On line competition for rankings is like a jungle: it’s eat, or be eaten. Fortunately, there is a lot of information either overtly available or through inference that can help you improve your ranking. Remember, you don’t have to “beat the internet”, you just have to show up more often than your competitors in order to gain credibility and share of mind.

The Basics

One set of areas where you want to be strong is in the areas of key words, key phrases and knowledge base. If you establish strength for these attributes you will be perceived as one of the experts in your industry and establish yourself as a credible expert. Aim to be in the top three in the important areas mentioned above. This process is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Since 93% of search is done through Google, this will be your primary reference. You should have a pretty good idea of what words or phrases your core audience uses for search. Using the autofill capability of Google, start typing in keywords, one at a time. Google’s autofill function will complete the search phrase using the most common phrases. Once you’ve developed a list of strong keywords/phrases see which companies rank highest for those words or phrases. Note that if the listing shows up with the word sponsored, then the results have been paid for. Non-sponsored results are known as organic search results and are considered by some to be higher quality results.

Two more pieces of information you’ll want to monitor include whether key words or phrases are trending up or down and if there is any recent online news related to your business. Both can be had by visiting Google trends and Google alerts, two free tools from Google. Your objective is to find out what you can learn about the structure and content of your competitors web site that helps it rank higher than your web site. You also want to keep tabs on current developments.

Digging Deeper

Spend some time looking at your top three (non-sponsored) competitors’ on line presence. Do they belong to any associations, what companies do they link to and where do they have back links from these companies. Where is their social media presence and what sort of content do they reserve for those outlets? The object is to get a sense of the strengths and vulnerabilities of your web site versus your competitors. You want a sort of “on line personality profile”. Not surprisingly on line analysis tools are available, some free and some paid. Two that are worth looking at are Ahrefs and Spyfu. Once you set them up for the information you need, they will produce continual information monitoring your competitors. They can do the analytics for you, identifying opportunities for improvement.

A growing area for improving web site ranking comes from social listening, sentiment analysis, and media monitoring. Automating these functions makes a lots of sense as manual searching would be too time consuming. Staying on top of your competitors may give you an opportunity to understand why your competitors are highly ranked. It can also identify opportunities to highlight areas where your offering would be more favorably received than your competitors’.

Search positioning is like a game of chess, except that the rules and moves change with time. Search positioning takes the right combination of competitive intelligence along with understanding the customers’ needs. There are often many possible solutions to improving search rank and the game goes to the company that best understands how to consistently create customer confidence in their company and product. The more often your company offers top results to searches, the greater the customer confidence.