Who Are You Really Up Against for SEO Rankings?

Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

Who is your real competition for SEO Rankings?

The key to success in business is to know who your competition is, and to outperform them, right? Restaurants need to provide better service, a higher quality menu and better prices than others in their category in order to attract and retain customers. An attorney needs to demonstrate an ability to consistently gain a positive outcome for their clients and to bill more affordable hours than other firms in order to get those first-time clients. Knowing who the competition is should be easy, right? Any good web development company will have new clients provide a list of who they see as competitors in the industry as a way to get started planning for the internet marketing campaign. Unfortunately, when it comes to internet marketing, figuring out who your competition is is not always so clear.

Do your own quick research if you are still skeptical:

Because it is morning and I am doing my usual continuous caffeine intake, let’s say that you own a specialty coffee distributor and you are interested in how much online presence your competition has. You open up trusty Google and type in “coffee”. This is what you would get:

Notice that it is not all coffee distributors or even coffee companies that show up on the first page of the search engine results. Wikipedia is there, as is a coffee review site. In real life, would you be competing with an encyclopedia or a coffee taster for customers? Um, not likely. But the internet is a unique creature; and a search engine optimizer is going to have to learn new ways for making their pages stand out and compete with these odd characters. Even though search engines have greatly improved over the years and are becoming increasingly capable of providing you with pages that actually do give you what you are looking for, they are still largely run by programs that look for specific keywords.

Figure out ways to beat them

Okay, I know this is easier said than done; but there is simply no other way to put it. You now know that you will be competing with more than just similar businesses for SEO rankings, so you need to learn some proven SEO strategies in order to beat them. If a site is getting higher rankings due to fresh content, you may need to work hard (or pay someone else) to make sure your site is updated regularly. If a site is successful in large part to incoming links, it is time for you to begin using social networking to get some of your own. I realize that many of you will need some assistance as you learn internet marketing strategies–in fact, I need help myself! This is why I am grateful for web development companies who have staff professionals on hand who can provide that expertise.

Know your finish line (and, by the way, this line is constantly moving!)

Your goal line is to appear on the first page of search engine results; because, let’s face it, appearing any lower than page 2 is just failure. See the line, be the first to the line, and clear the line. Then, move on to the next race–in internet marketing, there’s little time for a long victory celebration.