To excel in digital marketing or for that matter in anything in life, you must begin by setting your sights high. During search engine optimisation, you must follow this principle. Keep in mind that the competition for gaining supremacy in digital marketing is so intense that in no time it can turn into a dogfight. The players engage in a fight unto death to secure better ranks against targeted keywords, and things can soon turn quite ugly that you must avoid at all cost. Compete hard by staying away from the fire and fury of battle. Apply your mind and set a high target by benchmarking the best ranking page of your competitor. If you can outrank that page, you automatically move much ahead of others.
When you target the best-ranking page of your competition, you are treading a tested path, and it is a safe bet. The page has already ranked well and driven real traffic to it, and if you can emulate the feat and better it, you beat them at their own game. Knowing the path to success and understanding how they achieved it is the twin objectives that you must fulfil to be able to repeat the act with success. In this article, we will show you the way of doing it systematically.
Your target
You are only drawing inspiration from how others have tasted success and must formulate your strategy to chart your course. You must do the same things differently so that the results are much improved. Be methodical in your approach and make a list of optimisation parameters that you want to examine. The ultimate goal is to do what your competition has done but in a much better way for more gains.
Gather data on success
Since you have in front of you the best performing page of a website, you must try to understand the reasons that contributed to its success. Firstly, ensure that the page corresponds to the product or service that you promote and then identify the technical aspects of SEO of that page in threadbare details. From the quality and type of content published on the origin of the backlinks, from the title to no follow and do follow link analysis and from hyperlink anchors to H1, H2, H3 tags scan through the process details just in the way post mortem is performed on a dead body. For extracting the information, use analysis tools that are available for search engine optimisation. On analysing the information, you gather you get the answers you are looking for.
Look for technical weakness
Even if you select a top ranking page, there are possibilities that some inherent technical weakness might exist on that page. Since your target is to improve upon the performance of the competitor, you cannot ignore this aspect. Check the structure of the site to identify if there are problems and be sure that there are no issues at all with the indexing and crawlability of the site. Hunt for coding glitches that you must take care of in your campaign. Make use of appropriate tools that are available for auditing websites to detect technical issues. While the previous exercise reveals the strength of the web page, this practice tells you about its weakness. Only when you are completely aware of both that you can plan to create a flawless and much active page that ranks higher than the inspirational page.
The game plan
The page that ranked well owes its success to the content contained in it. This is the reason that you must pinpoint a link worthy content on the page and improve upon it. After that, go ahead in promoting it with the help of influencers. In a nutshell, this is the action plan which when implemented correctly will give the results that you expect in ranking. The content that has helped boost search engine optimisation becomes the North Star that guides you to the pinnacle of success.
Create content that has depth
Avoid shallow content that carries insufficient and incomplete information that leaves users disappointed. Such content does not add any value to users. To score high with content, it must be of high quality and contain complete information that is authentic. Content with an average word count of 2000 is usually of high quality because the structure of the content is such that you are compelled to provide valid information based on proper research. Otherwise, it will not be possible to create the content at all. Long form content receives more sharing and even earns more links.
Mobile friendly content
To do better than your competitor, create content that is more mobile friendly as compared to theirs. Ensure that the way you display content on mobile devices creates a sterling experience for viewers that outperform the competition. Know about the ways of creating content that is mobile friendly so that you edge past others with ease. By using Google’s mobile friendly test, you can ascertain the level of mobile-friendliness of websites.
Visual content is more appealing
Create content that is rich in visuals so that you can expect a much better response from viewers who enjoy consuming visual content. More visuals mean more views because content that is rich in visuals enjoy 94 percent more views. Create content by using images, videos, maps, charts, graphs and infographics along with text to gain mileage from it. Just remember that the visuals must be relevant to the content and you must not use it for the sake of decoration only
Present the content in an attractive way by splitting it into small paragraphs, using subheads and bullet points so that it is easy to read and digest it. The layout helps quick reading as viewers can scan through the critical sections and focus on the part they are looking for.
Finally, make your website as much speedier as possible so that viewers have a better experience than that of competitor’s. What you have done till now will drive you closer to the target of mobile-friendly the competitor’s page.
Guest article written by: Bill Walker is an SEO marketing professional since 2006. He is a Content Marketing Specialist, and the ever-evolving world of search engine optimisation attracts him most. A die-hard fan of Super Bowl events, he longs to see his favourite team win.