SEO is a growing field with nearly 70% of digital marketing spend on SEO. That means competition is growing fierce every day and you’ll be seeing more & more competitors show up on your turf.
That’s why you’ll need to come up with a strategy that involves maintaining your rankings. Here’s how you should approach it:
Revamp Your Content as The Top Ranking Sites Get Natural Links Easier
If someone is researching a topic, they’re likely to discover your site through Google and link to your content if it’s good. This makes it easier to stay on top.
In order to take advantage of this, revamp your high-ranking content and write something that is link-worthy. Ensure you have the best content out of all your competitors ranking on the first page. This way if someone decides to use Google as their source, you’ll be rewarded with the majority of backlinks.
In order to create great content, make sure it’s more in-depth than your competitors and use CRO techniques to improve bounce rates and dwell time. Also encourage user participation by asking them for their opinion in the comments. An active comment section can improve your rankings.
Optimize Your Titles to Improve CTR
Google has announced that CTR doesn’t improve rankings directly, but there are plenty of case studies showing that it does. Whether you believe that or not, it’s clear that CTR can indirectly affect rankings and results in higher traffic regardless of whether it can improve rankings or not. Higher traffic = more natural backlinks.
For this reason, optimizing CTR is one of the most rewarding tasks for SEOs. The best ways to improve clickthrough rates are:
- Include a number in the title. Listicles work well. Having the year at the end of the title is also very good. Here’s an example: Top 10 Best SEO companies 2019.
- Optimize for user intent. For instance, if a person searches for ‘SEO agency’ it means they aren’t looking for informational content, but to hire someone to rank their website noticed on Google. In that case a title like ‘SEO Agency – Get Front Page Rankings’ works very well. That’s the title used by the agency Bitcoin SEO which boasts a 11.7% CTR increase after changing it from just ‘Bitcoin SEO Services.’
- Optimize the meta description for user intent. In five seconds, it should describe what the site offers and how the user can benefit from visiting their website.
Use Ahrefs to Discover New Competitors and Backlink Opportunities
Whenever a new competitor emerges into the front page, Ahrefs will notify you. Usually this means the competitor is executing a link building strategy that is working well for them. If you’re clever, you can analyze their link profile and imitate their links.
These links are clearly pushing them to the first page, so imitating their links will only make your site stronger. If they’re building blackhat links like private blog networks, then you should avoid using the same strategies as it will only hurt in the long term. Instead, try building links of your own:
Conduct Outreach for High Quality Guest Posting Links
Guest posts are one of the best ways of getting high quality backlinks. It’s whitehat and completely safe but can also be time consuming.
If you already have a high-ranking site, it’s wise to invest some of that money into creating awesome content and using that to pitch to other sites. If one doesn’t accept, try the another. Your content will never go to waste that way.
Create Internal Links to Your Blog Post
Go through your previous articles and find relevant blog posts where you can include internal links to your page. This will help improve the link juice flowing to that page and tells Google “this page is important,” making it rank higher.
The great thing about internal links are that you can use them as many times as you’d like, and they cannot be abused. If you want a page to rank higher, create more internal links to it.
Hire a Designer and Adding Multimedia
Images, videos, infographics and fancy UI can greatly improve the engagement rate of each post. It’s certainly expensive to implement so you should aim to improve conversion rates by using multimedia. Test it out on one page first. If it works well, continue adding multimedia on other pages.
Top sites such as Backlinko use a lot of multimedia and fancy UI designs. They do this for good reason. It makes the content more appealing to the eyes and improves engagement rate/user satisfaction. Google can determine whenever a user is satisfied and uses this as part of their algorithm to rank sites.
By following these steps, it’ll be nearly impossible for a competitor to overtake you, because you’ve established authority by satisfying user intent whilst age plays a huge factor in ranking too. If you’ve been ranking for years and have great content, a competitor will have to do something drastic to change that.
