Competitor intelligence is a critical part of SEO. The process enables your business to understand how your competitors are working to try and outperform your website. Firms that select a proactive approach towards competitor intelligence can remain a few steps ahead of how competitors are performing. Future-ready technology plays a key part of how a business can look to leverage data insights to out-rank competition.
Website Audit
With a clear and detailed outline of how your website is performing, SEO technology can offer some of the following fundamental best practices:
Technical Errors
Meta Tags and Headers
Website Loading Speed
Image Analysis
Internal Links
Website audits also offer the additional benefit of education to a wider business. It is important for other departments within a firm to appreciate the value of SEO and how this impacts your digital performance. Implementing a digital culture is key in an ever-developing global landscape which adopts new online practices all the time.
“Website audits are a great indicator for businesses looking to understand their website’s true performance and potential. It is vitally important that in modern day digital marketing and website design that infrastructure, design and experience is all considered. With proposed updates to search engine algorithms focusing more on design led considerations, this could have a great impact on your SEO performance moving forward.”
Ben Michaelis, Founder – ThinkEngine
With constant refinement of your digital presence, a proactive business can also utilise the fully automated reporting tools and metrics. Such information enables marketing and sales teams to constantly remain ahead of competition and explore opportunities for improvement.
Competitor Research
Powerful SEO technology can be a game-changer for growing firms who are looking to take the edge of their competition. In fact, it’s fair to say that firms who use this technology have a competitive edge of those firms who do not – we live in a world where we have the information available to us, you just need to invest in the technology to take things up a level.
Understanding which keywords your competitors are investing in is always an interesting piece of research and a worthwhile exercise – but why? It tells us which SEO keywords, strategies and digital approaches the competitor is looking to invest in – or is currently investing in. Equally, this provides tangible evidence on where opportunities may arise for your business with some strategic and creative thinking.
Using forward-thinking SEO software will deliver key findings which you might not uncover without it, these might include:
Keyword rankings, new and lost keyword statistics
Search volume and keyword difficulty
CPC and number of advertisers
Traffic estimate and cost per target keyword
Search results overview by country
An equally important consideration is to try and compare a few competitors if possible (if you have more than one). This often provides a greater level of detail and data, and can expose strategies selected by different industry firms – which you can adopt or navigate around.
“It is always a challenging conversation when you are approached by globally respected firms who believe they have a very strong SEO presence, when actually they might not. The data in the SEO reports and Website Audits doesn’t lie and highlights a truer reflection on performance. These reports provide us with greater intelligence including how search engine algorithms may or may not be building relevancy with your website. The most reassuring thing for our client or prospective client, is that we can support them to build firm foundations for a scalable website SEO journey.”
Ben Michaelis, Founder – ThinkEngine
In addition to all the SEO insights, advanced SEO tools like SE Ranking’s Competitive Research can provide you with extra details on your competitors’ standings in paid search—the keywords they target, CPC data, ad rank and ads history. This data is a great indicator to understand if a particular keyword should or shouldn’t be used for SEO or PPC purposes, or even both.
Backlink Considerations
Every SEO strategy should consider how ‘off page’ practices can impact your website’s relevancy with search engines. In simple terms, a website with a good number of relevant backlinks to other websites, may often rank higher than those that do not. However, there are a considerable amount of factors which might impact this. Those factors might include key metrics like Domain Trust, Page Trust scoring, referring domains, backlinks and a website ‘Dofollow’ and ‘Nofollow’ ratio. A cumulation of these ratings all dictate how your website performs. But most importantly and conveniently, when you invest in a great SEO platform, this is all managed and reported on, all in one place.
Doing your best to review backlink data regularly is always sensible, you can not only keep tabs on your own website performance, but your competitors too. If you don’t have the time to login and review this information, simply automate the reporting to do this for you.
If you’re still unsure how SEO Technology can provide a competitive edge to your business, check out our interactive SEO chatbot in partnership with SE Ranking! Ready to have your mind blown by some hard-hitting SEO statistics?
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