What do you do when your business goes up against that 800lb. gorilla competitor in the search results. Do you think you can take them – or is it a wasted effort trying to beat them in rankings?
Business savvy folks driven to success will want to throw everything they have in their digital marketing arsenal to outrank big competitors, including link building and paying for spammy links. You have to be careful when you go up against a major competitor though.
You can waste a lot of time digging too deeply into the competition. The most effective start is to do a quick SWAT analysis of the competitor (strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, threats).
Next, research your audience and find out what they’re looking for when they search for information. Keyword research can provide some insight, but so can digging into a lot of the social communities where they linger.
Some companies recommend seeing how your competitors engage your audience, but you have no real way of understanding whether or not what they’re doing is truly effective. Instead, start building valuable content within your site that focuses on the needs and wants of your audience. Optimize it, and you’re building a solid foundation for organic visibility.
Shift some focus to the landing pages on your site to ensure they’re properly optimized and contain enough content to be informative and of value. Update those pages (including product descriptions and service pages) as needed to ensure they’re fresh and original – including the meta content.
Create a content marketing strategy that focuses on producing off-site content to help you build relevancy. This includes press releases, videos, off-site articles, guest blogging on other sites, and see how you can engage your audience to get them talking, sharing your information and blogging about your brand. Editorial links are always a great boost.
That social engagement is extremely important, because updates to the Google algorithm over the last year have now bundled social proof (shares, retweets, likes, +1′s) as a big ranking factor. Getting your content shared naturally, or using a services like SYNND for building social buzz, is critical to beating out a weighty competitor.
The fact is, you may never topple them – but that shouldn’t be your primary goal. Your primary goal and where your focus should be is on providing the most valuable content to your office through a wide range of content marketing channels. Over time, visibility will grow and so to will your business provided you focus on what is really important.