Understanding Your Competitive Position in SEO
Launching an SEO strategy is much like launching a new business. In order to succeed it’s important to research your competition and get a sense of where the best opportunities are.
The obvious first step is to search on all the most desirable terms you want to target through your SEO efforts. Have a look at the sites that come up high in the rankings:
- Do they have a lot of relevant content?
- Do they update their content (blogs, articles) on a regular basis?
- Do they have a high PageRank?
- Do they have a lot of relevant inbound links?
- Is their site structured and their content organized in a manner that is friendly to search?
(note: we’ll discuss how to determine the above points in another post)
Once you’ve determined the answers to the above, you’ll be able to see trends and areas of opportunity. In most cases, you need to try to be “as good” in most of the areas noted and then excel at one or two areas in order to get decent rankings.
The exact areas you pick to excel at depends, of course, on where the best opportunities exist. For instance, if the sites you’re competing with have a lot of content but are poorly structured for SEO, put your biggest focus on structure (rather then trying to win on volume).
So, what to do when ALL areas are competitive? This is an interesting question that comes up regularly in industries like software and financial services. In these cases, the answer is to get more granular:
- Pick a limited number of search terms and focus on them one at a time. A LOT of strategic content around a single search term is going to yield exponentially better search results than a little bit of content on a lot of different topics. In this case, get some traction with your first chosen term(s) before moving on to focusing on the next ones. This strategy is particularly effective when executed through blogs and article archives (just make sure they are structured properly).
- Move to niche, local and/or “long-tail” terms. Typically, the more specific you can get, the less competition you’ll find. Also, focusing on a local or regional market (i.e. targeting searchers on “Seattle Web Design” rather then “Web Design”) will diminish your direct competition by a huge amount. “Long tail” is something you can build effectively over time as well - it refers to the large number of search terms that get fewer individual searches each, but cumulatively add up to a vast number of overall searches.
As I write this post I’m realizing that I could spend my entire morning and still not cover all the details I’d like to. With that scary thought in mind, I’m outta here!
Questions? Suggestions for a follow-up post? Just email me at robertecooper(at)gmail.com
Tags: Competitive Strategy, SEO