Introduction

So many businesses think that when investing in organic SEO, all they need to do is pay a monthly fee, and then the business will start to appear for certain keywords.

So, for example, let’s say you run a dental practice, and you want to promote teeth straightening here in the U.K, so you partner with a white hat seo agency.

That agency can implement work that’s in order to improve where your business ranks organically.

Yet, this means that the seo company will need to work on strengthening your businesses “ranking signals”.

This means in order to beat your competitors, your business must have stronger ranking signals. Plus, your website must be deemed the most relevant for which keywords you wish to improve the businesses organic ranking for.

So for instance, lets say you are currently positioned 22nd for the term “teeth straightening” here in the U.K, well you have to Improve your website to the point that it is deemed better that the other 21 businesses before you.

So, as you can see investing in organic SEO doesn’t mean just investing money, and few clicks and suddenly your business is ranked higher.

No, instead the major search engines, such as Google are thought to take into account over 200 ranking signals.

And this means in order to beat your competitors, your website has to have stronger SEO. So how do you evaluate how good your competitors seo is? Well here’s how we do it.

Onsite SEO

Looking at your competitors onsite seo is where we start. Now a skilled SEO consultant is likely to consider many things when evaluating why a competitor is deemed to have stronger SEO, yet here’s some of the main things they are likely to consider.

Structure                      

Has your competitors websites got a logical layout? And is the website structured in such a way that it makes implementing SEO easier?

For example, let’s say you run a solicitor’s practice, and you offer many different services, such as offering employment law advice, family law advice and also advice over business disputes.

Now, if all of these services were described on one page on the website, well it would make it very hard to optimise the website for all these separate terms.

So, what a digital marketing agency may recommend is that the various services have their own page.

Then your SEO company is likely to evaluate your competitors, for example how have they split their services. Do they offer the same services as your business, if so does every service has its own page?

Have your competitors optimised their websites for services that your business offers, yet they have done this in a better way.

For example, some our competitors may just state they offer organic seo, yet other businesses may mention they offer link building, content marketing and local seo, so this may be deemed a better way of optimising the website, rather than grouping all the different services just under the banner of “organic seo”.

Internal links

Internal links can be really useful to a visitor on your website. For example, you may well be a divorce solicitor, and you may have just published a blog post on your website, where in that blog post you’ve mentioned that you offer a mediation service, now a reader may not know what “mediation” means, so you could use an internal link within your website, so that the reader can then click the link, and then find out what mediation means.

Internal links if implemented in a white hat way, can help your SEO.

So do look at how your competitors are using internal links, you may find that the main menu may have a list of pages that describe the businesses services, yet then internal links are used to take a reader to other pages, which describe that service in more detail.

So, for example, we may on our website that we offer “Local SEO”, yet on that page we may use an internal link to a page that’s dedicated to explaining how we build backlinks.

Therefore, internal links can be used to help visitors to your website to find out more about what your company can offer.

NAP

How have your competitors mentioned their NAP details on their websites? Have they mentioned the NAP information in the footer of the website, or has it been written in a large font on the contact us page?

White hat?

Are your competitors only using white hat seo methods? We would strongly recommend that your business only implements white hat seo.

If you do not know what white hat seo means, or whether your competitors are implementing white hat seo, then we would recommend that you work with a white hat seo agency.

Blog posts?

Are your competitors adding blog posts to their website on a regular basis? Are the blog posts high-quality, meaning that a lot of effort has been made to offer quality information, that will be really useful to the reader.

For example, let’s say the business in question is an electrical retailer, and they sell electric ovens.

Now somebody who is buying an electric oven may not know all there is know about electric ovens.

So, a blog post that explains what all the different options are, well this is likely to be deemed useful.

If its useful more people are likely to read it, which means that it can help to improve the businesses SEO.

Plus, if the work is really good, well other websites may link to the work. For example, a interior designs website may be talking about luxurious kitchens, and therefore may mention the website has a good place to find out all the different features that an electric oven can have.

Offsite SEO

Backlinks

Your seo agency should evaluate your competitors backlinks.

Can our business help?

If your business requires help with its seo, then why not call us?