyword and competitive research.
Do Keyword and Competitive Research
At Rank Fuse, we believe that keyword research is the key to a successful SEO strategy. We use keywords to help our clients improve their rankings. In fact, some of our clients see dramatic increases in their rankings due to the keyword research that we conduct at the beginning of our contract.
Keyword research and competitor analysis can both be extremely beneficial for those looking to jump in SERP rankings. Competitor analysis can show you what keywords your competitors are targeting, which allows you to focus on those terms as well. Using the correct tools, you can find a lot of information about your competitors, including the keywords that bring in the most traffic for your competitors.
While you may be tempted to target the keywords that have the highest search volume, but you are going to have a hard time outranking your competition with that strategy. Instead, look for places where you can jump from one page to the next. If you are ranking number 12 for a keyword, focus on getting on page one.
When you conduct keyword research for your own website, you can also see where you can improve on the keywords that your competitors are using. A combination of these two types of research can be incredibly beneficial for your SEO strategy.
Focus on Traffic Sources
Another key focus to increase rankings is to determine what traffic sources you need to make your top priority. Take a look at your Google Analytics. You should be able to see where your traffic comes from. Not all traffic is going to come from search engines. Once you see where the majority of your traffic comes from, you can see where you need to focus on and where you have room to improve.
Search traffic comes from search engines, but direct, social, referral, and other types of traffic are also important. If you aren’t getting any referral or social traffic, you can create an SEO strategy that will help you boost those traffic sources.
Work on Content
Content can either help or hurt your SEO strategy. Target the wrong keywords in your content, and you are likely to see no improvement in your ranking. Bad content can also hurt your website. Create unique, relevant content for your website and update any poor content that exists on your site.
Incorporate the keywords you found during your keyword research into your content and meta information on your website. Write quality blog posts that delve into topics that are relevant to your business and utilize important keywords.
Remember to include images and format your website so that everything is easy to read. Google evaluates all kinds of factors when it comes to rankings, so be thorough.
For help with all things SEO, contact Rank Fuse today at 913-703-7265.
