“Why is my business ranking behind others?”

Answering this question demands in-depth analysis, primarily because of the dynamics involved.

So, in this article, I will show you three steps to investigate this problem, focusing on over twelve possible factors affecting your business’ ranking on search engines. You will also learn how to improve local SEO and outsmart the “big guys” in this game.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors

Your business competitors can be actual or potential. Real competitors outrank you while potential ones grow at a pace that will make them surpass your business soon. Your focus when performing an audit would be on those currently outperforming you on Google.

Because a business ranks ahead of yours does not make it a competitor. If Wikipedia offers the same service as yours, you wouldn’t want to see it as a competitor. The same goes for a local government establishment; their official advantages and privileges may be something you cannot meet.

While several online tools claim to help fish out business competitors, I recommend that you conduct a manual search. Some automatic finders usually include unrealistic results, which may affect your audit. But manual searching can reveal your real business rivals, and you can start learning a lot as you identify them.

The steps below can help identify your local competitors as you kick-start the auditing process:

1. Determine which keyword phrase you like your business to achieve the highest ranking or local visibility. This keyword must be highly relevant to your brand and must be what visitors will likely enter on Google when searching for your services.
2. Once determined enter the keyword on Google and generate a list of competitor businesses in their order. Ensure that your search location is the same as the location you want your business to achieve the highest visibility.
3. Find your business’s position on that list and note it down.
4. Try and vary locations within your state or province and see what search results you get. You will likely get different competitors and rankings as you expand your reach. However, you may want to note a business that keeps making your list regardless of location in your city or province.
5. While you can perform audits on every business ahead of yours in ranking, it’s easier to focus on the most dominant competitor. A practical approach is to focus on companies with the highest appearance in all searches. By comparing the results from different searches, you can determine which of them is the most prevalent.

Pro Tips: You need an Excel or Google spreadsheet to record and organize your findings neatly. The sheet should contain at least four columns and twenty-five rows. The first column should have the audit parameters, while the second can be for wins.

When your business outperforms the competitor’s for a given factor, you can record your business name and vice versa. The next column should be for notes, especially on how to increase local SEO based on that parameter.

Step 2: Spy on Your Competitor’s Details

As the local audit begins appropriately, it’s time to investigate your competitor’s secrets using many parameters. Some of the topmost factors include:

Name

The first thing you want to beam your searchlight on is how your competitor crafts their brand name. Your focus would be to determine whether they included keywords. Suppose your search phrase is “Vets in San Antonio”, and their brand name is “San Antonio Veterinary,” while yours is “Furry Clinic.” In that case, keywords in their name are one reason they outrank you.

The ranking advantage of keywords in a company’s name may not be much, but it’s safe to include it. Google’s tradition is to always give preference to businesses with relevant keywords in their name. While the 2021 Vicinity Update may appear to downplay this practice, there are indications that it still matters.

Maps, Centroid, Proximity, & Address

Google often places a red border around cities on their maps; if your business does not fall within this border, it might not rank as one within. So, check this out by confirming if your business is within its Google perimeter.

The centroid is a reference to the placement of your city on Google’s knowledge panel. Consider how close your business’ address is to your city’s address on this centroid and do the same for your competitor. It might be a competitive advantage if your brand’s address is far from the city’s while your competitor is closer.

Co-Location

Two businesses offering similar services sometimes share identical addresses. Where this occurs, Google typically filters one or some of them out from search results. This phenomenon is known as Google’s Possum, and a 2016 update confirmed that no fewer than 64% of local SERPs are affected.

Check for co-location for your competitor’s company and yours on Google Map. By zooming in, you can see whether similar businesses share the same address as yours. If another identical company exists at your address and not your competitor’s, that can be a considerable edge.

Landing Page URL on Google Business Profile (GBP)

When you click on your competitor’s website from Google’s Business Profile, where does it land on their website? Their homepage or somewhere else? Check yours too and see where it takes your visitors to on your website.

Homepages are the strongest “selling points” of most websites. The reason for this is simple. Record this finding on your Excel or Google sheet.

GBP Vs. NAP Details Mismatch?

The next thing you should do in your auditing endeavor is to match the Name, Address, and Phone Numbers (NAP) on your website with what is on Google’s Business Profile (GBP). Repeat this process for your competitor to determine discrepancies.

Whoever has a perfect information match takes the win here. Contractions don’t count, but the name or address disparities are enough for Google to decrease a company’s visibility.

GBP Reviews

Reviews play many roles in local ranking, but this factor has several dynamics. First, you must consider the overall rating star of your company and that of your competitor. Of course, the closer the rating is to 5, the better the company’s conversion.

Second, consider the number of reviewers for your competitors and yours. For instance, a 4.4-star rating from 12,000 people portrays more credibility than a 4.6 from 100. Besides these figures, you should also check out the general sentiments of these reviews – are they largely negative, neutral, or positive? If reviewers constantly praise your competitor’s business for a factor, that may give a local ranking advantage to them.

Consider whether your competitor responds to customer reviews. If your business fails to engage reviewers, mark it as a plus for them. Another factor to consider here is the recency of comments. Look at the first fifty feedback of your competitor and compare how old they are to yours.

Third-Party Links to Your Business

When you type your business name on Google, check the web results for third-party links to your website. The focus here is on the number and quality of those third parties. If your competitor has more authoritative third-party links to their website than yours, they’re the winner.

Google Business Profile Last Post

This factor does not improve local SEO but adds to other things; it can make a difference. When last did your competitor post compared to yours? The business that posts regularly and recently gets the “win” mark.

GBP Photos Also Count!

Nowadays, photos are now powerful and vital elements for listings. As it goes, the business with the most images of excellent quality ranks ahead of others without it. Also, the plus increases if the business owners are the posters of such images.

Step 3: Estimate How Your Business Fare From These Parameters

Although these parameters are not exhaustive, you would have started seeing why your competitor ranks ahead of you locally. List out those areas and see how you can meet up and surpass them. You may not have power over your location, but things like images, data correctness, and keyword insertion are pretty controllable.

Conclusion

The goal of a local audit should never be to produce a carbon copy of another business or edge them out of business. Instead, it should be that you want to identify some marketing areas that you need to improve. It should also give you insights on how to stand out within what is usually stiff competition.

In the auditing process, whatever you notice as your competitor’s weakness should help you develop a unique local brand with great value to local consumers.

Suggested:

Local Business SEO – Taking Advantage of Google Maps.

How To Ensure That Google My Business Page Rank High?

How to Protect Your Online Business from Google Updates?

The post How to Perform a Basic Local Business Competitive SEO Audit? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

In such circumstances, SEO has to be one of the biggest priorities of a webmaster, especially because Google changes its search engine algorithm roughly 500 to 600 times a year. If you administer a website and want to ensure a higher ranking in Google searches, then you should conduct a thorough SEO audit to eliminate bugs and make improvements.

Our post will show you seven ways to run an SEO audit and boost your ranking relatively quickly. Let’s begin!

1. Choose the Right Tools

You don’t start an SEO audit without the right tools. Doing all the work manually would make the job extremely difficult – if not impossible – so it would be wise to test some of the best SEO platforms and use them in the process. Our recommendation is to consider the following tools:

• Google Analytics: This platform is Google’s native tool and it will tell you everything you need to know about website performance.
• SEO Site Checkup: Just like the name suggests, SEO Site Checkup helps webmasters to conduct thorough audits and eliminate optimization blunders.
• NinjaEssays: Most websites outsource content creation to ensure the highest quality of their posts. If you are looking for a professional paper writing service, try NinjaEssays.
• Screaming Frog: It’s a website crawler that explores every single page and the corresponding URL.

2. Fix Broken Links

Not too many things can ruin the user experience and jeopardize ranking as fiercely as broken links. Fortunately, you can remove broken links quickly using almost any SEO audit tools, but we will stick to Google Analytics because it’s free and widespread.

You just need to open the main dashboard, set the timeframe of your analysis, and create a search filter containing the “404 error” notification. Google Analytics will display all broken links and you’ll know the magnitude of the problem.

The next step is to redirect broken links through your content management system. The way it works depends on your system, but most platforms contain the redirect option where you can create new redirects and take visitors to functional pages.

3. Create Keyword-Rich Content

Another important task is to reevaluate your content and make it keyword-rich. This is where you’ll have to be patient and improve articles to match the search intent of the target audience.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t compete for simple keywords only. On the contrary, it is also important to target longtail keywords and common search phrases. For instance, content creation services rely heavily on word of mouth marketing, which is why they highlight keyword phrases such as Essay Shark reviews, Superior Papers reviews, or GradeMiners review.

You should follow the same pattern – understand the needs of your audience, come up with the corresponding keywords, and revise the content in a way that makes it highly relevant and keyword-rich.

4. Optimize Metadata

Metadata optimization represents a big part of the SEO audit. It’s not a complex process, but it is incredibly significant for your ranking. Generally speaking, you need to focus on three elements:

• Title tags: Title tags are the first thing users see in Google search results, so you have to make them relevant and easily discoverable.
• Description: Meta descriptions don’t influence ranking directly, but these short paragraphs reveal the nature of your content and inspire searchers to click your link instead of someone else’s.
• Image tags: Users also look for images. It means you’ll need to mark each photo correctly so that Google can display it in related searches.

5. Eliminate Duplicate Content

If you find large portions of the same content across various pages, then you are facing the issue of duplicate content. Google is not exactly thrilled about duplicate content and might even penalize you for it, so you should try to remove such elements as soon as possible. A simple tool like Copyscape will help you to discover duplicates and remove them from your website, thus preventing ranking downfalls.

6. Improve Page Load Speed

Google and users appreciate speedy websites and hate slowly-running pages. For instance, if you search for the best resume writing services and learn that VelvetJobs takes more than a few seconds to load, you would probably consider it irrelevant.

Now, if you don’t want the same thing to happen to your website, you need to increase page load speed using tools such as Pingdom. It’s a simple platform that scans your site, assesses its performance, and gives you suggestions on how to improve. The process is smooth and simple, so you better get it done quickly.

7. Optimize for Mobile Experience

The year is 2019 and we should not talk about mobile optimization, but lots of websites and their HR software still don’t pay attention to it the way there are supposed to. All you have to do is test your pages via Google Search Console to measure the mobile-friendliness of the website in general. Just copy/paste the URL and Search Console will tell you whether the content is mobile-friendly or not.

Conclusion

Ranking in the first page of Google search results sounds like a dream come true for every webmaster, but earning this position is out of reach for most of them. It takes a lot of work and optimization efforts to boost the ranking of your site, so you’ll have to do the homework and begin with an SEO audit.

In this article, we showed you seven ways to conduct a basic SEO check of your website. Remember our tips and leave a comment if you have any questions – we will be glad to answer you quickly!

The post SEO Audit to Get Higher Ranking on Google appeared first on Tricky Enough.