Being on the top leaderboard is the dream of every business owner. To achieve the top place, you do need strategic website optimization, competitive benchmarking, and competitor in-depth analysis.
At a certain stage, you will need to know what your competitors are up to. This is essential since you and their business target the same keywords. Not to mention also, you need to get insight into the market share you have and define the next strategy to outperform them.
In this article, we will guide you to have an ideal strategy to conquer the market leaderboard by implementing SEO. We would not say that this is the best strategy you can do since every business is unique and needs certain treatment.
Why Your Brand Should Be on Top of Leaderboard?
Google has become the go-to for digital users when they are wanting to do research, digging information, or purchasing something. It must be the goal of most businesses to conquer the leaderboard and be the first on SERP for their targeted keyword. The question that arises is, why is being the first important?
The basic answer is that the first position has the power to rule the market. It is not surprising that SERP #1 gain the most traffic. Based on a study, the first page of Google succeed to capture approximately 71% of search traffic and is predicted to be higher.
Now, you can imagine how many leads and conversions your business will get if you manage to be on the strategic leaderboard by implementing SEO. You can look at your own search behavior on Google. How often do you click the first result on the SERP? and how often do you find it useful and relevant to your queries? For internet users who really need relevant information as soon as they push the enter button, the first-page result is where they stop.
That is why your business should manage to be the leader in your market since it has more potential to be clicked by high-quality users. It means, that if you want to get right in front of your audience, you will need to get as high as possible on SERP.
Target Keywords and Competition
Your business will not be the only one on the internet, there are thousands of businesses offering the same product or services as you. That is why it is very common that you might target the same keywords as your competitors whether it is direct competitors or indirect competitors.
Is it something good or bad? It all depends. In some cases, the same target keywords have a different potential and performance. So now, all you need to do is focus on your website performance and try figuring out the ideal tool and strategy to win the competition on the same target keywords.
So, how could you know the keyword competitiveness between you and your competitors? here are some actions you need to conduct first to figure out the keyword competitiveness.
Identify your competitors
This step is fairly easy since you know already who you are competing with. Try to find businesses that have the same product as you, target the same region, or businesses that intersect with yours. However, we would not suggest you spend so much time identifying all competitors on the internet because it would take a long time.
Monitor Your Valuable Keywords
Most important thing, you need to monitor your keywords and focus on their optimization. You can use Sequence to monitor your targeted keyword with real-time rank data. This data will be very useful to track the daily performance of each keyword targeted by your business. You definitely need an SEO tool that accommodates all SEO needs such as tracking keyword ranking, grouping your keywords, and getting competitors' insight.
How to Conquer the Leaderboard by Analyzing Target Keywords
If you know already who your competitors are, the next step is to analyze your target keywords. Whether your keyword already has an excellent performance, or still needs some improvement. Not only that, you have to know how your target keyword led you to be the leader in your market.
As we said before, you might target the same keywords but the potential might be different on your website compared to the competitors. It would be best if you stop comparing your business to the competitors and persistently digging for information about their keywords. Instead, here are the ideal ways we suggest for more efficient SEO work.
Keywords Grouping Strategy
First of all, you need to have a list of all your targeted keywords in hand. From this list, you can make a group of each keyword category on your website. There are so many reasons why you need to group keywords.
Google is smart, it might show the same result on different keywords such as "pizza delivery" and "order pizza online".
Grouping keywords enable you to monitor close relevant keywords with ease without spending such a long time.
You might need Sequence to group keywords and see their performance based on the group. The View feature in Sequence enables you to do keyword grouping at a glance.
Competitive Market Analysis
The next way to conquer the leaderboard is to conduct competitive analysis. This activity will provide insights about products, sales, and marketing tactics by key competitors in your area of business. By learning how competitors work in running their business, you can design marketing strategies more effectively
However, the most important data to get is the market share. Market share refers to the percentage of the entire sales of the market or industry at a certain time. This metric can be a key indicator of a brand's competitiveness. The greater the market share you have, the higher the profit you will get.
To get the data on the market share, you will need to calculate it first. Here is how to determine the market share of your business.
How to Calculate The Market Share
To determine the percentage of market share, you need to calculate SOV (Share of Voice). The SoV value represents the estimated visibility and dominance of your brand compared to competitors, obtained by multiplying the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Search Volume for each keyword in your domain.
SoV formula:
SoV= CTR (Click-trough rate) x SV (Search Volume)
After knowing the SoV value, you can calculate the total market share of your brand by adding up the SoV of all the keywords in your domain. In order to determine the total market share, add up your brand's SoV with the SoV of all your competitors.
Next, the market share percentage is obtained from the division between your brand's total SoV and the total SoV of the market, then multiplied by 100.
Market Share Formula:
Market Share= (Total SoV of your domain / Total SoV of the market) x 100
By knowing the market share, you can judge the effectiveness of SEO marketing or any revenue-generating effort on your website. It would show how your companies are doing in the competitive market.
Getting Market Share Insight From Sequence Stats
Market share calculation is quite complex and time-consuming, but you do not have to calculate it manually. With Sequence, you will get the market share insight with just a few clicks. This tool offers you simple usability with in-depth data, clear justification, and accuracy. No matter how many keywords to crawl and calculate the organic market share.
The insight about the market share in Sequence Stats can be found in the View dashboard. Not only your market share, but the top 10 competitors that share the same market as you. You can use this in-depth data to define your next strategy to be in an important place on the leaderboard.
Figure 1: the display of market share within the View menu on Sequence. Users will see the top 10 competitors complete with the information on market share.
Analyze Your Strengths, Weakness, and Opportunities
Now you know the competitors and the market share of your brand, the next thing to do is to conduct deep research. You can analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of your business. After you figure out the data, you can be compared it to your competitors by using the SEO approach.
SEO approach we mean is how to outperform your competitors through the power of search engines. Indeed, the most important thing to do is to impress the search engine with your website and what you offer inside it.
Utilizing an SEO tool is a good investment, even for the needs of the long term. It would be best if you choose an SEO tool that can accommodate all SEO needs such as enabling team collaboration, providing business insights, and supporting your efficient budget usage.
That is what we can suggest for conquering your market leaderboard through the SEO approach. Lastly, we recommend you use your time as effectively as possible. Rather than digging about what keywords your competitors are using and keep comparing your business, use a more sustainable SEO tool that can help you do the job in a short time.