Why does Jansen BV (fictitious company name) appear above me in the search results?
It is a frequently asked question in the initial conversations I have with clients as an online strategist: why is the competitor doing better? This can be due to many factors. For example, it may be that the competitor:
- has a better technically optimized website;
- has written better or more relevant content;
- has more authority on a particular subject;
- has a website page that functions better for visitors.
In this article, we will NOT ALLOWED focus on all factors that search engines consider important. If you would like to know those, by the way, you can here finding an article about 200 different Google ranking factors. So, it is quite a task to find that one factor that ensures the competitor's website ranks better than yours.
In this article, let's focus on how we can use a competing website for our own success.
I often start with an online competitor analysis to determine which keywords the competitor ranks for compared to my own website(s). This can be done using software such as Semrush of AhrefsWith these software tools, we can easily generate an export of all competitors' top 100 positions and an analysis of which websites rank for keywords you also rank for. The image below shows a quick online competitor analysis of kpn.com's competitors as an illustration.
In this case, the total competitor list amounted to more than 26.000 different websites with keywords similar to those used by KPN. This varies by industry.
What can we do with these competing websites?
Based on this online competitor analysis, we can see, among other things, for which keywords the competitor ranks better than you. It also often provides interesting options for keywords you haven't thought of yet. The competitor may well have thought of this and written a good content page about it. Moreover, it turns out that keyword is searched for more than 500 times a month. This gives us ideas! After all, the saying goes, "Better to steal a good idea than to come up with a bad one..."
Write better than your competitor
Now that we know which keyword the competitor ranks better for, we can write a similar article, but better. In terms of content, there are numerous ranking factors that Google looks at. Chances are that the competitor's article is no longer completely up to date. We can catch up on the following points:
- Write a longer article with more content;
- Write a more current article; the competitor's article may be outdated;
- Use more enriching content such as video material, photos, lists, etc.
By writing a better article, we receive a better rating for our article from search engines like Google or Bing than the competition gets. After all, we have done our best to offer the searcher even better content.
Comparing authority with an online competitive analysis
Secondly, I compare the competitor's authority. After all, we can also use this authority to improve ourselves. With a software package like Majestic You can analyze all backlinks pointing to your website or that of your competitor. To stick with the example of kpn.com: below you can see a breakdown of the different sectors and the number of links pointing to the KPN website.
Based on these backlinks, we can analyze on which high-authority websites the competitor appears and how they achieved this. Are they present there, for example, with an advertisement, a good blog article, a news article, or do they have a partnership with this website? Based on the strong websites, we can see if we—since we are in a similar industry—can also generate a backlink on these websites or, even better, replace them.
There might, for instance, be a link pointing to a competitor's page that no longer exists, or a link to an outdated article about KPN's new mobile phones. This gives us an opportunity to create this page and notify the website administrator that they have a dead link or an outdated reference on their site. We will have just created a new page featuring the latest mobile phones. The website administrator will then likely be quick to change their link to our website. In this way, we have snatched a (strong) link from the competitor that now passes value to our website.
Conversion options
Finally, we can use the competitor to analyze whether they offer interesting conversion techniques or interesting website information. Perhaps we can build on this to create something better. For example, is there a selection module on the website to quickly see which shoes suit you, a valuation tool for the car you want to trade in, or a configurator that allows you to determine for yourself which laptop suits you best? In summary: we look at which website offers the best user experience. Besides generating traffic, it is also important to offer visitors interesting information and features so that they enjoy staying on your site and refer others to you. We can use the competitor for this as well.
It always has to be better…
Conclusion of this article: you are essentially always looking at how you can do better than the competition. In fact, the SEO world works that way too. If you want to stay one step ahead of the competition, you will have to continuously improve yourself. And doesn't it work that way in every industry? Everywhere you see competitors vying to offer a better, faster, or cheaper product. However, in some industries, that has become a bit more difficult than in others. As a result, SEO is sometimes no longer the best strategy for you, and we need to look at other possibilities to generate traffic. Fortunately, online opportunities are constantly growing, and there are always ways to be found to achieve online results. And remember that, fortunately, you don't always have to be the best to earn a good living.