The SEO Battle: Don’t let your competitors kick your butt

Tired of the fact that all your online competitors are getting all the sweets while you scratch your head in bewilderment? It’s time to improve your SEO efforts.

While search engine optimization certainly takes into account an immense “chance” factor, marketers still need to fulfill their side of the equation to create a perfect setup and get all that desired traffic and click-through rates.

AJ Kumar, co-founder of Single Grain, a digital marketing agency based in San Francisco, offers these tips whenever you feel like you’re getting behind on the SEO competition:

1. Focus on content creation.

When it comes to digital marketing, the acronym "ABC" doesn't just stand for "Always Be Closing." It should also remind webmasters to "Always Be Creating."

Whether you're pursuing SEO, pay-per-click or any other digital marketing strategy to attract new visitors to your website, the quality and amount of content matters. Adding fresh content to your site makes it more appealing both to the search engines and their automated indexing programs, as well as the people who read your pages.

2. Plan your keyword targeting strategies carefully.

As you're creating this content, you'll want to pay careful attention to the keywords you're targeting. Just because you've reached the top spot in the Google results for a given keyword doesn't mean that maintaining this ranking is a valuable use of your time.

What you need to focus on are the search queries that yield the highest total traffic. To determine which keywords are most effective and which ones can be ceded to competitors, look at the traffic data for different search queries using Google Analytics or Google's Webmaster Tools program.

3. Stay abreast of SEO news.

SEO is a field that's constantly changing. If you're able to jump on a new technique or growing trend before your competitors, you may be able to cement your lead in the natural search results.

Set aside time each week to monitor SEO news websites such as Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch.

4. Monitor your competitors' backlink profiles.

By monitoring your competitors' backlink profiles using tools like Majestic SEO (free, with paid plans starting at $49.99 per month) or Open Site Explorer (free, with paid plans starting at $99 per month), you can both identify potential linking partners for your site and uncover any new linking strategies your competitors may be using to try to beat you.

5. Monitor your competitors' on-site SEO activities.

Also monitor competitors' on-site optimization efforts. If any competitors dramatically change their SEO activities, you could be looking at one of two possible scenarios: They may have discovered a new way to optimize their pages in the search results, or they may be updating their pages in response to a penalty from the search engines.

Read the full article at 5 Ways to Beat Your Competitors at SEO