Do you know how to play the game? The game of winning over the hearts of online searchers so they choose your business over your hated rival? There are 6 easy steps you can take today that will put you on a path to success. And, the best part about it is that you don’t have to do anything revolutionary groundbreaking. There’s no inventing fire here. It’s more learning how to investigate the competition to pull out the best strategies and improve upon them.
Have you ever looked at some of your competitors and wondered how they can possibly outrank you in search results with a far inferior product or service? There are always ways to one up the competition; and reverse engineering the way you think can be one way to do it. Take a look at your competitors who are succeeding. Is there something they’re doing differently from anyone else?
We want to give you the steps to find the sales and marketing strategies proven to work for home services businesses that allow you to beat your competition at their own games. And the main advice is backlink management software.
Step 1 – Hear what your customers have to say
There are more ways than ever before to gain insight into the consumer’s mind. But to do so, you need to actively listen to what they say. You need to know what your customers first think of your business, products, and services before you can hope to beat the competition.
What are a few ways of going about this?
- Visit blogs where your customers post or frequently read.
- Get involved in social media
- Mine your customer service calls, emails or chats
Doing this will alert you to competitors’ actions and – potentially even more important – will virtually hand-deliver your best keywords to you on a silver platter. In this pool of keywords, you will find that some are already heavily used by your competition. For those keywords being underutilized, there lies big opportunities.
Step 2 – Identify the key players
Find out which of your competitors are winning the SEO game, and go after them. How can you do this? Well there are a few ways:
- Search Engines – this is the simplest approach. Perform your own searches with your top keywords on multiple platforms – Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and take note of who comes up on the first page of each of these search results.
- Google Alerts – this handy tool pushes alerts directly to your inbox every time your identified keyword – which can be a competitor name – is mentioned.
- Social Mention – via this tool, you can search for social mentions of any topic, keyword or company.
- Marketing Grader – similar to Social Mention, this tool goes a step further and grades the marketing and social activities of your competitors.
- Directories – a great way to identify competitors because these are edited by people, which means that a lot of attention is paid to which sites are included.
- Ranking Sites – tools like Alexa or Compete rank different sites based upon web traffic and site speed which you can use to compare your website versus a competitor.
As you go through using these tools, you’ll likely see many of the same names popping up in different location. This will help you to pick out the top 5 to 10 competitors you should be investigating.
Step 3 – Examine your competitors’ website and strategy
Armed with your list of competitors, your next job is to learn the secrets to their success. SEO can deliver traffic but it is the sites themselves which must convert visitors into customers. So in this phase, you’ll want to study the following elements:
- The Customer Experience – pay close attention to the navigation and site layout. How easy is it to find what you’re looking for? Is the content relevant and complete? Are there images for all products/services? Special discounts or bundles? The bottom line here is to learn how each site addresses customers’ needs and how easy they make it for customers to move through the conversion process.
- Content – evaluate the various forms of content offered from basic product information to opt-in content forms. Do your competitors maintain blogs or other information that complements their website?
- Site Performance – a website chock full of great content that offers poor performance will not deliver the leads you want. Compare page speeds, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility and mobile functionality of all sites.
- Mobile Friendliness – if your site isn’t mobile responsive, you’re at an automatic disadvantage. Numerous templates are available that factor in responsive design from the get-go, making it easy to accommodate users no matter the platform.
- Unique Value – what programs or features do your competitors offer that bring unique value to customers that only they provide? These can be loyalty programs, guarantees and warranties or affiliate programs.
Once you have this information for each of your competitors, you’ll want to compare it to your own practices. The differentials that you note are your primary areas of opportunity and is where you can leapfrog the competition.
Step 4 – Analyze Links
If you’d like to continue with your investigation, please download the rest of the Digital Forensics eBook for steps 4 through 6 with an additional bonus step! Don’t worry, it’s free!
Running your own investigation can get tricky. There’s no reason you have to go at it alone. Contact us to find out how we can help you succeed in the world of digital marketing and SEO.
