When your prospects search for a particular product or service, they’re most likely to click on the first result they see–the #1 ranked search result. The number 2 and number 3 ranked pages get significantly fewer clicks. After number 3, the click-throughs literally drop off a cliff. That's why it's important to outrank your competitors online. More clicks mean more business.
So, how can you make sure that your website is showing up in those top three results… or at a minimum ahead of your competitors?
It all starts with mastering and implementing a continuous process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is an umbrella term for the strategies and tactics used to increase your website’s visibility across search engines.
Because search engines and their algorithms are always changing, SEO is not a one-time deal. In fact, we always liken SEO to walking up the down escalator. You have to keep at it, or else you’ll quickly end up at the bottom.
The process of Search Engine Optimization is a long and difficult journey that requires lots of patience, research, methodical thinking, and expert execution.
Here are five proven SEO tactics to help you get better search engine visibility and outrank your competitors online.
1. Keyword research to outrank your competitors online
The first step in creating your SEO game plan is keyword research. Keyword research involves generating a list of the top words that you want to rank for in Google–including your products, services, type of business, and the location(s) that you service.
Google offers a free keyword planner tool that will help you pick and choose which keywords to target. Using this tool, you can see just how many users are searching for particular keywords each month and gain a better understanding of how competitive it will be to rank for such keywords.
Google’s Keyword Planner is also ideal for checking out your competitors’ rankings as well as the tactics they’re using to get there.
2. Keyword-focused content creation to outrank your competitors online
If you want to outrank your competitors online, creating content (like blog posts) centered around the keywords you want to focus on is one of the easiest ways to organically increase your website’s search engine rankings. Case studies, before and after results, and FAQs are other great ways to incorporate keyword-focused content onto your site.
Creating this type of content, however, does not mean stuffing each of your pages full of keywords. Not only will keyword stuffing deter visitors, but Google will penalize you for it as well. Instead, for every 1,000 words on a page, you should have the keywords for which you want to rank make up about 1 – 3% of those words (a ratio known as “keyword density”).
So, build pages with uniquely focused content centered around a single concept or keyword. That should help you create the appropriate keyword density while still providing relevant content to your visitors.
3. Creating backlinks to outrank competitors
A backlink is essentially a link pointing back to your website from someone else’s site. By obtaining backlinks from trustworthy sites, your site gains more credibility with Google and your ranking will increase.
Backlinks can be obtained through local directory submissions (i.e., adding your site to Yellowpages.com or Yelp.com) or guest post outreach so that you can outrank your competitors online.
Guest post outreach involves reaching out to credible sites with similar content and asking if they’d be interested in reposting one of your blogs. For example, if you run a tech company, a site that accepts guest posts like Iamwire.com would be a great place to start.
Guest posting is one of the best ways to boost your site’s credibility with both Google. It is also a great way to provide potential consumers with valuable content.
Quality over quantity is key when it comes to backlinks. The quality of a site is determined by multiple factors, including its content, search optimization, speed, user-friendliness, and more. One high-authority link back to your site (e.g., a link back from Forbes.com) will place you higher in the search results than would multiple backlinks from low authority sites.
4. Interlinking
Interlinking is the process of linking keywords on your site to their respective product or service pages. For example, on our About Us page (as seen below), we mention the services that we offer in the first paragraph and provide links to their individual service pages.
The purpose of interlinking is to increase traffic to specific pages of your site, decrease your exit rate, and increase your average number of pageviews–all of which help your site achieve a better ranking in Google and outrank your competitors online.
5. Boosting your page speed will help with outranking your competitors online.
How quickly your web pages load is incredibly important when it comes to search engine rankings. Page speed can make the difference between ranking first and second in Google.
Thankfully, Google offers another awesome free tool called PageSpeed Insights to help you see how fast your pages are loading and what might be causing them to slow down.
If your pages are running too slowly, your visitor exit rate (also known as “bounce rate”), is likely to increase. When your bounce rate goes up, your ranking goes down, because Google interprets that as your site being irrelevant to the visitor’s search that brought him or her there.
At Bizzuka, we understand how difficult it is to outrank competitors online, and we’ve spent years developing and refining the techniques that help you dominate the search engines. Our internet marketing team works with a variety of businesses worldwide to help them not only get better rankings, but to automate their lead generation process.
If you want to learn more about our proven 3-step process for turning dormant websites into lead generating machines, click here.