What are some good SEO tactics to defend our position against an upcoming competition in a near monopolistic market?
-
I'm doing SEO for a medium sized client whose area of business is targeting a very niche audience, in an almost monopolistic market. We're currently in top 3 ranks in our head terms. However, market research has indicated the threat from an upcoming competitor. The competitor is relatively larger and is well established in other countries.
Is there something I could do from my end to defend/maintain our current position?
-
Hi iQanti! You've received some wise advice from several long-time members of our amazing community. I just wanted to make sure you saw their thoughtful responses to your question. We'd love to get an update from you on how things are going!
-
Some awesome answers from folks here - Giving them all a thumbs-up now!
Just to add a bit to the above (so meant as suggestions in addition to the above)... I'd also monitor the up-comers backlinks, press mentions etc. (Patrick mentioned checking what they are doing... I'd go a step further and monitor it on-going as some stuff may not be showing if it was done recently).
Of course, it's important not to be too 'copy-cat', I wouldn't focus JUST on this, but if you listen to the advice above, I'd mix in some competitive analysis of PR (public relations/press, not the old green bar!) of the competitor, mentions and links etc.
- You can use Moz's, like OSE (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) and look for 'just discovered' and also 'link opportunities' (to find mentions etc of your competitors)
- Set up a Google Alert (https://www.google.co.uk/alerts I like to do an alert for their brand name, minus their domain, set to 'as it happens', and be sure to set to 'all results' rather than just what Google thinks is the best of the results) - See screenie added to this post for an example. You can also opt to publish this to an RSS feed, rather than get emails - then use a feed reader (Chrome dashboard plugin with a few feeds is what I use! - Handy for the start to the day with a coffee, just review the updated RSS feeds).
Keep an eye on them, see what they're up to and figure out if any of it can feed into your work. Maybe they register on a decent industry site and start contributing content, can you do the same, only publish better content & promote it? Perhaps they get links from a supplier - do you use the same supplier? Don't copy them for the sake of it of course, just where it makes sense. It can also help to inform your strategy.
It sounds like you have your SEO pretty well sorted (ranking high for head terms), so how about reviewing:
- CTR from SERPs... can you optimise your click through by tweaking title tag (carefully! don't lose rankings) and/or meta description
- Page speeds - can you get the pages that rank to load faster?
- Internal links - when did you last run an internal link audit? Remember, when it comes to the top-slots in the SERPs, little things matter! If you've published any content in the last few months, see if it makes sense for internal links from there to the ranking pages (don't force it though!).
- Can you rank in position 0? < Are there any SERP features for the keywords (or related ones - Keyword Explorer to the rescue!) If there are SERP features, can you optimise for them?
Hope that gives a few things to think about?
-
There are definitely some good answers here already from Kevin and Patrick, though I think I'm going to go a bit more general.
It sounds to me like you have been concentrating heavily on your head terms. So you're singularly focused on a small subset of terms that you now rank quite well for, but does not leave you in a very defensible position. Let's say you have 4 SERPs that are driving you most of your traffic. You get pushed down even 1 spot in each and you've lost a ton of traffic.
If I were you, I'd look at a few things:
- What are other sites in other niches doing that you are not? EG building links via strong content, receiving a ton of referral traffic, building partnerships with other sites in their niche, etc.
- From a pure SEO perspective, do what Kevin has suggested and look at how you can build out longer tail pages (which you should have been doing all along to minimize what you're currently about to face) as well as building links that these competitors have no hope of getting.
- Diversify your traffic sources. Referral, social, etc. If you're local, look at local advertising options to solidify your brand in the minds of your potential customers.
I do want to leave you with a bit of hope, though. I used to work for a big PubCo, and when they went to enter new markets or expand offerings they, as most big companies do, found it quite challenging to unseat the incumbents. So being in there already is to your benefit and hopefully you won't actually face too much of a challenge from them.
Good luck!
-
Hi there
There are a few things you should be doing at the moment:
- Review, update, and create consistency in citations / local listings
- Create strong content that actually solves problems or provides information
- Look into paid search opportunities and sponsoring industry events
- Engage your audience on a more personal level (social media is a great way!)
Doing these things will help keep you at the top of mind from both a local and industry standpoint, while also ensuring that you as a medium sized business take advantage of your ability to engage your audience at a more intimate level than a larger business can. What you're doing is creating a unique selling proposition without selling your audience - you create accessibility, something that audiences want in a brand.
Beyond that, what I would also do is the following:
- Conduct a solid SEO audit on your site to tie up potential loose ends
- Conduct a backlink audit on both your website and your competitors - what links do they have that you find valuable? What's their strategy in getting them? How can you obtain similar links? Are there links you should remove?
- Conduct a content audit of both your website and your competitors - what content do they have that their audience finds valuable? How can you create more engaging content?
- Review the marketing tactics they are using that you may not be incorporating into your marketing campaigns
The goal here isn't to copy your competitors, but rather look for opportunities they are taking advantage of that you aren't, or finding patterns in their marketing that you could build upon or make better. Your business is unique and valuable in it's own right, your goal is to find opportunities that allow you to market these areas in a much more brighter light.
Let me know if you have any questions, there is a lot here, but your goal is to build your brand not just through SEO, but multiple digital marketing channels where your audience is. Hope this helps!
Good luck,
Patrick -
We had the same thing happened a few years ago. We had top 3 organic positions for many competitive keywords when Amazon, Home Depot and Lowes unseated us and pushed further down on the serps. We implemented many new useful landing pages focused on the high-converting longer-tails keywords that had guides, white papers and etc. Although we didn't regain these competitive positions, it greatly lessened the impact. My suggestion is to do your best in solidifying these positions (freshness, speed, testing content & etc.) to lessen any impact, but devote resources in a similar strategy described above (if they are not currently doing it). Be straightforward with your client on what potentially might happen.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why do keyword competition rankings differ between Google and SeoMoz?
I am a novice at keyword ranking etc. so I appreciate your patience! I checked a longtail keyword - how do i get out of this relationship - in Google AdWords and it came back 'low competition.' When I entered it in SeoMoz it came back as 'very competitive.' Any thoughts? I appreciate your help.
Competitive Research | | UncleTodd0 -
How to track seo campaign success fully?
Hi All, What are the best ways to track a seo campaign successfully, other or including Google Analytic?
Competitive Research | | ITRIX0 -
Sending autmated queries to Google hurting SEO?
Anyone have any ideas whether there could be a chance that a site might get penalized if it is sending automated queries to Google (ie, to check rankings)? I was reading the recently updated Google Webmaster Guidelines and saw on the section - "Quality guidelines - specific guidelines" that mentioned about sending automated queries to Google... Just wondering what are the chances that Google will actually penalize a site that sends automated queries (if they are able to identify which site is doing so in the first place)..
Competitive Research | | globalsources.com0 -
Effort for "moderate competition" keywords
I'm rather new to this, and while I'm getting some sense of everything I'm trying to figure out what kind of scope of work lays ahead of me. The keywords I'm looking to rank for are "moderate difficulty" -- somewhere between the 45%-55% "difficulty scale" on seomoz's keyword difficulty report. Assuming I have a number of "A-grade" (according to SEOmoz's reports) optimized pages for these keywords, how many links of a given quality level should I be looking at building up? I mean, of course, the more the better, but if I'm gunning for high DA/PA pages, am I looking at dozens here or hundreds of such links? I can imagine that any answer isn't going to come with much specificity, but if there was just an "idea" of the scale of backlinking involved here, that'd be great!
Competitive Research | | yoni450 -
Is using photos of people to market your ecommce a good idea? Do you think people relate more?
So I noticed all the leading competitors in our market are using photos of people on their home pages to market products.. While we are using a simple but eye catching design with no photos of people but only produts.
Competitive Research | | JHSpecialty0 -
Crazy SEO question (maybe I'm missing something?)
OK - so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story: A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for. She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow" He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site. He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight... Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site. Thanks for your help, Mozzers!
Competitive Research | | Greg_Gifford0 -
How do you perform competitive research for SEO?
What metrics tell you the most when you're looking at your competitors across the search landscape? PageRank/MozRank Inbound links Keyword rankings Alexa/QuantCast/etc. Pages indexed Something else entirely? What numbers speak volumes to you when you want to get an idea of how you benchmark against your competitors? And how do you communicate these results?
Competitive Research | | jcolman2