Read your competitors’ blogs to better your own

In any industry it’s important to know what your competitors are up to and how they are providing their services. Every company needs to know what its competitors are doing, whether you’re in the car manufacturing business turning over billions of pounds annually, or whether you’re selling bric-a-brac on a market stall in Ellesmere Port. Researching your competition is essential.

When your business involves trading online you can easily keep track of your competitors by looking at their website. You can see what they’re offering, what new services they have developed and how they are positioning themselves in the marketplace. You can read the content on their website and see how that compares to yours. This becomes even more important if your competitors rank above you in Google; how many pages do they have on their website, what are they writing about and how often do they update their website?

All of these factors affect their rankings, and you should be aware of where they rank for your keywords and how they’re doing it.

With SEO companies on the Internet, this becomes even easier as most SEO companies feature blogs on their website, offering advice and insights into their own views on search engine optimisation. At StuckOn we’re constantly reading material from other SEO companies in the UK, such as PushON, Just Search and bigmouthmedia, who offer SEO in Manchester. They have regularly updated blogs on SEO, offering advice and tips. It’s important to stay updated on what these companies write on their blogs in order to know the sort of SEO services that they offer, and how they perceive the changing face of SEO.

Reading how others have interpreted SEO industry news such as the Yahoo!/Microsoft merger and Google’s Brand Update allows you to challenge your own views on the subjects. It should also be pointed out that many search engine optimisation experts have different, often conflicting, views on SEO; which is why reading different SEO blogs gives you a balanced view of the SEO community and allows you, the client, to form your own opinions on whose methods will achieve the best results.

As with everything on the Internet though, you should take what you read with a pinch of salt as not everyone’s opinion is correct.