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Over the last ten years or so, search engine optimisation – or SEO – has become the cornerstone of digital marketing. Whether you’re monitoring clicks on your company website or fortifying your off-page SEO services, it’s crucial to cover all bases to boost your profile online. But doing your SEO well isn’t always enough. You’ve also got to make sure your SEO strategy is better than your competitors. Otherwise, their services will probably outrank yours.
Did you know that Google’s second page of search results captures less than 6% of internet traffic? Do you want your website to stand out online? Read on to discover three ways you can use SEO to outrank your competitors.
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Carry out keyword research
Sometimes, the simplest methods are the most effective. Carrying out keyword research is a straightforward step that can completely dictate the visibility of your content – whether you’re writing copy for a landing page, blog post, or meta description.
Keyword research is the process of researching the words, phrases, and questions that your potential customers type into Google. By including a range of high-ranking keywords in your copy, you can capture greater volumes of search traffic and attract more people to your site.
For example, let’s say your business sells a variety of garden furniture – a search term that receives 673,000 searches a month. If you’re writing a landing page for garden chairs, the right language can have a huge effect on your discoverability.
While the term ‘sunloungers’ receives 14,800 monthly searches, ‘sun loungers UK’ receives 22,2000, and ‘deck chairs’ receives 40,500. This means a landing page entitled ‘Deck chairs and sun loungers UK’ is likely to attract more traffic than one entitled ‘sunloungers’, and will rank higher on a search engine as a result.
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Gain backlinks
Backlinks, which are also sometimes known as incoming links or inbound links, are links from one website or page to another. Search engines tend to prioritise websites that have a lot of high-quality backlinks, as this suggests the information on the site is particularly reliable or valuable.
If you want to gain backlinks, it’s important to make sure you get them reputably. Poor-quality backlinks won’t help your site at all and could even result in it being penalised by Google. Fortunately, there are several ways you can try to gain backlinks and boost your business online.
- Find a high-ranking web page that comes from one of your competitors, then rewrite your own content to make it more valuable.
- Write guest posts for other sites. Guest posts are articles that are hosted on a particular domain but contain links to another.
- Focus on writing informative content, such as ‘how to’ guides.
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Use multimedia
When you’re building your SEO strategy, you’ll probably focus on your written content. But although web copy plays a huge role when it comes to outranking your competitors, it’s not the only tool at your disposal.
Images, infographics, and videos aren’t just important in the world of e-commerce. Every business can benefit from including multimedia on their web pages. This is because visual content is often more appealing on social media, which can encourage people to share your posts.
Follow our top tips to build a robust SEO strategy and outrank your competitors online.
