5 steps to beat your competitors

Your website does not have to be perfect to get high listings on Google. It just has to be better than the websites of your competitors. If your website is only slightly better than the sites of your competitors, your website will get the click. If more than one web page has been optimized for a keyword, it's the quality of the links that makes the difference. The following tips will help you to beat your competitors.


Step 1: Find your real competitors

Your main competitors are the websites that have high rankings for your keywords. Search Google for five of your keywords and write down the URLs of the websites that rank best for these keywords. These websites are your main competitors.

Step 2: Analyze the backlinks of your competitors

The next step is to find out how many of the links to your competitors contain your target keywords. To outperform your competitors, your website should have more inbound links that contain your target keywords than the websites of your competitors. 

Step 3: Check the PageRank spread of the linking pages
       
         Although the official PageRank number that Google displays in its toolbar is a flawed metric, it can
         still help you to find out why some websites rank higher than others. If your competitors have more
         backlinks from web pages with a high PageRank than your website then you should try to get more
         high  PR links.


Step 4: Check the top level domains of the linking pages

If you target local Google versions (Google.com.au, Google.co.uk, etc.) then your website should have more backlinks from websites that use the corresponding top level domain than your competitors.
For example, if you want to get high rankings on Google.com.au then try to get backlinks from .com.au websites.

Step 5: Check the content of the linking pages

Google prefers websites that get links from related websites. If you sell shoes then a link from a fashion blog is much better than a link from a website about puppies.
Your website should have more inbound links from related websites than the websites of your competitors.

Do the things above and your website will get better rankings than the websites of your competitors.