Companies are seeing how the influx of digital competitors is increasing, and you can also see how new websites or brands are coming onto the market with important SEO work behind them.
Due to this evolution, the positioning market is also compromised and nourished by new SEO professionals.
Being successful in SEO has become less about being familiar with optimization tactics and strategies, and more about customizing a strategy that takes advantage of a business’s unique strengths and weaknesses.
In this post, we’ll look at how you can go beyond just thinking about SEO tactics and tricks, and instead start focusing on how you can develop SEO strategies based on a company’s unique competitive advantages.
To achieve good results in SEO, we must understand how search engines work today, and what are the pillars on which they are based to determine which web pages appear first and which appear later.
The Three Pillars Of SEO Are:
- Content Strategy
- Link Building (brand mentions, hyperlinks, etc,)
- Technical SEO (tracking, web structure, page optimization, etc).
So, when we see that a competitor ranks higher than your brand in Google, it is because they have worked on one or more of these pillars better than you, or because they have been able to benefit from some Google algorithm update and you have not.
Next, we are going to see how you can use some strengths of your company to improve SEO.
Strength 1: For Online Stores With Full Product Pages
Today it is very common in online stores of a certain level to include comments, images or user manuals for that product on the product page. In short, online stores that have worked in depth on each of their products are a SEO competitive advantage.
Note: if you only add the features on the page of each of your products, you should know that this is a weakness for your eCommerce, you should consider working on them better to get them to position themselves higher in Google.
If this is you and you’ve done well, you’ll find that in April 2021, Google released its Product Review Update, setting new guidelines for product review sites.
This update is focused on rewarding websites with expertly written content that provides useful and necessary details to enable customers to make better informed purchasing decisions.
If you’re going to write product reviews but don’t quite know how to go about it, here are some questions you might find useful to ask yourself. Ask yourself if your reviews:
- Provide expert product knowledge where appropriate.
- They show how the products physically look or how they are used, and they do so in a unique way, providing more information than what the manufacturers provide.
- They quantify the performance of products in different categories.
- They explain what aspects differentiate the products from the competition.
- They cite which similar products are worth considering or explain which other products may be more suitable in certain cases.
- They discuss the pros and cons of the products reviewed based on research.
- They describe how products have evolved since their previous models or versions to indicate what improvements have been made, what problems have been solved, or other information that helps users make a purchase decision.
- They identify which factors are the most important when deciding on one product or another of a certain type, and assess those aspects of the products reviewed. For example, in a car review, you may determine that fuel economy, safety, and suspension are most important when deciding which vehicle to buy, and assess those aspects of the car being reviewed.
- They describe the main design features of products and explain how those features affect users beyond what the manufacturers say.
Let’s see a practical example of an online store that has gained positions after the Google update. Let’s imagine that you have an online home appliance store, and you want to position the built-in microwave category very well.
Google query: “Best built-in microwaves”
Search volume per month: 1,600
You may need a category page to be quite long where it appears:
- comparisons of different microwaves
- talk about energy efficiency,
- the capacity,
- the best,
- worst,
- recommendations of the cheapest,
- recommendations on the best quality and
- durability,
- accessories
- and helpful tips.
Conclusion: It is time to reinforce those category and product pages so that Google can verify that your content is of value and worthy of being higher in its rankings. In case you do not have it, you should focus your efforts on implementing this type of content in your eCommerce and focus SEO on it.
Strength 2: For Small Businesses
Sometimes marketing experts and small business owners or merchants insist on working only on the website.
This can be a mistake, and I have personally seen how some small local businesses have benefited much more from having a complete and updated Google My Business page, than from their website.
Many local businesses already appear on Google Maps and if they are also brands, that people are already looking for directly by name, that is already a strength that needs to be improved.
The results of the Google, local package is another very interesting option for a small business to get clients, with less effort than working on the website itself.
If your brand is already searched on Google, for example, “Stealth SEO Solutions address”, or perhaps “Stealth SEO Solutions where is it”, or “Stealth SEO Solutions contact”, that is already a strength that you have to take advantage of by using Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) well.
During the Covid pandemic, Google rolled out Google Local Post for small businesses, which allows business owners to post updates directly to their Google My Business account and map listings.
Even after the pandemic, this feature is good for notifying customers of seasonal sales, in-store events, product displays, or other important messages.
Conclusion: keeping nearby customers informed about daily changes in offers, news or products through your Google Business Profile is a competitive advantage that will also improve your local ranking.
Strength 3: Web Performance
At the SEO level, there is another strength or competitive advantage that is currently causing some important changes in the google ranking, the page experience.
In June 2021, Google will officially launched the Page Experience algorithm update, which makes various components of a web page’s speed an official ranking factor.
While Google expects the impact to be slight for most sites, it’s still worth improving metrics like visual stability, interactivity, and load times if your site struggles at those points.
This fundamental Web data can be tracked through Google Search Console and further diagnosed and analyzed using Google PageSpeed Insights or another tool that is similar: Lighthouse.
Let’s be honest… many web pages built with WordPress are not exactly “fast”, which implies a worse performance for the user when he/she is visiting them, and that is a problem.
For those with a slow web, you will not be able to take advantage of these latest changes made to Google’s algorithm related to the user experience within a web page.
For those who do have a fast website, built with WordPress, Shopify or another CMS or custom, then it is possible that they will benefit from the latest Google update.
Especially in online stores, the page experience must be positive, and this means that the website loads quickly, has smooth internal navigation and does not make users wait for images, videos or other content to finish loading.
Conclusion: Improving website load times will not only allow customers to make purchases faster and more efficiently, it will also improve the organic ranking of the website.
Currently, it is necessary to consider how to improve the SEO of a website, and not become obsessed with internal issues of the page itself, but rather this work must be aligned with the brand’s own strengths and that are already working.
