SEO: Competitor Research | The Digital Clicks Blog
SEO is a crucial component of online marketing, but an SEO strategy that fails to take into account the tactics of more successful market competition is an ineffective one. Competitor research is a convenient means of discovering the path that your newly established company should be taking. Companies that have been in the game for a while may have already learnt to overcome the majority, but this doesn’t mean that they will always be on top. Even if they dominate specific sectors of industry, there are bound to be areas that are underoptimised, and whether your company can target them head-on in their dominant niche or not, these lesser fields are the areas that SEOs should try and capitalise on. After you've done some keyword research and you’ve decided which terms you think will bring around the largest return on investment, it is a good idea to check which companies are ranking highest for those terms. There are a variety of tools online, both free and paid, that enable the monitoring of competitors’ use of content-based and meta-keywords and the amounts of traffic that they generate. How prominent are the main terms? Are there any popular implemented keywords that are underutilised? Competitive keyword research might be an arduous process, but once exploitable niches are found, you can take advantage and work your way up the rankings. Besides an effective use of keywords, the other primary way that competitors may have acquired and maintained their high rankings is through strong link building. Your website should already be acquiring its own set of incoming links, but these can be built upon by discovering the types and number of links that your competitors have achieved. Many of these might be obtainable and will prove to be ‘equalisers’ as you continue to build on your existing links before eventually gaining the edge in your chosen niche.