5 powerful SEO tips to stay ahead of your competition

SEO can easily be assumed as one of the most competitive domains available today. Even if you are a big organization with enough money to burn on marketing and online promotions, staying ahead and sustaining yourself in the current eco-system can be a tad challenging.

Fortunately, it is not tough to decipher the paradigm of SEO. SEO is dynamic, but once you start getting a hang of it, all you need is an effective strategy to stay ahead of the curve and emerge victorious. So dive in and beat your competitors at their game with the help of these tips:

Know the other side of the bush

The first step in order to reach anywhere in this race is to study your competition thoroughly. You need to know the tactics they employ and the strategies they swear by. Take a deep analytical look at their on-site SEO. Pay attention to how their overall SEO activity looks. Has your competitor made a major change in their strategy recently? Be on the lookout for that. Rather, have a dedicated person in your team to do that.

Also, keep an eye on what they are not doing. For instance, SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer will show you how your company stacks up against others. Look at where your competitors are not listed and leverage on those spots. Imagine your top 10 competitors are having more than 100 pages of quality content and 10,000 high authority backlinks. How long would you need to reach that benchmark? Perhaps you need more time to tank your business if it’s just entering the eco-system. Ranking keywords, increasing referral traffic, reducing bounce rate and creating high quality content is a part of the SEO.

Content is the King

Your content can make or break the overall existence of your online business. No matter how much you deny it, content is still the KING, and it is here to stay. Websites like Inch, Forbes, and even YourStory for that matter, get thousands of article submission requests every day, but only high-quality articles are published. The math is simple: the better the quality, the better are the chances of getting tanked on popular search engines. You need to be consistent with content quality. Make sure it is relevant to your site or business. It is highly advised to utilise other mediums, such as videos, podcasts, and infographics, to make your content look more attractive to your target audience. This will instantly boost your SEO ranking.

The idea is to churn out fresh content on a regular basis. The engines have to keep moving – if they become stagnant, your competitors will get an edge over you. In the internet-savvy world of today, when we eat and breathe social media, make your content crafty and creative enough that it has the potential to go viral. One such move and you are right on the map.

Monitor backlinks

Link Mining is an important backlink strategy whereby you see backlinks of your competitors, get in touch with the owner of these websites and put up a review or a guest post of your own. You should maintain a constant log of your company’s backlinks. You can shield yourself from any impending negative SEO attacks and ensure that all the links that lead to your website are relevant sources. Keep an eye out for your competitor’s link strategy. Tools like MajesticSEO can be used for assistance.

Keyword selection is the key

Your keyword selection and execution is the key to unlocking the success. If you have targeted a few keywords and they aren’t doing much to your business’ revenue or traffic, chances are that your current selection is totally wrong.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to rely on top-ranking keywords. If you find a combo that’s landing in the top spot, don’t assume that’ll help your business as well. You need to focus on search queries that yield the highest traffic for businesses in your category and industry.

Tools like Google Analytics help you monitor different keyword combinations and their related traffic correlations, while tools like Open Site Explorer can help you remain in the limelight.

SEO is an organic domain that changes and evolves by the day. Stay current and have the courage to try new trends as they emerge. Explore the unexplored and you will tend to grow as a company and manage to beat the competition, too. Create an SEO strategy that is ironclad with consistent commitment to your content, competitor research, on-site metrics and current news. Combine the real world results and the future trends to attain high rankings.