The Pillars Of SEO

In the business of SEO, success mainly relies on how well you (1) understand your prospect clients, (2) know your business, and (3) recognize your potential competitors. All these three combined will help you, if not guarantee, a safe spot on the top ranking page.

                Since SEO is the business of producing (online) results in order to reach the top, most SEO professionals would battle head on by focusing on link-building, readable content, on-page optimization and searchable keywords for the website—which is of course logical to satisfy the first and second goal I have mentioned earlier. But what happens to the third, to the competitors, after? Do they just disappear and leave you unbothered? No. Business is not as easy as that.

Like any other business, one cannot simply ignore the threat that a competitor brings, no matter how petty they may seem—and for doing SEO here in the Philippines for quite some time now, no SEO company is petty. If you want to stay in this industry longer than you anticipated, tactics and strategies must be concocted.

To make sense of what I’m saying about tactics and strategies, you first need to go back to the second item on the first paragraph and understand it fully. What is the nature of my business? Who does it cater? What does not it cater? Is it relevant to any other business/industry, directly and/or indirectly? By this, you can set your business’ scopes and limitations and therefore narrow down potential competitors.

Having trimmed the list into specifics, try determining the actual competitors by knowing what they cater. Is it parallel to the same services or product that you’re offering? How is its proximity as compared to yours? Is it going to affect your business at all? If yes, that’s the time you need to do some extensive planning.

In some articles I’ve read about SEO competitive analysis, they all share the common idea that there are three things that every SEO professionals should focus on to keep them ahead in this industry. The first is content. It is the industry’s king anyway isn’t? But content without keywords to follow is like a king without an utter common sense, it is undeniably useless.

Second is the authority. Even though you’ve created tons and tons of content, one must still bother on the response the content is getting, or is it getting any? Unless the content you’ve written appeals to its target audience, a good content written by a competing company will tip the balance to their favor.

Lastly, an SEO professional should take notice on this on-site such as its titles, copy, alt tags, headings, internal link, title tags, the H1 and H2 texts among others.