How Competition Can Work to Your Advantage

Caught up in a tough competition with everyone fighting tooth and nail for that number 1 spot on Google? Your SEO company is telling you to do this and that to your website and it's driving you nuts.

Though you sometimes wish you could bail out of the rat race, the truth is you need competition to grow your business. Consider it a barometer on your performance. Would you have known how good you are at hockey if you're playing by yourself?

Suppose you have a monopoly of your niche market, would you have bothered to keep up with SEO trends? Would customer feedback still matter to you? Do you need to change your processes or improve the quality of your products and services?

When all customers are yours anyway, why bother?

In the absence of competitors, it's easy to slack off. You become complacent and stagnant. Worse, you get stuck in the same routine and fail to move forward.

Competitors push you to do your best, adjust your methods, gain new perspective and standardise your processes to win customers. But that's just one side of the story.

The other side is that not everyone takes competition lightly. Especially businesses doing SEO. A little drop in rankings and it's like the end of the world already.

So how do you deal with competition gracefully? You may have fallen behind the pack, but there are ways to ensure competition works to your advantage:

Use Competition to Drive Innovation

What is innovation and why do businesses need it?

Innovation is a new way of doing things, leading to breakthroughs in the development of products, services and processes. It banks on change and creativity as catalysts for growth.

Without innovation, businesses will not be able to connect with the new generation of consumers and accommodate emerging markets. Innovation makes sure your business reflects the spirit of the times and earns consistent revenue whatever the circumstances.

But innovation alone won't cut it. There must be a strong driving force behind your efforts to change the way you do things. This is where competition comes in handy.

According to Dave Lloyd from ClickZ Marketing Technology Information, an innovative SEO strategy pays attention to the following:

Data about your team, your potential clients, your competition and effective techniques Analysis and interpretation of all data sets Behaviour of everyone who benefits from your data Other markets

Use the fourth item above as a springboard for innovation. Look into other markets and avoid placing your eggs in one basket. Go where your competitors have not tread. You may have the same target customers but see what happens if you tap into markets they've neglected. See what happens if you offer a more comprehensive product or service package at a lesser rate.

Be Ethical When Spying on Your Competitors

If your business website does not have enough traffic or customers, it's hard for you to extract useful feedback. In this situation, spy on your competitors to know what their customers want. Since you share the same market, understanding the behaviour of competitors' customers will help you understand your future customers too.

Remember that spying on your competitors for innovation purposes shouldn't be . Innovation means creating something new and different out of existing ideas. In this regard the following scenarios should be avoided:

• Copying the products and services of other companies and passing them off as your own.

  • Copying the content and design of your competitor websites.

  • Using hacking tools to penetrate web systems and monitor your competitors' activities behind closed doors.

  • Stealing images and other markups.

  • Creating black propaganda to bring your competitors down.

  • Using dodgy shortcuts and automated tools to overtake your competitors.

Whether you're conducting your business or doing a digital marketing campaign, honesty is always the best policy. Search engines know whether you're trying to outwit algorithms or really giving your target customers quality information. Ethical SEO or white hat SEO is beneficial in the long run. Though occasionally slow and steady, you don't have to be concerned with Google penalties when you adopt an ethical approach.

Benchmark Best Practices

Each competitor has a strength not present in others. If you are yet to identify your own strength as a business, it's good to study your competitor websites and understand why their offerings click. This will give you an idea of their competitive edge and what keeps them on Google's radar.

Benchmarking is the ongoing process of comparing the performance, system, methods and practices of your industry's best players to those of your own. Know what you lack that your big-time competitors have.

The benchmarking process usually looks at time, quality and cost with the end goal of creating a faster, more efficient or unique product, service or process. It is not the same as copying what your competitors already did or achieved.

SEO Benchmarking also involves:

• Getting ideas and inspiration from best practices; either continue where your competitors left off or produce something altogether different

• Identifying your competitive edge and gradually fleshing that out until you own it

• Generating data related to your competitors' web performance (i.e. traffic, backlink count, domain authority, page authority, search engine rankings)

• Creating a database of best practices based on the data you gathered (may be provided by your chosen SEO Company)

• Scouring through testimonials, online reviews and forums and reading what customers have to say about their services

• Understanding how your competitors deal with their customers and vice versa

When choosing websites to benchmark for your SEO campaign, choose the ones that display these qualities:

• Superior output with at least 25 percent traffic share for broad keywords

• Recognised by customers and industry experts for their quality service

• Use of patented tools or service initiatives

• Awarded for the practice

• Well-referenced by other websites

• Page 1 ranking on search results

SEO Services Sydney

Still think it's too hard to topple down your competitors? Not sure whether you have the right tools to compete neck on neck with other businesses?

If you think you can't deal with your competitors head on, then turn over your worries to us. You don't have to jump the gun if you're not ready yet.

Digital Muscle, an affordable SEO company in Sydney, offers a range of digital marketing services designed to boost brand recognition and sales for small businesses. Allow us to prepare you for competition. We will fine tune your website to make it more searchable on Google and friendlier to your visitors.

Drop by https://www.digital-muscle.com.au/ and choose the best SEO package for your business.