Competitive Domain Analysis
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What is the best way to improve this in reference to my competition? My site(s) are formatted well, returning no errors or warnings. I have removed my keyword meta-tag and tested my sites against the keywords that we want to appear under. Now I need to close the gap on the competition.
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Trust badges, live chat, and toll-free numbers won't improve your rankings but should enhance the trust a user places in your brand, thereby increasing the potential for conversion.
On-page optimization is the price of entry into the SEO competition -- it sounds like you've squared away the basics (title tag, meta description, h1 tag, used the keyword in your content, included related words and phrases). If that's the case, you're likely being outpaced in off-page factors.
Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, or ahrefs should all be capable of giving you a glimpse into whether or not you're competitive from an authority standpoint. In order to pass your competitors, you're going to have to build links. You can leverage an export from any of these tools to find the links you can duplicate (directory listings, industry-specific lists, etc). That should let you close the gap considerably (and perhaps pass them).
The "Future of Link Building" webinar referenced by Jamie is an excellent source for some additional link building approaches.
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Wow! I had no idea that things like live chat and toll-free numbers are important. I believe I have optimized my tags (I think), I do have social and industry badges. Not sure how to answer the content piece but I believe it is most of those things to my target audience. I will look at the offsite SEO.
Thanks for the assistance.
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There are three ares of SEO you likely wish to address: your website itself, content and offsite.
It sounds like you addressed some of the onsite areas such as code validation and removing the meta keywords tags. There are dozens of areas involved in onsite optimization. A few more areas to consider:
do you offer trust badges such as BBB, McAfee, TRUSTe, etc? Are there any industry based affiliations you should present?
are all your seo tags optimized? title, meta description, etc?
do you offer live chat? a toll-free number for visitors to contact you?
do you engage in social media? You can share your social accounts, offer visitors the opportunity to like / tweet / +1 your articles, etc. and allow for "single sign on" so visitors can sign in with their social account.
For your content, is it truly fantastic? Is it compelling? Is it authoritative and accurate? Is it written at a readability level suited for your audience?
For offsite SEO, we recommend the following webinar: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building
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