If you are expecting a recipe that can help you generate higher traffic than the competition, then this is not that kind of an article. However, what it can do is give you an idea of where and what to look for when you try to get your voice heard in the chaos.
When a user punches the query on the SERP of any search engine, the results show up based on relevance. The mapping, however, happens based on the search engine’s comprehension of the search intent.
What factors do you consider to evaluate your website’s performance concerning the competition? How can you outweigh your competition, who are more popular and bigger?
The Current Thinking
It often happens that many end up looking at the wrong variables for introspecting the websites. Choosing the correct parameters to check the website or gauge the performance concerning the competition is vital. You can draw correct inferences from analysis only when it considers the right factors.
Core Web Vitals
Many website owners and publishers have seen an increase in the rankings after the improvement of the Core Web Vitals scores. That can mean that all the web essentials were equally considered, but not complying will not mean losing the rank.
Word Count
The number of words on a page is not relevant. Word count is not considered to be a quality factor. However, the formatting and structuring of the words are crucial. Using header tags and the bullet points, or whether the presented information is in the correct form, are critical factors.
Domain Age
Domains can change service or product types, change hands, or change topics. Hence they are not a significant aspect to consider for competition mapping. However, what you can refer to are
- The indexing bloats and old backlinks from old pages that can still exist in the indexes,
- Older website versions have loopholes affecting you, like if there is a penalizing history by the search engine.
What Should You Consider?
Websites should be a reflection of the company’s core values and ideologies. It should do the heavy lifting for the brand as and when required. Advance thinking about the offerings of the website can help to design a more functional and apt one.
You can have a service-based website that enables high-quality lead generation for your local business. It can be an E-commerce website optimized and responsive for higher sales generation. An educational website for selling online courses or a personal brand website to showcase your portfolio.
You can find reference points for such websites online. However, if you have something more specialized, you can opt for the services of innovative social media and internet marketing agencies. You can refer to the works of Ambio Media while scouting for such agencies working in this domain.
Such agencies can help brands grow their online presence, spread their message, and help them make a mark among the competition. But what are the factors that should be part of the plan, either an agency or you do it?
Page Copy Relevancy
It is crucial to understand whether the page copy is relevant to the user experience or not. To comprehend the same, you can consider reviewing the following factors:
- Product usage is defined well by the images
- When and how of the product or service usage is clear from the content
- Content explaining benefits of the product or service
- Is the content able to put forth the product or service as the best solution?
- Page FAQs handle the specific product or service queries properly
Schema Markup
To help you stand out from your SEO competitors, schema markup is a great tool. Schema markup helps add enhanced descriptions when part of the webpage. Enhanced descriptions, known as rich snippets and appear on the SERP. You can choose to review the following to aid in this process:
- Service,
- Product,
- Video object,
- Review,
- Pricing,
- Ratings,
- SKU,
- Additional type,
- Description
- FAQ
Internal Product Page Links
A crucial factor to consider is the number of internal links that the product page has compared to the rest of the website. Enabling the crawler to crawl through the page easily helps faster indexing of the page. You can consider the following:
- Make sure the internal links are there for customers and not just SEO
- Building the internal links can happen from blog posts, category pages, or navigation, .etc.
So when you sit next to brainstorm on the ranking strategy, avoid the misconceptions. You can focus on the things that you can control and have an impact on your page ranking. Looking at the ranking signals can help improve the page rank and the experience of the users too.