Dealing with a Competior in Google SERPs

by 5 replies
6
Hi there, I'm hoping for some great advice here!!

I have a site that has always enjoyed strong rankings for more than 5 years. I noticed today, doing a
search for one of my main keywords (which also appears in my brand) shows a smaller competitor
whose brand name and domain name happens to be an exact match on the particular search phrase. It goes something like this:

Keyword phrase: word1 word2
My brand: Name word2 Name word1
Competitor brand name: word1 word2

So, whilst my brand contains the keywords they are not exact match.

Now, I must say that when I do the search the competitor comes up 5th. However, when my CEO does it the competitor comes 1st. Aside from localisation and personalistation which I understand, what's the best way to combat this?

This competior has 1/100th of pges indexed compared to my site, 34 for total links from 1 referrer (site-wide navigation).

I thought it my be new site honeymoon period but I need to come up with a strategy to keep the competitor at bay and below my listing.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
#search engine optimization #competior #dealing #google #ranking #serps
  • Even if your competitor's site rank higher than your site, remember not to resort in any negative SEO. It will do more harm than good. Focus on how you can further promote your website. Diversify your SEO strategies, do on-page and off-page optimization. Engage in social media and content marketing. Additionally, learn competitor links analysis and reverse engineering.
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks dannysimon.

      Never in a million years would I contemplate negative SEO (fully white hat here . There is SEO (on and off page), great content, video, social integration etc.

      The competitor only has 34 links from 1 site so nothing to reverse engineer.

      In theory, they are ranking for their brand, even if it can also be sonsidered a keyword.......
  • You need to out think them, better links and ones that nobody else in your industry is getting.

    An example as I don't know your industry...

    A client of mine, sells gas and oil training courses.

    Every single competitior has the same links that we do, from blogs about the industry.

    What links can I get that they don't have that are still related?

    Education, job sites, career progression blogs.

    How did I get the links?

    Created documents on how to get started in the gas engineering field, what money can be made, basic info on career progression, timescales and estimated earnings, approached job sites and offered them a copy of the PDF and and more info they might be interested, said they should also link to our courses pages for people who were interested in what they had just read.

    Outcome:
    1) a ton of links, authoritative ones too, improved rankings and organic traffic. (kind of important)
    2) referral traffic from these heavily used sites, extremely relevent and targeted and send ing people who were actually interested in these courses clicking through to that page. (more important than the rankings)

    Think of ways in which your industry can be linked to others and then create somethign that they will find useful. Ask them if they'd like to look at it and if they do perhaps they would like to either publish it or use it as inspiration, tell them if they find it useful you would appreciate a link as it will help their visitors.

    Competitors above you in search, doesn't matter as you are generating referral traffic. The links will also take care of that position 2 spot after doing this for some time.

    Rinse and repeat for every course and angle and type of blog you want links from.
  • When brand awareness is your goal, PPC works in increasing awareness effectively or you could implement local business listings for your website and comment on blogs and articles with high domain authority. Do these along with other SEO strategy I've mentioned above.
  • Having a keyword in the domain has been discounted by Google. It used to be of value years time back but doesn't work now from a seo perspective.
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