A competitive SEO strategy can make a big difference to any organisation keen to improve online rankings. Using effective SEO tactics gives your business the edge, helping to improve discoverability and ensure that you are ranking more prominently than your competitors. Especially in the current climate these tactics can make all the difference when it comes to giving your business the visibility it needs to thrive.

Change the way that you use keywords

You may already be targeting commercial keywords but to ensure effective brand reputation you also need to focus on informative and transactional keywords too. These are the key words that start with “where to buy,” “what is” etc and where the user is looking to find new businesses to buy from, get more information about a product or service and compare costs. You can also integrate keywords that set your brand up against prominent competition, such as “[Your brand] vs [other brand].” Even if you don’t yet have broad brand recognition this kind of targeting can help to position your brand against others you want to complete with. Another way to diversify your keyword use to improve SEO is to focus on sub-markets within your industry and start generating support among niche groups to help you gather momentum.

Improve your competitor analysis

Instead of just running a general competitor analysis, start looking at top performing competitors for signals at both macro and micro level too.

  • Macro signals might include: site structure, which keywords are being targeted, mobile optimisation, whether a local SEO strategy has been adopted, how many links the site has and what the content publishing schedule is.
  • Micro signals could be: off-site marketing strategy, how web pages and blog content are structured (e.g. number of H2s), marketing channels not used, any local partnerships and whether voice search optimisation is being integrated.

Nudging the search engines

Don’t wait to be noticed by Google but switch to a more proactive approach to SEO instead. This might include, for example, focusing on your reviews – whatever location they are in – and ensuring that you respond to all of them, whether they are positive or negative. Broaden out your marketing strategy so that it is a multi-channel approach that will give Google the signals it needs to start pushing your website higher up the rankings. Using a combination of social media marketing, paid search marketing, email and content marketing will create more opportunities for people and other brands to interact with your business online and influence its standing positively. Apart from improving search engine rankings this will also help to generate brand recognition, reviews and drive traffic to your site.

SEO is often seen as something unpredictable and not within your control but there is actually a lot that you can do to influence how your brand performs online. Integrating some of these SEO tactics into your ongoing strategy in 2021 could give your business the edge that it needs to really start to thrive. Find out more information about search engine optimisation in London.