SEO 101: 5 Things To Do To Rank Higher Than Your Competition

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SEO 101: 5 Things To Do To Rank Higher Than Your Competition

If you’ve read the title, you’re here to learn how to rank higher than your competitors.

Surprisingly, SEO isn’t as difficult as most would imagine. Anyone can learn how to do it, i.e., reading up articles online, watching YouTube tutorial videos, or joining a Digital Marketing Course.

Still, time and patience are necessary to execute it properly —or you might just find yourself in a rather sticky situation.

If you don’t have the time to explore and figure it out by yourself, hiring a competent agency providing SEO services can be extremely valuable.

Skeptics, don’t start doubting just yet—in this article, we’ll be addressing the 5C’s to include in your strategy in order to cut through the clutter, and rise to the top of Google.

The 5C’s In SEO Marketing

1. Code

Having a good underlying HTML code, as well as paying close attention to the forward-facing code on your site is more of a necessity than anything else. Many brands tend to neglect either one, and major search engines like Google actually favour sites that employ a seamless coding strategy throughout their site – making crawling for them much more effortless.

For most businesses, technical SEO is a fundamental basic and doesn’t usually pose that much of a problem. However, if you have only just started dipping your toes into SEO waters, planning and executing a comprehensive and bulletproof SEO strategy can prove to be difficult. This is where a more experienced agency can come in to the rescue.

2. Content

Search engines are becoming smarter by the day, and they are slowly but surely gaining the ability to read and interpret words and their underlying meaning.

At the end of the day, relevance is still key. Users are constantly taking in new information every day, and this means that your content has to be consistently updated and refreshed – as determined by Google and end consumers.

Stuffing random keywords into your content is both ineffective and counterproductive — instead, communicate your business’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition), using the words people interested in your goods and services are searching up online.

Rather than spamming a bunch of long-tail keywords into your site, put more effort into creating content that resonates with the user first — before making it work for search engines.

3. Connections

Links to a website used to be the best indicator of site relevance to specific queries. While the algorithm may have changed a lot over the years, links still matter.

However, rather than quantity, link building should concentrate on quality. Spammy tactics may generate huge quantities of links — but it doesn’t accurately identify the best influencers for your brand that cultivate a genuine relationship.

It’s without question, crucial to build a strong network of connections – and nurture relationships with the right people.

4. Communications

It’s true that social media doesn’t directly impact SEO rankings. Nevertheless, it plays an important role in the success of any SEO campaign.

As mentioned earlier, your goal is to source out and foster relationships with the right influencers for your brand – with social media acting as the connecting link between the two.

In addition, having an active social media presence aids in brand awareness and recall, generating more clicks in search engine results — regardless of your ranking position. Relationships with and relevance to influencers garner quality links —which is why Influencer Marketing can be so effective as part of a robust SEO campaign.

5. Capture

Oftentimes, clients simply aim to rank high for specific keywords – thinking that this is all it takes to take down the competition.

Unfortunately, that’s not very likely to happen.

It’s getting tougher by the day to fully comprehend the intention of a searcher. This means that there are still plenty of keywords that are waiting to be tapped upon – provided you have the ability to spot it.

Ultimately, always look beyond the last click of a conversion – basing your SEO strategy on actual data from your site and making adjustments accordingly. Blindly following your gut instinct is only going to result in a half-baked SEO program – and if all else fails, leave it to a Digital Marketing Agency that specialises in SEO instead.

Either way, you can be sure that you are well on your way to rising the ranks of Google.