How Does A Company Use SEO To Turn The Table Against Its Competitor?

If you’re in any business, then you’re also in it for the competition. And in any competition, it is always a war, so prepare yourself to display your A game. To do so, you must know your competition.

As a business owner, you want to know what practices work best among your competitors and how you could use them to your advantage. Similarly, you want to know the factors that make other companies' digital marketing campaigns successful. Turning the table against your competition means conducting a thorough and effective SEO competitor analysis. See the steps below on how to do it correctly.

1. Conduct A SWOT Analysis

Maintaining a hold against your competition means knowing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Strengths refer to the internal and positive attributes of your campaign, for example, web designs, functions, and interfaces. Of course, weaknesses are the opposite.

Opportunities are external factors like upcoming events, holidays, and factors that are advantageous to your digital marketing campaign.

Lastly, threats are external disadvantages that could affect the performance of your site. This may include trolls attacking your site.

2. Identify Top Competitors  

Next on the list is to identify your fiercest rivals or websites competing in the same niche, targeting the same audience, and with similar branding. 

Typing a specific keyword on search engines and looking at the first page is the simplest way of doing it. 

There’s no way you could pull the same trick, however, when you’re dealing with thousands and millions of keywords. Using keyword search tools can also help you do this more effectively and efficiently than manually searching for it.

3. Conduct A Keyword Analysis

Going into more details, keyword gap analysis comes next. This involves determining which keywords your competitor ranked higher with.

Comparing a couple or even three other competitors provides you with a better understanding and business insights. Again, the simpler way of doing it is by looking at the top three websites in the SERPs though when dealing with a high volume of keywords, it is smarter to use tools.

Moreover, this strategy aims at enriching your content planning. When you know what keywords your opponents have been using, the goal is to use them as well. Especially, in web content pages where you have not used a single high-ranking keyword.

4. Conduct A Content Review of Your Competitor

Keywords may be important but they aren’t the real deal yet. People only type keywords for searching but they leave the page right away if they aren’t satisfied with your content. After all, the reason why they search is for answers and solutions. 

So, in your analysis, it is advisable to review your rival’s blogs, images, and including their videos. You have to figure out things on those pages that attract people to visit them. It could be stories, data, trivial things, and so on. 

In doing so, the end-game is to recreate a similar but improved version of such content. This means having a similar topic with a better writing style, more recent data, more valuable information, and more appealing graphic designs or videos. 

Fortunately, there are also free online tools that explore links and content for you to analyze. Thus, you don’t have to worry about doing it manually.  
If you’re in an industry not related to technology and are unfamiliar with SEO practices, for example, Law, you may consult a specialist with experience in Law Firm SEO to learn what’s required and execute the best strategies for your company website.