Put yourself in the shoes of a graphic designer for a moment. You are struggling to come up with design ideas for your next project. What is the best advice you will get? “Take inspiration from best designers”. Business is no different. No matter how unique your business idea might be, there might be couple of competitors already vying for buyer’s attention.

In digital marketing, you can analyze all the competitors and keep an eye on each one of their moves. Moreover, you can also predict their next move and create a strategy that gives you a competitive advantage. How? Here is a step by step guide to outsmart your competitors in the battle for the top spot on search engines.

1. Identify Your Competitors

In order to outrank your competitor on search engines, you should know who they are and what they do? There are three types of competitors.

• Direct
• Indirect
• Perceived

Your direct competitors are those who sell the same products or offer the same services as you do. Indirect competitors might be selling different products and services, but they have a product line that competes with your products. Perceived competitors are those who offer a different product, but their product might be an alternative to your product/service.

Do some research on your competitors and look at the positives and negatives of their products. You can use a tool like Ahrefs to know more about your competitors. Once you have a list of competitors, divide them into three categories I mentioned above.

2.  Analyze Competitor Keywords

Once you know who your competitors are, it is time to identify what keywords they are targeting and what keywords they are ranking for. A closer inspection of some of their blog posts and product pages will give you a clear picture about competitors keywords. You can use different keyword tools for this purpose as well. This saves you a lot of time you spend on keyword research.

If your business operates in the same niche as your competitors, piggybacking competitor’s keywords can come in handy. Avoid using keywords that have the highest search volume because it is harder to outrank top companies ranking for those keywords. Check the keyword difficulty with Ahrefs which an indicator of is how hard it is to rank keywords.

3.  Content is King

Gone are the days when you can stuff keywords in your content and still rank at the top of Google. Today, Google’s search algorithm and RankBrain engine is more sophisticated and intelligent than ever before. It looks for synonyms, combinations and user search intentions. If your content aligns with the user search intent and answers user problems in the best possible manner, it has a much higher chance to rank on top of Google.

Write high-quality content not just for blog posts but you should also optimize product pages, about us pages and even frequently asked question pages for search engines. Don’t forget to interlink related blog posts to boost your search engine rankings. Finding it tough to come up with topics to write on? Write on trending topics or topics your competitors is writing on. Even if you are writing on the same topic as your competitor, deliver more value and give it your unique twist with your distinct writing style. Make it relevant to your target audience and solve their problems.

4.  Prioritize Traffic Sources

When you create a website, you want people to know about it and visit it. It is a primary goal for any website, which paves the way for lead generation and lead conversion which translates into sales. If you are struggling to attract more traffic to your website then, try these proven SEO techniques. Apart from search engines, there are many other traffic sources that you need to capitalize on.

Before targeting a particular traffic source, it is better to look at the traffic source your competitors are getting traffic from. Use Similar Web’s extension for Google Chrome to analyze your competitor’s traffic sources. You should also look at keywords and traffic sources that are not generating more traffic as you can rank for them.

5.  Build Backlinks

Backlinks used to be one of the top-ranking factors, but it has slowly lost its importance over time but that does not mean that you should ditch it altogether. With your competitors building backlinks, you can not afford to fall behind. That is where a digital marketing company in Dubai comes into play.

They dig deeper and identify sources your competitors are acquiring backlinks from. Additionally, they keep an eye out for backlinking opportunities such as broken links to capitalize on. If you notice a sudden increase in their referring domain number, it is a clear indication that they are actively building backlinks and you should also put the foot down and build backlinks.

6. Improve Website Performance

What is the first thing you notice when you visit a website? It is how long it takes to load, right. Your website load times can make or break your business as it makes the first impression. Would you continue browsing a website which takes ages to load? No, right. That is why it is important to improve the page load times and overall performance of the website.

Google Page Speed Insights will help you iron out all the performance and facilitate you delivering a lag-free user experience to users. Here are some of the ways to speed up your website performance.

• Use a CDN to deliver content faster without putting too much strain on servers.
• Remove all the unnecessary plugins and widgets from your site.
• Minify code and compress the media file sizes so that website elements load quickly.
• Use cache to boost the speed of page loading process.

7.  Optimize for Mobile Search

With more users accessing the internet through mobile devices and Google penalizing websites that are not mobile friendly by pushing it down its search rankings, getting a responsive website is a no-brainer. Google even launched a separate index for mobile which goes to show how much emphasis Google lays on usability on mobile devices.

Pass your website through this mobile friendly test to find out how your website fares on the mobile performance front. Use schema.org so that your content is visible above the fold on mobile devices. If your website is relevant to keywords user have typed, your website can also feature in mobile search in the form of cards, which are spots usually dedicated to most relevant results.

How do you outrank your competitors on search engines? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.