SEO is like the Holy Grail today for websites, to get visitors.

Many websites all over the world are spending on advertisements to drive up their rankings. However, organic traffic has no alternative because advertised traffic will dry out eventually when the advertisements stop. On the other hand, organic traffic keeps growing when a site owner understands SEO properly and uses the proper methods to improve the SEO of the site.

For organic growth and to Improve website ranking, it is critical to follow a few steps. These are broadly five vital steps that can change the SEO of your website. These steps also provide you with the skills to do comprehensive SEO research for your website & get your site in list of top ranked websites. So, without any further delay, below are those five essential steps for realistic and comprehensive SEO competitive research.

  • Proper keyword research and keyword strategy.

The most common mistake that most website owners commit is to try and optimize for single words. It is a fact that small or medium businesses simply can’t afford to spend enough to rank for single keywords. The strategy for keywords is to find the niches first. The niche makes you understand what all keyword combinations are worth your attention. Then you can target longer keywords and long-tail keywords. The thing to understand is that the keywords don’t essentially need to have heavy volume. They can be words with decent search volumes but should be very relevant to the website. There are many keyword planners available in the market which you can take help of. These will help you find your target keywords and their related keywords as well.

  • Spot your SEO competitors.

The keywords from your gateway to the world of SEO, but it is just the beginning. There is a lot more to your SEO campaign, and the next step is to identify your competitors. This is an easy job as you will get access to all the competitors for your keywords when you search for those keywords on search engines. Try to list all the top-ranking websites for those keywords. The top 10 websites are what you should look for. The more keywords for which a particular website keeps ranking, the more domain authority the website has. You have to find all possible competitors and try to outwit them in the website ranking as much as possible. Understand that this is a continuous process and doesn’t happen overnight.

  • The competitors are in front of you now, but what to do next?

Well, the next step is competitor analysis. There are some online resources that you can take help from to do this exercise. There are various metrics that you will need to analyze and understand to increase the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. These metrics include domain authority, inbound links, age of the domain, social shares, and social presence. These are critical data, as these will help you understand the typical characteristics of your competitors and why they are successful. Next, you need to look deeper into the backlinks, as these form a critical part of the domain authority and ranking of the websites. You can also refer to tools online to get the industry averages for your domain and work accordingly.

  • You just cannot ignore social media!

The next thing you will need to do is analyzing the social media profiles of your competitors. Try to find out all the social media handles of your competitors and research their activity online. How often they post on different platforms, how often they engage with their followers, and more. These things will give you clarity on the follower acquisition and follower engagement ratios.

  • Work on the insights derived.

The last step is to take the gist of all the analyses you undertook and work on those. You will need to decide how many backlinks you want to target. Which websites you would try to get these backlinks from because backlinks from trusted websites are always preferred by search engines. You will also need to decide your posting strategy and how many posts you need to do periodically.

When all these steps are followed properly, you can undertake an efficient and effective SEO campaign for your website.