9 Ways to Improve Your Ranking by Replicating Competitors

March 11, 2020

All website owners can work on boosting their online presence by consistently providing fresh content, but the truth is, only a few manage to outsmart the tight competition. check our competitors regularly.

Whether we like it or not, some sites perform better than ours when it comes to SEO performance. The trickier thing is, even if we do try to implement advanced strategies and use advanced tools to make our campaign extra useful, there is no hundred per cent guarantee that you’ll get the result you hope for.

Online marketing is ultimately a continuous process with no particular formula over time. Strategies need to change to adapt to the trend in the market. But there are certainly ways that will help you increase the chances of performing better in search engines. One of the proven-effective ones is to study your competitors’ strategies.

Why study your competition?

It goes without sayingthat the very reason you invest in SEO strategies is to make sure your contentis found on the first page of people’s online search. This means that there arepotential industries or content providers who are giving out similarinformation as you do. To promote your content, it’s important that you winagainst these competitors.

But how will you win ifyou don’t know what approach they are making?

You study them.

It’s a widely-knownpractice in the marketing industry. Aside from creating a stable market profileto serve as guidelines for your promotional strategies, it’s also crucial thatyou have good knowledge of your competitors. It’s by doing so that you get todevise strategies on how to appear better to your audience.

It’s by studying yourcompetitors that you also get to see which of their strategies is worthy ofemulation or enhancement. By replicating their best approaches and adding yourunique touch to it, you increase your website’s chance of becoming the ‘morepreferred’ option by your target market.

Below are some simpleways to replicate your competitors’ best strategies and eventually improve yoursite ranking.

Subscribe to Google Alerts

This one is completelyfree and is highly customizable regarding its alert frequency. Just input thebrand name of your competitors, the standard relevant keywords and even somewords that are related to the product or service that you provide. Alerts willbe directly sent to your email which you can organize as daily or weekly.

This is an efficient,free method to stay updated with the most recent developments in your industryas well as the activities of your competitors that are making the headlines.

Study their social media activity and engagement

Using social media formarketing is now mainstream. All successful companies do it. Even startup andsmall business companies do it. So there is no reason why you should ditch offthis free opportunity to socialize with your market and freely study the socialactivity of your competitors.

You can easily create accounts on any SMS and start checking the quality and level of engagement other companies have to their viewers. Are the people responding well to their campaigns? What promotional strategies are they implementing? How often do they post-sales and discounts for their goods?

Analyzing their social media performance gives you at least an idea of what works and not. Moreover, it helps you understand the typical behaviour or reaction exercised by the market when presented by a particular strategy.

Facebook and Twitter,for instance, have their efficient analytics that helps you assess your ownpost’s performance through impressions and interactions. Don’t just ignorethem. Use them to your advantage.

Subscribe to their newsletters

Acting like a‘customer’ to your competitor is also a good way to study their ability topersonalize their special promotions to fit your preference.

Newsletters usuallycontain valuable information about the upcoming special promo, best-featureddeals and even just a short message informing customers of a major corporateevent and how clients could benefit from it.

By studying theirnewsletters, you get to assess whether or not there is a need to revamp yourstyle and incorporate the style of your competitor.

Take time to visit their website

While you are busylooking into their social activity and skimming through their email marketing,don’t forget to visit their actual website too. It’s the forefront of theirbrand. While social media and email do an efficient job at spreading the word,it’s ultimately the quality of information found on their website that can makeor break a deal.

Google page ranking ismore than just about analyzing text. Search engines have different metrics thatalso examines the images, videos, text layout and the speed in loading the sitepages. Even the ease of navigation is part of it.

When you visit awebsite, you should be able to tell whether or not it’s easy to navigate. Itwill likely teach you as well the most strategic way to design a landing pagethat would surely attract the attention of your market.

Find out what your competitors are offering for ‘free.’

Not all of your competition may be giving out something free of charge, but it doesn’t hurt to have a look. Customers always want things for free. Who doesn’t? And it’s considered as good business etiquette to once in a while give something back to your clients as a display of gratitude. You can learn a thing or two from the ‘Free’ offer strategy implemented by your competitor.

Take a look at their media exposure

One thing that boosts people’s awareness about a company and its website is media publicity. You can choose to pay for an ad on television or print and hope to reach more people. But the best publicity is those unpaid reviews and mentions you get from people working in the media industry.

When studying your competitors, try looking into the media mentions they have. We’re they featured on a local television show? How about a magazine or newspaper? This will also give you an overview of how you can grab the attention of those media personalities to hopefully cover or feature a product or service on your arsenal.

Consider looking into their Guest posting activity

Guest posting orwriting quality articles for other people’s blog has proven to work wonderswhen done right at a good timing. Aside from the potential of attractingexternal links to your site, this technique also raises your brand awarenesseven to people who may be considered as your secondary market.

Skilled onlinemarketers invest in guest posting because this can be an essential method toboost one’s credibility in a specialization.

Verify as well if thecompetitor’s’ site is accepting guest posts from other content providers. Thisis one way to attract the attention of other entrepreneurs and bloggers who mayend up featuring your site especially if they find it rich in information thatcould also help them promote the content of their blog.

Have a look at the events they organize

Any corporate events isa good chance to build your professional network. Take time to see the calendarof activities your competitors have. If they don’t make this available on theirwebsite or social media pages, then looking at their upcoming eventannouncements could help.

Events are good ways to attract the attention of the market too. It’s even better if they open it to the public where prospective customers will have better means of engaging with the company. Study how well is the response to this kind of activity and see if you can hold an event that would attract your market too.

Get a list of their partner market influencers

Again, not all companies have prominent official endorsers that they can consider as their partners. But in case your competitor does, they might as well get the names and study their level of efficiency in promoting your competition’s products.

Market influencers havetheir fan base and getting them to promote your goods have a bigger chance ofattracting the people who closely follow them.

A good example would be sports brands partnering with world-renowned athletes when doing an ad. Fans of the athlete will most likely pay attention to a sports apparel brand that their idol uses.

Getting good results on your page ranking requires a certain degree of planning. It’s not something that comes automatically after you consistently provide blog articles and cool infographics on your website. It’s ultimately a science and an art.

For creative industries such as web design in India, the need to stay on top of the competition and trends is vital to continue business operations. After all, skilled web design professionals are now appearing from anywhere. Unless one shows a clear edge above the rest, you can’t guarantee the support of your principal audience.

Get a list of yourdirect competitors and spend time studying their marketing strategy. Whatthings are they doing that you have not yet tried? Which of these are showinggood results? How can you enhance these strategies to fit your own?

Start paying closer attention to your competitors as you create a better approach!