There are many facets that make up effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Without implementing best SEO practices, your business website will find itself in the search engine wilderness.
One area of SEO that’s important is links. This can include internal linking within your website’s content and pages, as well as external links that point back to your website.
If you’re wondering why links are important for SEO, then you’ll discover why in this post.
Why Links Are a Vital Component of Good SEO
Some people wonder if link building and internal linking is still even relevant to SEO. The answer is that it will likely always be highly relevant. In fact, Google still places huge emphasis on backlinks, as links that point back to your website indicate to Google and the other SERPs that your content is valuable enough to link to and reference.
PageRank is a major cog in Google’s algorithm these days, and what PageRank does is count the number of quality backlinks to a website, or a content page on that website. This gives PageRank a good estimate regarding how valuable that website it and will rank it higher in search results if PageRank deems it worthy of a promotion.
What PageRank is assuming, is that a website or web page with lots of backlinks must be important, and will therefore rank it higher than other content that is similar, but with less backlinks.
One way to get backlinks is to write guest posts for other sites in a similar niche to yours. You give that site free content and in return they give you a link back to your site.
Backlinks are not the only links of importance though, when it comes to good SEO. Two other types of links are:
Linking out
Internal links
It’s always a good idea to link out to another site at least once in your content. The link has to be relevant, and the more authoritative the site you link to (for example Wikipedia), the better. This helps Google understand how relevant your content is when it comes to serving up search results for a query. It also demonstrates that you are being fair with your linking and that your content has some quality to it.
Internal links are handy for navigational purposes when users are on your site, as you can link to other relevant content you’ve written about. Internal linking is also helpful for SEO purposes, too. These links help the SERPs crawl your website more efficiently, and also gives search engines a far better understanding of how all your content links together and is relevant. Internal linking is good for your visitors as well as search engines.
In Conclusion
Inbound, outbound and internal links will always be important for good SEO, as they are a vital cog in the wheel on so many levels. If you’re not sure about linking, how to add links or how to get backlinks, you would be well served to consult with a specialist in SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is designed to achieve higher rankings for your site’s web pages when someone does a search in Google or one of the other search engines. Higher rankings mean more visibility, which in turn leads to more traffic to your business website.
But how does SEO help drive traffic? What does it actually do that increases a website’s search engine rankings and does it really work?
Let’s take a look at a few key areas where SEO can give your website and its content a boost in the rankings so you receive more organic visitors to your site.
Create Content Around Popular and Relevant Topics
Any content you post on your website should have relevance to your brand and the industry you are in. Regularly adding new blog posts is a proven method of drawing in more traffic.
The trick here is to target topics that are popular in your niche, themes or questions that people are already searching for. Once you have some ideas for popular topics, you’ll then want to target some keyword phrases that get good searches every month, but ones that also don’t have a lot of competition.
Google Trends is a handy tool to discover whether a topic is popular or not. For keyword research tools, you could use the Google Keyword Planner or one of a number of other free keyword research tools you can access online.
The more relevant and popular keyword phrases you can target in your content, the more chance you have of that content ranking high in a search and getting traffic.
Guest Posts and Backlinks
Writing guest posts for other blogs and websites is the most popular way of getting a link back to your own website. Backlinks themselves can help bring in traffic from the guest post, but most importantly, backlinks indicate to Google’s algorithms that your content is popular and of a high enough quality that people are willing to link to it.
This results in your content ranking higher in the SERPs and thus leads to more traffic to your site.
Off-Site SEO
Creating a Facebook page for your business and adding short posts regularly with links back to your site is one example of off-site SEO. Also, the more engagement your social media posts get is an indicator to the SERPs, once again, that your content is popular. Increased search engine rankings is the result.
What’s known as social signals is now an integral part of Google’s algorithms and the better the social signals are for your site, the better your website will rank.
Have Your Site Audited By A SEO Expert
The most effective way to implement SEO into your website and for it to produce effective results is to consult with a professional in the field of search engine optimisation.
They will perform a professional SEO audit of your website using the latest SEO tools. Once this is done, your consultant will then be able to determine where your SEO efforts can be improved so your website starts to receive the organic traffic it deserves.
Knowing just how important SEO is to the success of an online business, it’s interesting that most people are quite clueless about how to find and choose the right types of keywords. Yes, they know how to choose and target a few generic keywords, and they probably stalk a competitors website from time to time, but the sad news is that none of this works effectively. Why?
To start with, they’re not taking into account just how competitive their target keywords are;
They’re not considering the ROI they could be getting by targeting specific keywords; and
They’re not correctly assessing the resources they’ll need to be able to compete and win.
Imagine the results if you had full knowledge of the keywords users search for during their online journey! Every single aspect of your sales funnel would be strengthened.
Your message would be clear and more powerful;
There would be a huge increase in your click-through rate, simply because your content would match the search intentions of your potential customers; and
There would be a massive increase in your conversion rates, delivering a huge competitor edge and increased ROI.
So now you know the results you could be achieving, let’s dive in and get started. We’ll start with what’s required to match your keywords to a customer’s buying cycle.
A potential customer’s journey;
The keywords that relate to every stage of that journey;
The competitive performance of each keyword at each stage; and
How to compete by determining what these keywords are.
Explaining SEO Competitive Analysis
All site owners should be doing competitive analysis, yet many are not doing it and some are not doing it very well. Well-executed competitive analysis can become your roadmap for what needs to be done to improve your website, to be as good if not better than your competitors.
Competitive analysis is the ideal tool for identifying the weaknesses and strengths of both your site and your competitors’ sites. With this information you can quickly determine areas of your site that need improvement, as well as identifying areas where your competitors are weak – these are the areas you can capitalise on.
Why SEO Competitive Analysis Is so Important
it’s not good enough to simply guess which content to create, keywords to target, or links to build. You need to see what’s working for others, then build on their success. Therefore, “SEO competitive analysis is the researching of keywords, links, content, and so on, of your SEO competitors with a view to reverse-engineering the more profitable elements into your own SEO strategy”.
Imagine you’re the owner-operator of a small supermarket, just one of three supermarkets in town. You know your customers are happy because they tell you so, but you also know that, because they’re not able to purchase everything in your store, they also visit the other supermarkets. So what do you do? It’s obvious, isn’t it! You visit the other stores to gather competitive intelligence, to discover the popular items they’re offering to your customers. Now you can offer these products, or even superior products, in your own store, thus gaining more business for you and helping your customers make fewer trips by doing all their shopping in your store. A win-win situation for both you and your customers!
What SEO Competitive Analysis Involves
Neil Patel says that ‘your competitors can become your greatest allies if you allow them’. Imagine this: take someone else’s success, reverse engineer it and identify their weaknesses. You now have the knowledge to win more often, and win bigger. After all, that’s what competition is all about.
SEO is simply following best practices. There’s a right and wrong way of doing everything, whether it be keyword research or building internal links. However, we often see webmasters declaring that they’re using best practices and implementing every aspect of Google’s SEO guide, yet still failing to achieve top-3 results. As we can see from the results, some best practices simply don’t work, while others only exist within a certain niche. That’s why we have competition research.
What we know for certain, though, is that websites that rank higher than you are doing something more effectively than you, and we’re about to find out what that is. When you perform an SEO Competitor Analysis, you’ll discover –
What your competitors’ weaknesses are – which will allow you to capitalise on them;
What does and doesn’t work in your industry;
How to find, then replicate your competitors strengths;
What SEO tasks you need to prioritise; and
How difficult it can be to outperform competitors in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
Uncovering SEO Opportunities
SEO Competitive Analysis is a powerful research strategy designed to help you get more traffic, earn more conversions, and ultimately rank higher. This happens when you uncover SEO possibilities not previously recognised.
Now you’ll have answers to questions like these –
Who are my SEO competitors?
What keyword should I be targeting?
What topics should I be covering?
Where do I find links?
What must I do in order to beat the competition?
While there are a number of ways to carry out SEO Competitive Analysis, what’s basically required is this: you need to analyse the keywords, links, content, and so on that works for your competition, then use this information to improve your own SEO endeavours.
Comparing SEO Competition to Business Competition
The first thing you need to determine is who your SEO competitors are. Interestingly, your business rivals are not necessarily your SEO competitors, and your SEO competitors are not necessarily your business rivals. You need to understand that when we say SEO competitors, we’re only talking about those you’re competing with for a high ranking in the search engine results pages.
If your business competitor is not ranking in the SERPS you’re targeting, then as far as SEO competition is concerned, they’re not a threat to you.
User Intent and Google SERPS
If you want to win web traffic, knowing the right keywords to target is not enough; what you need is to understand ‘searcher intent’ for your specific keywords. What does this mean? It means you need to get inside the mind of the web searcher to discover what they’re really looking for. Yes, we know this doesn’t sound feasible, but luckily Google has already done most of the work for us. Start by Googling your target keyword.
How to Identify Your SEO Competitors
The two types of SEO competitors are domain competitors and topic competitors. Both of these are crucial for SEO strategy.
Domain Competitors: These websites are the ones that are targeting the same keywords that you are. They’re over all their webpages. To locate your domain competitors, start with your domain and all keywords applicable to your niche. Make a list of domains that rank for the specific keywords.
Topic Competitors: These are not entire websites; they are specific webpages that rank for your chosen topics. To locate your topic competitors, start with a specific group of keywords, then find all the ranking webpages that target them.
Once you start identifying and tracking your domain competitors you’ll notice huge ranking variations across your niche. This will be your opportunity to monitor how successful domains develop their content strategy.
At the same time, it’s vital that you know your topic competitors when creating new webpages. Before you create your page, make a list of the most-clicked, highest-ranking webpages on your topic. This is a way to discover what both search engines and users expect to see on popular pages that cover your topic.
How to Find Your Domain Competitors
In order to determine who the kingpins of your industry are, you need to learn (and then help yourself to!) the marketing strategies and SEO that keeps them on top of the pile. It won’t be necessary to search the top one-hundred.
How to Find Your Topic Competitors
To determine what works on your target SERPS right now, you need to analyse your topic competitors. It’s highly likely that the way webpages have been set up by your ranking competitors will be what search engines are looking for in a relevant page.
To check the results, get the highest positions and see how their content is structured, how they present their titles, and how they write their URLs. Many webmasters do this manually; one-by-one they Google the keywords they want to target; they study the SERP, then enter the data into a huge Excel spreadsheet.
Let’s say your topic competitors have many backlinks. We can assume, then, that it’s a very competitive vertical you’re targeting, so you’re going to need a heavy link-building campaign if your aim is to make it to the top three.
On the other hand, some results will show more backlinks than others on the SERP, which will automatically affect its ranking position. However, if you’re not trying to rank your homepage for nonbranded keywords, and the rest of the SERP is okay, you can then exclude that specific result from your competitive SEO analysis.
Once you’ve located your topic competitors, go ahead and click on any of them to find their ranking keywords.
Analysing Your Competitors’ Content
Copying Ideas for Great Content from Your Competitors: One of the best and easiest ways of finding the right direction for your website content is to look for published inspiration on your competitors pages.
Your Competitors’ Best Website Content: One way of developing ideas for your content is by using keywords, while another is to check out the top performing content on your competitors’ website.
For the purpose of this exercise, we’re trying to determine which content scored the most links for our competitors. We know that links are one of the biggest ranking factors, so we know we need to focus on topics that others are happy to link to.
Set out below is one of most effective and reliable ways of creating content in SEO –
Find your competitions’ top content;
Create new content that dramatically improves upon it in as many ways as possible;
Now start promoting your own content to a similar group of people.
Note that we said to ‘Dramatically Improve upon’ your competitors’ content, not just recreate it, because that would have little or no chance of success. Try adding more data, additional features, amazing visuals, anything at all that will make your content more useful and/or more appealing.
We’ll now look at how your competitors create their content. Once you have analysed their high-ranking content strategies, you’ll be able to –
Consider new ideas for your own content; and
Improve your rankings on your own pages.
Closing the Keyword Gaps
What are keyword gaps? These are the keywords that your competitors are already ranking highly for, however your own website is not ranking at all for these keywords, or perhaps it’s ranking low.
What Does the Term ‘Competitive Keyword Analysis ‘ Mean?
Competitive keyword analysis, also referred to as keyword gap analysis, is a process whereby valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking highly for are identified. These are keywords for which you’re not ranking highly.
Consider the following important points –
These keywords are ones that you should rank for, or words you could be ranking for better;
These are keywords that should be valuable. By this we mean related to your business, high-volume, or likely to convert; and
In order to get a more accurate analysis, we suggest you compare two or more competitors.
Obviously, both you and your competitors could theoretically rank for any number of keywords (perhaps thousands) so this can be a difficult type of analysis to do manually. So, what are we looking for? We’re aiming to find –
High-volume keywords; one’s where you’re ranking in positions 4 to 15, words that could use a boost; and
Valuable keywords that you’re currently not ranking for at all.
It could be that ‘lack of relevance’ is the reason your page is not ranking as well as it should be. By ‘relevance’ we mean certain keyword clusters that are covered by your competition, but are not being covered by you. The result is that the search engines consider you to be a less-relevant source when compared to other pages. You need to add more relevant keywords, and even entire topics, in order to –
Provide a much-needed boost to the relevance of your pages now that you’re totally covering the chosen topic; and
Increase your search traffic because, thanks to the added keywords, you’ll start moving into new SERPS.
Find New Prospects by Analysing Competitors’ Backlinks
Explaining SEO Link Gap Analysis
Link Gap Analysis works very similar to our keywords process, whereby we identify links earned by your competitors, ones that you might also be able to obtain.
When it comes to ranking, links are very important. In fact, without links it’s very difficult to rank at all. On the other hand, it’s not easy to obtain good links. So, in order to determine where good links might be, links that may be easier to obtain, we use data and intelligence. We’re going to look for sites that are already linked to your competitors, but not linked to you.
The reason this works is because the sites already linked to your competitors have already shown they have an interest in the topic. What you need to do is prove that your resource is much better than your competitors. If you can do this, it’s highly likely you’ll earn a link as well. The added bonus with this process is that you’ll discover the highly-relevant pages you need to get links from.
One of the most powerful indicators of any site’s authority to search engines is backlinks, specifically referring domains. This explains why link building is an absolute necessity for long-term ranking success. Perhaps the major component of any link-building campaign is to find new, high-quality backlink possibilities by analysing the backlinks profiles of your competitors.
How do you do this? Locate all websites that link to at least two of your domain competitors. If you see that a website has already linked back to a number of websites in your niche, then you know there’s a good chance they’ll be happy to link to you as well. In particular, look at websites that provide “dofollow” links if you’re trying to improve your rankings. Speaking of “dofollow” links, you’ll notice that some websites randomly mark all their outgoing links as “nofollow”. This is not something you should be doing. Backlinks from those will not help your ranking; however, they may bring some users to your pages.
Now that you have located websites that link to at least two of your competitors, you need to see the context for those backlinks by going to the pages that link to your competition. Let’s say they’ve linked to your competitors in connection to a listicle on your industry: now you can make contact with them and submit your own product for their review. Once you have a number of potentially good-quality backlinks you can commence your reach-out campaign.
In order to achieve higher rankings, you need to focus on the overall number of linking domains and backlinks, specifically dofollow links, and the range of C-blocks and IPs in your link profile. With these metrics increasing, you’re basically telling the search engine that your website is trusted and authoritative. Keep in mind that it takes time to build links; it takes even longer for a search engine to start weighing them into your rankings. Also note that, if your website receives a heap of low-quality backlinks in one hit, it could be assumed that you bought them which would result in a ranking penalty.
Continue Tracking Competitors’ Backlinks and Rankings
The process of keeping track of your competition is not a one-off thing. You may have obtained all the information you needed from their backlink profiles and from their content, but remember that SEO is always changing, so you still need to monitor them closely.
Continue Monitoring Your Competitors’ Rankings
Continuously monitoring your competitors rankings is important for a couple of reasons –
If any major algorithms shake up your industry, you’ll be the first to notice. Every year we see thousands of minor updates, but we also see some major algorithm updates. There are always going to be fluctuations, what with Google upgrading their calculations and different factors gaining and losing weight. You need to keep a close eye on these movements; this way you’re fully informed and can make an accurate diagnosis of your own changes in rankings.
You will have immediate knowledge of your competitions’ optimisation efforts. You’ll know it’s time to start investigating if you refresh your competition’s rankings and notice that their visibility and rankings have increased.
Let’s say you notice that one of your competitors’ pages suddenly shoots up in ranking for a certain keyword. When this occurs, it’s time to run a full-scale analysis. Start with their backlinks, and you might want to try using something like Internet Archive Way-Back Machine. Here you’ll discover billions of cached webpages, so you’ll be able to see straight away if your competition has done a major content overhaul.
Check to See Changes in Your Competitors’ Backlinks Profiles
It may be that your competitors’ rankings have dramatically improved not because of their content, but because of their backlink profiles. You’ll need to analyse both the new backlinks and the new referring domains they’ve located for their content.
In Conclusion
Competition is normal; it exists in every profession and in every industry. However, competition in SEO can be extremely beneficial, far more-so than the phrase ‘Competition spurs innovation’.
As optimisation specialists and webmasters, we can determine what actually works by using our competitors’ rise and fall in rankings. By checking out their backlink profiles and web content, we have easy access to information on what search engines really value and what they expect to see on webpages they are already ranking highly.
What is search intent and how does it affect the search engine rankings of your website?
Free traffic is the very best traffic you can get. Rather than paying big dollars on advertising to get exposure for your site, if you can rank well in Google and the other SERPs, you’ll receive a steady, increasing flow of organic traffic that doesn’t cost a cent.
Let’s take a closer look at search intent and what it means for your website rankings.
What Is Search Intent?
Also known as user intent, searcher intent and audience intent, search intent is a term used to describe the purpose behind an online search. People search online looking for specific information, or a product or service.
As a website owner, you want to know how to tap into search intent and use keywords, phrases and methods that captures search intent and impresses Google, so the SERP ranks your website higher. What Google is aiming to do is rank the most relevant sites or content the highest so it accurately matches the search intent of the user.
A search term typed into Google might be specific, but Google’s algorithm is also striving to understand the actual intent behind the search term that’s been input.
If you can understand the intent of your target audience and create content around that intent, you’ll have a far better chance of achieving first page rankings when someone does a relevant search.
The different types of search intent can basically be broken down into 4 categories:
Information – The user is searching for specific information or is looking for the solution to a problem or the answer to a question.
Navigational – In this instance, the user is looking for a specific website.
Transactional – Someone might be looking to buy an item online and is browsing around for the best deal.
Commercial Investigation – This is more about researching a product someone wishes to buy soon, but they haven’t yet made up their mind. As an example, what’s the best camera for a beginner?
Optimising Content For Search Intent
Whatever landing page you want to attract visitors to, it needs to be relevant to the search intent of the visitor. Subheadings that are questions are an effective way of drawing in traffic from people looking for an answer to a question. This why having sections for FAQ on your site is always a good idea, along with answering questions in your site’s content.
If the search intent of the user is based on finding information, you won’t want them landing on a product page that’s trying to directly sell them something. Likely this will scare the visitor off, or at the least make them feel somewhat duped.
For product pages, more commercial keyword phrases that are directed at potential buyers is the best way to attract your target audience.
In Conclusion
If you can understand the search intent of the users you want to attract to your site and create content around that intent, you’ll be able to boost your website rankings and increase the traffic to your site.
