The key to ranking high in Google and other popular search engines weighs heavily on the ability of a business to produce high-quality content that encourages an increase in website traffic. Keywords are an important part of rankings, but the quality and usefulness of the overall content of a professional website is essential to the long term online success of any company. Google Quality Guidelines help dictate how a business should put together informative, engaging content for a website, but finding the right keywords to stay competitive is necessary.
Every company that wishes to maintain a strong online presence needs to complete an internet search of similar companies in order to get to know the competition. Analysing competitors who are successful is an important step in putting together content for a company website. What are successful competitors doing that your company has not yet tried? What kind of content are these competitors using to draw attention from potential customers?
Finding out how competitors use their content in order to achieve and maintain rankings allows companies to utilise this information to put together their own useful website content. However, it is important to understand that copying a competitor is not recommended. Using the successful techniques of a competitor in a unique way is a valuable tool, but outright copying of these techniques could be detrimental to the success of a business.
Looking at a competitor’s website is just the first step in analysing their techniques and evaluating the content that a competitor chooses to use. Different tools that are used to analyse an individual URL can go beyond the words on a website to determine how the competition really stacks up when it comes to online presence. For example, SEMrush determines how words used by the competition are working for ranking purposes, Open Site Explorer analyses linking of a specific URL and Mutual Mind allows a company to discover how their competitors are using social media to establish a strong online presence.
Learning more about a competitor and their use of SEO allows a company to determine what they need to work on in order to stay ahead of the competition. Weak points in a business can be pinpointed when the success of a competitor is evaluated. Companies can work on bettering their own business when they take the time to learn all that they can about the businesses that are their direct competitors.