Good to Know

Competitive Strategies

ASMART Solutions is a creative team that specializes in Custom Web Design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services in Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). In web design we design sites for our clients using latest web development tools and do website analysis, competition analysis, on- page optimization and off page optimization as part of our SEO Process. 

In SEO it is always important to have a glimpse of what your Competitors are doing in terms of your chosen keyword space and link popularity. Bear in mind that most successful SEO and link building campaigns involve doing what your competitors are doing but maybe slightly different to create the winning gap. We are going to outline some major strategies that we implement for our clients in SEO campaign and efforts to outrank your competitors in your chosen keyword space and in the link building campaign.

1.    Low-Competitive vs. High-Competitive Sites

Your keyword space directly impacts the scope and what kind of SEO strategy (and overall marketing strategy) we will need to implement. If your site is selling services to a certain region or local market (niche category) i.e. low competitive site your efforts should be focused on on-page optimization but if you are selling in a national or global market i.e. highly competitive sites its all about your link building campaign this is because major SE’s (Search Engines) gives much more weight to off-page link factors. For local and niche sites, on-page SEO factors like keyword phrases used on relevant content, can be weighed as much or even more than off-page link factors.

There are sites that cater to a local audience rank very well on a number of different keyword phrases having only a handful of incoming links. Conversely, there are seen giant, content-rich, well-optimized sites that sell nationally rank nowhere for any search terms until they have a ton of incoming links. With this said, for every site we do both on-page optimization as well as have an active link-building campaign. In short, generic or competitive keyword phrases, we do the following:

• We start optimizing your site for as many different more-specialized permutations of your best keyword phrases as possible and build content pages around each one.
• We start getting very serious and persistent about the link-building campaign. Your competitors know this and that's why they are busy getting hundreds if not thousands of links to their site over time.

To clarify the differences between a “low-competitive and high-competitive” site and to further illustrate the type and amount of resources that may be involved to obtain satisfactory ranking results, here are representative examples. Note that these are generalizations for comparative purposes only:

a.    Low-Competitive Site

Keyword phrase: “window cleaning services” or “window cleaning Melbourne”
On-site factors keyword contributes heavily to rankings. Often all that is needed is a handful of links and solid SEO methods used on the site. Most competitors won't even know what SEO is. We can achieve good rankings with relatively little effort within 3 months.

b.    Medium-Competitive Site

Keyword phrase: “home cleaning” or “house cleaning” A good combination of on-site factors and off-site factors contribute to good ranking. For such sites, 100 or so quality links are needed (this is a generalization). About half of your competitors will know what SEO is and of those that do, a fair percentage will be doing a good job at it. We can achieve good rankings with relatively little effort within 6 months to 1 year.

c.    Medium-to-High-Competitive Site:

Keyword Phrase: “cleaning” or “windows” On-site factors contribute little toward ranking, unless you have a large site, in which case they count for some. Such sites need an aggressive link-building campaign and typically have hundreds or thousands of incoming links that use effective anchor-text strategies. Most if not all of your competitors will be using SEO tactics, some quite aggressively and spending a fair budget on it. We achieve good rankings with steady, continual, focused efforts after 12 to 18 months. We also recommend the use of PPC advertising like Major SE’s (Search Engines) AdWords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Search marketing to augment traffic, especially in the near-term.

2. Reverse-Engineering the Competition

Do you have a site in a competitive market and want to determine how your top-ranked competitors are doing so well. This involves reverse-engineering the linking structure of the top 3-5 sites in your keyword space and emulating what they are doing right. Here is how we go about doing it:

• We use Yahoo's backlink command, or latest SEO tools to find every site that is linking to the top 3 sites in your chosen keyword in Major SE’s (Search Engines).
• Obtain links from those exact sites that your competitors are getting links from. This will definitely take time so we really call for your patience.
• Use the same anchor text that is pointing to the competition’s sites for your own incoming links. Trying to duplicate the percentage of different anchor text variations used – this is important.
• Look at the page titles of the #1 site and duplicate them for your site. We don't need to do this for all your pages, just your most important ones - home page, important category/product/service pages.

Bear in mind that site age and link age is a factor, so even if we duplicate your competitor's link-building strategies 100%, it is going to take time for you to rank well as the new links to your site won't be as good as the old links that your competitors have. In conclusion at ASMART Solutions we don’t reinvent the wheel, the competition has figured out how to rank well, so we emulate their strategies.