When you want to rank in the top 10 on Google, the best strategy is not to try to innovate anything for your company, but instead, look at who’s already doing it and see how you can duplicate their efforts. That’s going to be the quickest way to cover any distance between you and them in search results.
I like to use is a tool called SEMrush.com. You can access some free reports with them. You don’t have to have a paid account. There are also other tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Raven or SpyFu. But SEMrush organizes all the information neatly on a single report. The thing is, you want to make a list of the top 10 domains that are showing up for the keyword that you’re you’re trying to compete over.
To use SEMrush, you put in the domain name, and then it’ll tell you how much traffic that website’s getting. It’s also going to tell you all the keywords that are ranking in Google. It’s great because it gives you the ranking of the keyword, and how many people are searching each month for that keyword. With a paid account, you can also download a comprehensive list of what keywords a website is showing up for in search results.
The strategy here is to compare the keywords of the top 10 sites. You might even go further back and in the search results and look at everybody who’s showing up on page five, six or seven and see what they have in common. Compare this with your website. Try to look up your website and see what the differences are. Are there any keywords that you’re missing that you can incorporate into your content?
A might observe that a lot of the results that show up on the first page are using the same keywords. So what’s the difference? What makes one show up over the other?
If you are new to digital marketing, I can explain. The pages that link to a website lend their authority and trust, increasing the credibility of the site to which they point.
Try to explore the actual links. Take a look at those pages and see if these are websites you can partner with or create a relationship with or if it’s just an article that the published. But sometimes you can connect or partner with the same people. If they partnered with your competitor, perhaps they would entertain a partnership with others as well.
Another great feature of SEMrush is the ability to tell you who the most significant competitors are in your space. It can provide some interesting information. You might discover companies that you weren’t aware of before. But it’s important to know where the competition is getting their traffic.
SEMrush also provides traffic sources. Understanding traffic is vital when you’re getting started because you want to show up where they’re showing up, and you want to get traffic the way they’re getting it. Where that traffic comes from could be determining why they’re ranking the way they are.
Are they getting a certain number of visitors from one source?
What are they looking at on the website?
Is there a way that you can duplicate that content or compete with them in a new space that you haven’t thought of before?