5 ways to outrank your competitors

If your competitors are outranking you in the organic search results, there is a lot of website traffic and potential business that you are missing out on. It’s important to develop a local SEO strategy to help you outrank your competitors and take your percentage of that traffic.

I put together five strategies that you can start implementing today to improve your rankings and ultimately outrank your competitors. If you implement all five strategies, there’s no reason you shouldn’t see a boost in your traffic.

Do better keyword research

Many people know the importance of keyword research, but you need to have a better keyword research strategy than your competitors. If you can have a keyword research strategy that is better than your competitors, you are already putting your self in a position to succeed.

Keyword research is the foundation of your SEO strategy. You should be consistently be doing keyword research to find opportunities for your website to get more relevant, and quality search traffic.

Here are the most important things to remember when it comes to keyword research:

  • Find keywords that get searched frequently
  • Find keywords that are easy to rank for
  • Target more than one keyword in your content
  • Find keywords that will be valuable to rank for

Finding keywords that meet one of those requirements is easy to do. The tricky part is finding keywords that meet all those requirements, and that’s the important part.

Finding keywords that get searched frequently is one of the first things you should do with your keyword research. There’s no sense in targeting keywords that nobody searches.

Tools for Keyword Research

The best free tools to do this are Ubersuggest and the Google Keyword Planner. Both of these tools will give you an estimated search volume. While both tools are helpful, I prefer Ubersuggest, because it tries to give you a more precise number.

It’s a very similar process to find keywords that are easy to rank for. On both of these platforms, it gives you a “competition” or “keyword difficulty” metric. This is a good metric to look at to determine how difficult it would be to rank for that keyword. I like to cross-reference both tools to see if it is listed as easy to rank for on both.

It’s important to not just settle on one keyword per post. Use these tools to find multiple keywords that you can target in your post. This will give you a much higher traffic opportunity.

Not only do you want traffic, but you want to rank for keywords that will be valuable to your company. You could manually assess this, and you can also use the cost per click metric to aid you. If advertisers are paying a high cost per click for the keyword, it usually means that the keyword is valuable to get traffic from.

Start with long-tail keywords

If you are just starting to put together an SEO strategy, I would recommend starting with targeting long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords that are more specific and less competitive. For example, in the fitness niche you could target “Exercises to build muscle for women”, instead of just “Exercises”.

From these screenshots, you can see “exercises” gets searched much more, but it is also a lot more difficult to rank for.

Exercises to build muscle for women:

Exercises:

Long-tail keywords will be much easier to rank for. It’s a good idea to try to rank for many different long-tail keywords, rather than one competitive keyword.

If you are just starting an SEO strategy, the authority for your website will likely not be very high. This means that ranking for competitive keywords will be even more difficult for you. Targeting long-tail keywords is a great way to get some easy traffic right away and start building your authority.

Create high quality content

Search engines want to show the highest quality content to their users. The search algorithms they have in place are all with the common goal of showing the most relevant, high quality content to their users.

Google uses many factors to determine what is high-quality content, and they have gotten pretty good at figuring it out at this point. Creating high-quality content is more important now than ever.

This means that you should only write about topics that you can really go in-depth about and provide true value to your website visitors. Publishing content, just to “add your post to the pile” isn’t a great strategy and will make ranking your content becomes so much more difficult.

Some good ways to make sure you are producing high quality content is by finding out what is currently ranking for your target keywords, and then putting together content that is similar to that but make it even better. This will ensure you have higher quality content than your competitors. 

Include useful resources

A good way to get website visitors and to be sure you are producing high quality content is to include useful resources in your content. This could be anything from videos and images, to infographic and helpful external links.

If your content is full of helpful resources, users are going to want to take in your content. In addition to that, other website owners will want to link to your content.

Think about it, when you are linking out to another website in your content, you are linking to that resource because you think it is going to help your readers. If other websites come across your high-quality resource, they are going to want to link to your content to provide their own users with a better user experience.

Get more backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. This is referring to another website linking to your page. What this does, is it shows Google that the linking website thinks that you have quality content, and it acts as a vote to improve your rankings.

To get backlinks you need to have high-quality content. Nobody is going to want to link to your page if it is providing value. This is another reason why having high-quality content is so important for outranking your competitors.

The best way to get backlinks is to promote your content as much as possible on your social media platforms and ask website owners in your industry to include your resource in their content. If you are providing real value and are genuine, there are few reasons why website owners will not want to link to your content.

Takeaways

Starting with a solid keyword strategy is the first most important thing to consider when trying to outrank your competitors. You should target multiple keywords and include some long-tail keywords when you are just starting to implement your SEO strategy.

Always focus on creating high-quality content and providing value to your website visitors. If you can improve your user experience, and get backlinks to your content, you will have a great chance to start outranking your competitors.

Leave a Comment

Exit mobile version