Search engine optimization can be hard, especially if you are in a popular industry or in a major city.
It can be maddening to search for your products and services and see your competitors ranking above you – we feel your pain!
Keep on reading to check out some things you can do to up your game and step ahead in the SEO race.
5 Ways to Beat Your Competition
Want to climb your way to the top of the search engine results page? Give these tactics a shot.
Optimize your Google My Business Profile
One thing that can help boost your presence on Google is claiming and optimizing your location on Google Maps.
Once you do this, you will then be able to manage your Google My Business profile.
It’s known that having a GMB profile influences your rankings, and with the various aspects you can add to the platform – a website link, products, services, reviews – it makes sense that it affects rankings!
Submit Spam
Are you a local business? Do you depend on having customers find you based off of your location?
If you do a search for “[your service] near me,” what types of things do you see come up? It is likely that you will actually see a lot of fake listings, businesses using fake names, and other issues clogging up the maps.
Thankfully, there are a few ways you can submit this spam to Google to help improve your rankings.
Improve Your Site Speed
How fast your website pages load is a lesser-known contributing factor for strong SEO. But it makes sense, because why would Google prioritize a website that takes forever to load?
Aspects that play a role in how fast your website loads include where your website is hosted, the platform your site is built in, caching, and the sizes of the photos you use.
Write More Content
One of the things that could easily make your competitors rank above you is content. What types of pages do they have ranking above you? Is it their homepage, or a product page, or maybe a blog post?
It might be time to perform some competitor analysis and see what types of content your competition is being ranked for. This can open a door to future ranking success if you are able to get some fresh, keyword-focused content on your website.
Invest in Paid Marketing
The end-all-be-all of understanding search results is that paid ads will always be listed first and foremost at the top of a search page. And knowing this, it allows you to consider changing your marketing tactics and putting some money into PPC, which will then boost your business above the rest.