Improve your SEO strategy with competitive intelligence
Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your website or publication by ensuring that its pages appear high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Getting great search visibility is not magic: it all comes down to your content and how you are using your targeted keyword phrases in your information that describes your service, product or offerings.
The most basic and important point is, of course, to make sure that those targeted keywords are included in your page title, URL of the page (normally generated from the title), meta description, page heading, and first paragraph on your page.
There are tons of articles describing how to improve search engine optimization and how to write content correctly, so we will skip that part in this article. Let us instead focus on how you can measure the success of your content strategy and set up KPIs for your content team to improve overall SEO ranking.
Improving your SEO strategy
Success of a business comes down to improving marketing, content, and audience while finding the perfect approaches to increase engagement, conversion, and, ultimately, new customers. A part of that process is to make sure your business is visible enough to be discovered in the first place.
That’s where search engine optimization plays a big role. SEO is the process to make sure your information and brand is discoverable online. This, however do not happen by itself. It requires constant work and determination and a well-designed SEO strategy to improve it.
A vital part of your SEO strategy will be to measure your search ranking factors and search visibility score, which we will explain in the following sections.
Importance of search ranking
Search-engine ranking position (SERP) is the position that your website or publication has in a search engine when someone is searching for a phrase that contains any of your targeted keywords. The ranking position is determined by the relevance in your content compared to the search phrase used.
As you probably already know, being visible on the first page of a search result will give your brand better visibility and likely a higher click-through-rate — a higher percentage of people visiting your website.
To improve your ranking, it all comes down to content, and the goal is to write content that is related to your business that is informative, trustworthy, and authoritative about your topic. Strive for readability and value. Ranking algorithms are smart enough to determine if content is just stuffed with keywords.
To improve ranking — focus on your user and make sure you have a credible and valuable story.
A main part of your SEO strategy should be to find topics related to your business and create content around these topics sharing your expertise and knowledge. Try get your pages ranked within search position 1 to 30. Anything lower than position 30 appears after the first three result pages, which will likely be ignored by most search engine visitors.
Alright, keeping track of all my pages and the ranking for each one of them sounds like a monotonous job?
Yes, search rankings change constantly, and Google is continuously updating their algorithms to improve result relevancy, so accurately recording and organizing ranking score from day to day will be tedious job.
There is, however, online software that can automate this process; conveniently managing this part of your SEO strategy in the background, while you concentrate your efforts on writing quality content.
What determines search visibility?
Search visibility is a measurement to determine how likely someone will find your website or publication in a search engine when they are searching a phrase containing any of your targeted keywords.
A search visibility score is calculated by:
- Rankings for all your keywords.
- Content visible in search engines.
- An estimated click-through-rate (CTR).
The score measured in percentage from 0-100, where a score of 0% means you have no pages in the top 100, and a score of 100% means that you own all the top ranking positions for all of your targeted keywords. Realistically, it is very rare for a website to score above the mid-40s for non-branded keywords.
Keep in mind that the actual search visibility score is not very useful as a ranking factor for yourself or your SEO strategy. It would be better to include a bit competitive intelligence into the equation. With competitive benchmarking and intelligence, you can set up KPIs to measure this score against your closest competitor.
How about competitors?
Competing against yourself may be entertaining, but real SEO strategy starts when you combine keyword ranking and search visibility with KPIs to measure results against your closest competitors. Your goal is to be more visible in search results than any of your competitors by improving quality (and quantity) of your content.
Alright, that sounds easy! If I add a lot of branded keywords, I stay ahead right?
Correct, but try to avoid changing your keyword phrases to target easier, non-competitive phrases. People interested in a solution that you offer will most likely know little about your brand, so ranking high for brand-name keywords usually delivers little traffic until you are a household name.
Competitive intelligence and SEO all-in-one
As mentioned earlier, your goal with an improved SEO strategy is to set up KPIs that can be measured against your closest competitor, week-after-week, without hindering the process of content creation.
Those KPIs should contain your overall search ranking and search visibility scores, which can be tracked and compared against your competitors.
It sounds complicated, but luckily, there’s an online solution built exactly for just this purpose. Outsmart is an affordable internet service designed for competitive intelligence and SEO.
With Outsmart you can automatically track all your keyword phrases, discover where your different pages or publications rank within Google’s search results, measure their search visibility, and understand search volumes of each keyword.
Outsmart comes packed with features for competitive intelligence, SEO, social media analytics, and much more. Easily set up KPIs and measure your own success or failures against your closest competitors.
Sign up for free today and make sure that you stay ahead of the competition.
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