Ranking higher than your competitors might not be as hard as some people might want to think. In this article I am going to show you how you will rank than your competitor in almost all of the cases. The five steps that I am going to give you are called the 5 Cs. If you follow the steps appropriately I can guarantee you that you are going to rank higher than your competitor. To start with SEO is an easy thing to do and you can do it, it is not rocket science, it is more like plumbing. The same way one can learn how to fix things from YouTube. You will watch dozens of videos and try out how to fix, sometimes you will make mistakes but with time, you are going to be able to fix it. SEO is no different, you can learn how to do it but probably you are going to make some mistakes. Do the following things better than your competitors and I can guarantee you better ranking than your competition:
Code
You need to have good underlying code but that does not mean you are going to rank higher but if you code is not good it will prevent you from ranking. The google crawlers usually look into the forward facing code when it is crawling through sites. So your goal should to make the forward facing code is as “frictionless” as possible so that it become easier for the crawlers to crawl through your site. You can learn how to do this from YouTube videos since there are plenty of videos about them out there. Most people will think that being able to fix a code on a website is what SEO is all about but that is not the case. Fixing the code is just the first step into the game.
Content
Well, I have to say that content is king in 2019! The algorithms will read words, you will read words, a visitor to your website will read words practically everybody will read words! This does not mean that you should stuff your website with meaningless words. It is not more of how many words you put in your website, it is more of the relevance and the meaning of the content. Your content needs to communicate what your company is selling and it needs to do that in a unique manner and using the words that people are using to search for whatever services or products you are offering to them. That does not you should stuff keywords on the content, its 2019 not 2003! Stuffing lots of keywords on your content is counterproductive and it will do you more harm than good. You should just use the right amount of keywords on your content. The point is to make content that makes the user happy and the keywords are there to help him or her get the content when he searches on the search engine. Test if your content is making an impact on your audience by running a few campaigns like google ads or even Facebook advertising. If you find that it is working just fine with the people, make it even better.
Connections
Google had a principle that the links to a website are indictors that it is relevant to a specific search. But this algorithm has changed drastically over the years but it’s hard to find legitimate SEO that does not really think that link building is SEO important. Link building is important but it is more of the quality of the links and not the quantity. If your site is getting thousands of links in a month and there is nothing viral about it, it might be a red flag to google that there might be some spammy tactics being employed. Link building is more about building connection, and connections is what will separate good SEO from excellent SEO. Spend your time building relationships with the right people instead of using too much effort to get links that will do you no good in the eyes of google.
Communications
Let me make things clear first, social media does not have direct benefits to the SEO but it is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. One of the importance of social media in an SEO campaign is that it will provide you with a platform where you can initiate communications with the right people I was talking about when discussing link building. In addition to that, social media presence gives a brand recognition. The recognition is important when it comes to searches on google because most people will be knowing your company so they will be searching about it using it. Some SEO pros don’t involve themselves in social media strategies and I believe that is a huge mistake. Social media is like the most important tool which will help you develop relationships and hence you will be able to build high quality links. And when you have quality links you can be sure of ranking higher.
Capture
Yes, it is very difficult to understand why a user is using a certain keyword to search content. Some people will be tempted to think that they want something that will change their lives but that is not always the case. A lot of broad keywords are just at the top of buying funnel. To understand the effectiveness of a keyword you should look beyond the most recent click of conversion. Your data needs to capture the attention of both the search engines and the visitors of your website.
SEO is an ongoing strategy and you will need to keep on doing things right or your competitors will outrank you. If you have to hire an SEO professional, make sure he or she is google analytic certified.