SEO Companies: What does it take to be No.1?
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as we all know and love it, is what helps bring awareness to brands and drives leads to your website. However, we already know this and hundreds of SEO companies are already making use of it. What you want to know is how to show up in the top 5 results on that search results page (SERP) and then stay there for as long as possible. Let’s get into it.
Competition Is Everywhere
The SEO industry itself is huge, in 2022 the global SEO market size was around 68-billion USD, and sees heavy usage from SEO companies active in industries like healthcare providers, restaurants, bars, real estate, legal services and many more – making it highly competitive. To make matters worse, according to research done by Backlinko, only 0.63% of people searching on Google clicked on a result from the second page.
Scary, right? Luckily, with the right SEO strategies and tools in place you can successfully climb the rankings and make it to the top spot on Google’s results page. Remember that, as an approach, SEO is data-driven and intentional when it comes to increasing the quality of your business’ marketing efforts and the visibility that it receives. In cases where a business exists within a niche industry, it is crucial that they capture every available click. Why? Because otherwise your competitors will.
To get ahead of the competition, you have to utilise every tool and resource at your disposal. Besides using standard SEO best practise, you should also be embracing AI. Since Google has been using AI algorithms like RankBrain and BERT to better understand and analyse user intent, you can also benefit from using tools like MarketMuse and Clearscope. These tools analyse your content and help to optimise it for relevance and depth, this also includes identifying gaps in your content, suggesting keywords, and ensuring your content fully satisfies the needs of your audience.
The Nature of Industries
Each industry has a unique rhythm and pattern that influences the timing of crucial business decisions. This can involve choices on when to allocate certain resources toward the business’ marketing efforts and SEO – this is often dependent on the industry’s life cycle and competitive edge. Some industries can benefit a lot from investing in their SEO and marketing efforts earlier to gain initial visibility and market share.
However, with the growing intensity of a business’ competition strategies have to start performing this crucial balancing act between paid and organic SEO practises. Both have their perks and drawbacks; organic SEO can get you sustainable, long-term visibility while paid SEO can get results fast, although it comes at a recurring cost to the business.
Things like organic and paid SEO can have a significant impact on your timelines, as you can imagine. Not to mention, the varying levels of competition also have a direct influence in how a business might allocate resources. This could also impact your timelines, as either a low or high level of competition would have to achieve results at certain points in their marketing strategy. In addition to all of this, being on a timeline and competing with other businesses also means that you’d have to figure out the most viable strategy to implement. Let’s take two different businesses as an example, the one being an industrial construction company and the other a commercial retailer. The construction company, due to its industrial nature might not have such an emphasis on pushing their social media presence and instead would rather focus on something like white papers. In contrast, the retailer would place more focus on their social media presence due to their commercial nature.
So, if you’re going to stay competitive as a business then you will have to assess your own efforts as well as the efforts of your competitors. If everyone else is using SEO companies to invest heavily in digital visibility that means more emphasis needs to be placed on a more flexible approach. Adapting quickly to shifts can be crucial in giving you the strategic edge – this can be done through scaling your efforts or optimising the way you allocate resources.
So, all-in-all, there is no “one-size-fits-all” strategy when it comes to achieving the coveted top rank on Google, it ultimately depends on a multitude of factors, which is why you need an SEO agency that is both dynamic and flexible – get in touch.