Although the competition can be fierce in some industries, the tips below will help you set up a good strategy for outpacing your top competitors.
In the world of digital marketing, search engine optimization is one of the most effective ways for generating organic traffic to your website and once you know how to beat SEO competition, you’ll be able to attract more qualified visitors to your content.
How to Beat a Competitor In SEO
1. Create Better Content
The first step for how to beat a competitor in SEO is to select a target keyword or web page the competition is ranking for in Google, Yahoo, or Bing and then create better content.
Moz has a great whiteboard video on the topic of creating 10x content, which is essentially content that is ten times better than anything else on the same subject. Not only can this help your web pages rank higher in Google for your target keywords, but it also helps your brand stand out in a noisy online world.
To use this tip, just analyze your competitor’s content and then make your web page on the same topic 10x better. Look for ways to make the content longer, more detailed, and more in-depth by using original writing, research, and synthesis of existing information by experts in your field.
2. Focus On Evergreen Articles
The second step you can take for how to beat SEO competition is to only focus on writing evergreen articles. An evergreen article is a piece of is search-optimized content that is continually relevant and stays fresh for your readers for a long period of time.
This is the opposite of time-sensitive content that’s trend-focused like news articles, pop culture events, and any subject matter that may only be interesting for the day, week, or month.
An evergreen article can continue to rank high in the search engines and bring you high-quality website traffic for many years as opposed to time-sensitive articles that only capture visitors in short bursts.
3. Do Better On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is one of the most effective ways to beat your competition because most site owners don’t do it the right way. They think they can just optimize one or two places in the HTML code or on the web page to get a ranking advantage in the search engine results pages (SERPs), but that strategy doesn’t work well in the long term.
4. Analyze Their Site for Low Competition Keywords
Here’s a simple way to spy on your competitor’s website to uncover low competition keywords they’re ranking for. And once you do this, you can then create content around the same keywords to try and outrank them without having to worry so much about backlinks.
Using a tool like KWFinder by Mangools, you can scan your competitor’s site to get a list of ranking keywords, their positions, and their difficulty scores. This can then help guide your content creation process.
As you can see in the image below, this example website competitor has a few easy keywords I could also target on the SEO Chatter site. One keyword, in particular, that has low competition and a decent search volume is “alternative to screaming frog”, which is a popular SEO tool I could write about.
5. Use a Better Internal Linking Strategy
Internal linking is another great SEO strategy for beating your competitors. By adding relevant and SEO-optimized internal links inside the body content of your articles, you’re getting several advantages:
- Reinforcing to Google what keywords the target page should be ranked for.
- Helping Google’s search engine crawler find the most important pages on your website.
- Keeping your visitors on your website for longer periods of time.
- Exposing your visitors to more web pages that can lead to higher conversions and brand recognition.
As you can see, it’s not only about beating your competition with SEO, but also improving the user experience for your visitors which can translate into more leads, customers, and sales.
6. Check Your Competitor’s Link Profile
For some competitive keywords, you’re going to need to build high-quality backlinks to the page to get it to rank high in Google’s search engine. But instead of just guessing what types of links to build or which websites you should get them from, you can easily check your competitor’s web pages to steal that information.
And once you have this data in hand, you can then do targeted outreach to those same websites to get your own link placements.
7. Implement Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of structured data that enables search engines like Google to better understand the information on a particular page.
And perhaps the most desired outcome from using schema to beat your competitors at SEO is the ability to earn richer SERP listings. These “rich snippets,” which come in the form of average star ratings, recipe details, expanded FAQs, creative work details, etc, help pages occupy greater real estate and visual appeal in the SERP.
In turn, such pages can achieve higher organic click-through rates, which can be a significant edge in a competitive landscape. (See this post on types of schema in SEO for more details.)
8. Create Linkworthy Resources and Tools
Another simple way to beat your SEO competition is to create linkworthy resources and tools. What’s nice about this method is that it can’t be duplicated as easily by your competitors either. So you don’t have to worry as much about them copying your digital marketing strategy.
Also, the benefits of creating linkworthy resources improve your E-A-T score in Google’s ranking algorithm which stands for expertise, authority, and trust. As your content and tools get more awareness in the market, the more websites will link to you and talk about your brand online, which only works to help you beat your competitors even more.
9. Repurpose Your SEO Content
You can a lot with one article. It doesn’t have to sit just on your blog.
By repurposing your content into multiple formats, you can appeal to multiple audiences with different content preferences and attract visitors from multiple online channels. Plus, it’s difficult for a competitor to copy your repurposed content because it’s unique to your business.
Consider repurposing your articles into:
- ebooks
- PDFs
- infographics
- slide decks
- videos
- audio files
- guest post
- twitter threads or facebook posts
- email course
- webinar
10. Build an Email List for Remarketing
The final tip for beating your competitors with SEO may not seem like it has to do with search engine optimization on the surface, but it’s a powerful way you can outpace your competition online.
By working to build an email list from your website visitors, you can create a valuable asset for driving traffic back to your website. Essentially, you can send links to your content through email to your subscribers to generate instant traffic that doesn’t rely on organic search traffic or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Just think about this: If you only had an email list with 1,000 subscribers but you get an average click-through rate of 20% on the links you send in emails, that’s 200 extra visits you can get for your content outside of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
So it pays to work on building an email list if you’re serious about outpacing your competition.
Beating a Competitor In SEO Summary
As you discovered, there are a number of ways you can beat the SEO competition that doesn’t take much strategy or special skills. It’s all about thinking smarter, not working harder, to increase your keyword rankings and traffic online.
Source: Stephen Hockman, Feb 4, 2022
