There are millions of websites in the World Wide Web and the numbers are increasing each day. If you search for any keyword, you will see at least one hundred websites offering that particular product or service. You can either feel hopeless, as the competitors are driving the traffic away from you and pushing your site downward on search engine result pages; or, you can take advantage of your competitors to improve your SEO strategy and surprise them by always staying one step ahead of them. Today, I will share with you four clever ways to take advantage of your competitors for SEO success.
Get content ideas for free: These days almost every business website has a blog section to share informative posts, build brand image and acquire links for search engine optimization purpose. However, getting new ideas for your blog posts can be a little difficult after sometime as you feel pressurized and exhausted. It is impossible to think about new blog topics every day. Hence, you can check the blogs of your competitors and find unique, fresh concepts from their articles. However, don’t just rewrite the blog posts uploaded by your contenders. You should take inspiration from them and discover the topics you can target. Also, find out if they missed some points in their articles. You can highlight those points in your article and bring organic traffic to your site.
Differentiate your brand: Did you ever think why some people wear Titan watches and some prefer Tissot? Basically, both are watch brands and their watches display nothing more than date and time! It is all about the brand image and it takes time to build your own brand image. A normal watch buyer may search for “buy wristwatch”, but a sophisticated customer will type “brand name + watch”. In order to build your brand value, you must differentiate your company from the competitors and prove to the customers that though you sell same type of product, they should choose yours. How can you do that? Follow the SEO and SMM techniques of your competitors. How they are projecting their business in blog? What type of message they are sharing via social media sites? Once you know what others are doing, you can create an SEO as well as SMM strategy that will reflect your uniqueness to the potential customers.
Acquire followers: As you already know, Facebook share, Twitter retweets, Google +1 and all other social media signals play a great role in SERP ranking process. So, the bigger social media audience you have, the better chance you get to dominate the SERP. You may already have a strong follower/fan base, but same can be said about your competitors. Since you and your competitors are in the same niche, their fans should be interested in your business. Reach out to them with some content of your own and many of them will start following your social media page. This way you can build a bigger fan base, influence people to like/share/tweet about you and manipulate Google’s search algorithms.
Build strong relationship with the competitors: Your competitors are not your enemies if you know how to use them properly. You can offer them guest posting opportunities in your blog and in exchange ask them to let you post a few articles on their blogs. This way you can build a great backlink profile as your competitors are highly reputed and Google trusts them. The guest post sharing agreement can be beneficial for both of you as both parties can build a clean backlink profile that will help maintain SERP ranking.
Competition is good for any business and the web world simply makes the playground a lot bigger. As long as you are doing your own SEO research and staying ahead of your competitors by applying timely and intelligent strategies, you can earn millions of dollars online.
