Want Your Competitor’s Business? Build a Better Website!

To beat your competition, you need a site that puts you above them in the search results. It should frequently engage your audience long enough for conversion. Lastly, you require a team, including a Chicago web development agency, to achieve these goals.

Together, you can develop a solid five-step online marketing plan:

• Perform a comprehensive site audit to find gaps and opportunities.
• Improve the site structure to maximize the crawl budget.
• Power up the schema markup.
• Enhance the page experience.
• Continuously track the progress and update the site.

Explore how to execute all these strategies below! Let’s go!

To learn how Digital Authority Partners can create a standout website for you, watch this video!

1. Perform a Comprehensive Site Audit to Find Gaps and Opportunities

As the saying goes, know thy enemy. Before creating a standout website that puts you above your rivals, you must know where you and they stand.

• Where are they good at?
• How about their weaknesses?
• What are the optimal ways to improve your site so that you can surpass their strengths and take advantage of their missed opportunities?

The best technique to answer these questions is conducting a site audit, a deep examination of different aspects of a website. These include on-page SEO, website speed, content quality, and backlinks.

A digital marketing firm usually conducts this for its clients, but you can use the same strategy to spy on your competition.

A site audit usually involves:

• Performing a website crawl to gather as much information as possible about the website
• Analyzing the collected data (e.g., keywords, indexed and ranked pages, internal and backlinks, errors, page speed, mobile-friendliness, etc.)
• Identifying critical issues such as keyword gaps, broken links, etc.

The team then formulates a list of solutions that can include:

• Keyword targeting (If your competition ranks for a highly competitive keyword, do you want to chase it? Can you find keywords they fail to rank for and that you can dominate?
• Content and meta tag optimization
• Fixing errors that prevent proper indexing and optimization of pages
• Enhancing your backlink profile

2. Improve the Site Structure to Maximize the Crawl Budget

Sometimes the problem (and the solution) is in the small details that make significant impacts. If you fall behind others in the search results, you might want to improve your site structure. This way, you can efficiently manage the crawl budget.

What is a crawl budget? It is the number of pages, frequency, and speed at which search engines crawl and index your site.

Because search engines must visit millions of pages daily, they allot only a certain amount of time and resources to your site. Mismanagement happens when a site has too many pages, and bots cannot crawl them all.

You have indexed pages that do not convert and valuable ones that hardly get visited.

For example, you run a Chicago furniture store selling mattresses. To generate targeted traffic, you must have indexed pages for “twin bed mattress” or even “twin bed mattress with storage.” However, “twin bed mattress with free shipping” does not have to be a priority if it is a keyword with extremely low search volume.

You cannot control how much search engines give you, but you can effectively manage it with these tips:

• Eliminate irrelevant pages, including thin or duplicate content. Otherwise, include a robots.txt to tell crawlers which to visit and skip.
• Add and improve sitemaps. Ensure that the pages you want to index are there.
• Fix orphan pages or those not linked to any section of your site. Crawlers cannot follow them, which can hurt your ranking and traffic.

3. Power Up the Schema Markup

A Chicago web development agency also helps you “steal” your competitor’s traffic by designing effective schema markup.

Schema markup is a structured format that clearly defines the relationship between website entities. A typical example is the local schema.

In the local schema, you insert a specific code into your page that organizes the following business information:

• Business name
• Address
• Contact information
• Hours of operation
• Aggregate rating (such as stars)

Adding the code allows search engines to get a deeper context of your website pages and how they relate to each other. Even better, it makes your site poised to appear on the local map pack.

The pack refers to the top three sites that appear in the search results when someone looks for geo-centric information. These include “What is the best cafe in LA?” or “plumbers in Manhattan.”

It puts you above the organic results, where most of your competitors are.

Besides local schema, you can have markup for products, people or companies, content such as FAQ or how-to, and events. Structured data are also helpful in creating rich snippets that provide a more enriching and engaging user experience.

4. Enhance the Page Experience

Another strategy to build a better website and outrank the competition is paying attention to your page experience. It is Google’s new ranking factor that measures the quality of user experience based on these search engine existing signals:

• Core Web Vitals, which consider site performance, visual stability, and responsiveness
• Mobile-friendliness
• Page speed
• Interstitial or ad intrusions
• Site security
• Navigation and site structure

Search engines have long considered user experience as a major ranking factor. When the audience enjoys the site, they probably stay longer. When they spend more time with you, you have more chances of converting them.

Google has released some questions and tools to help you evaluate your site based on these factors. However, it also pays to work with a Chicago web development agency that believes in and adheres to fundamental web design principles.

5. Continuously Track and Update the Site

The four tips above can already provide some of the best tools to clinch first place in the search results. The question is: how do you sustain good results? The answer is to regularly track and update the site.

Some recommend assessing your performance every three months. In reality, tracking and updating your site do not require a magic number. The best frequency for your business depends on several factors such as:

• Changes in search engine algorithms
• Business or marketing goals
• Macro-economic changes such as inflation or recession
• Trends (e.g., artificial intelligence that automates several website management processes)
• Critical errors or events such as a potential data breach

Regardless of the frequency, tracking and updating your website is necessary because it:

• Keeps your site relevant at all times,
• Helps you become more responsive to uncertainties such as changes in algorithms or design,
• Maintains an excellent user experience, and
• Provides you with more ideas to be a step ahead of the others.

Summing Up

No strategy can guarantee that you can rank better than your competition and eventually attract their traffic. However, the steps above give you the best shot.

Working with a capable Chicago web development agency in designing and maintaining your site can also help. Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is a leader in the industry, with experts in SEO and other digital marketing services to help you reach your goals. 

Contact us today to get started!