Local SEO Competitive Research: All You Need To Know About It
Every business online has a desire to get listed on the top of the local search results. With many of the online businesses investing in local SEO strategies, getting your business listed in the top few results of the search queries is not an easy game. You should first understand how Google search results get displayed for local SEO keywords. The immediate question that needs to be answered is how the search engine decides the business that should be listed at the top of the search results for the related keyword. When your business cannot show up in the first page results, probably, your business is missing the attention of the potential customers who are looking for your product or service in the specified geographic location.
The secret to winning the competition is to know the competitor in depth before you start your fight to win the competition. Any online business that is serious about winning the competition in the major search engines has to conduct a competitive research. You should be familiar with everything right from the business operations to image they are presenting to the customers. Getting familiar with these aspects of the competitor sounds easier, but in practice, they are in fact a tough game. However, this article is going to help you in figuring out the best way to carry out your competitive research.
Benefits Of Competitive Research From Local SEO Perspective
Before you start the big fight with the competitor for the top ranking in the search results, you should be aware of the possible ways this competitive research is going to benefit your local SEO efforts so that this serves as a motivating factor for competitive research.
- A start-up business will get an opportunity to get in-depth insights into the competitive market and gain a good understanding of how the market works.
- Assess your actual consumer base in the market for better targeting.
- Dig deep into the reasons for your competitor business in the market.
Know Your Competitors
Your competitive research to benefit local SEO efforts should start at knowing your competitor in deep. You have to conduct your research a bit depth to make few guesses about your threats in the local competition. You should identify 5- 10 competitors in your local area from different sources and here is a way out. There are 2 effective ways to identify the competitors; one is to search manually, and the other is to identify those using tools.
- In manual search, you have to use the major search engine Google and enter a keyword that you should be ranked for. Then, you will see a number of the websites that are hogging up in the top of the search results. You should make sure to enter accurate keywords in the search engine to find border list of competitors.
- You can even use third-party tools to find the competitors list. These tools are more focused on letting you know what the users are thinking about these websites, and they fetch some hidden results too.
- After you collect the competitor's data, you should get some key information like their NAP details, landing page URLs, citations they are listed in along with the reviews of the customers.
- Study those data and know the trends that perform well in the specific geographic location. You should go through their landing pages to gauge the factors that hold good weight for ranking high.
Pay Attention To Speed
With the new updates in the Google algorithms in the year 2018, the speed of web pages is another important factor to be considered by search engines in how the search results rank. The search engine also prefers to rank the websites that are mobile friendly. Therefore, you can take measures to speed up web-page loading to beat your local competition.
Know The Power Of Reviews
Your online local business cannot ignore the importance of the reviews in the search engine rankings. A good deal of reviews about your business can bring a great deal of change in the search engine rankings. While positive reviews surge up your rankings, negative reviews fall them up so, explore different ways get positive reviews for the business to stay top in the search engine rankings.
Look At Some Valuable Citations
Having looked at citations of the competitors will let you know how important the quality of the citations is for search engine rankings. While listing your business on the top citations sounds helpful, you should check for opportunities that go with your competition. Compare your listed position with that of your competitor's. You should track your competition every month; you should generally track things connected to your brand in order to make things simpler.
To sum up, you need to assess your competition by drafting a plan, and then start your fight to win the game. However, you should remember that winning the local SEO is not one-time gameplay, it is a continuous marathon.
