If you’ve ever had the feeling that no matter what SEO strategies you try for your MSP company doesn’t change your search engine ranking, don’t give up hope. Maybe the problem is that your competitors are performing well with SEO, taking over the spotlight.
In a competitive niche like MSPs, you really need to analyze what your competitors are doing to perform well with search engines. Here are a few steps you can take to analyze your competitors’ SEO tactics:
Find Out Who Your Competitors Are
You can’t analyze your competitors’ SEO strategies if you don’t know who they are. One way to start finding competitors is to do a search on Google using your target keywords. The companies that pop up on the first page are your main competitors.
Check Out Your Competitors Keywords
Using the right keywords is one of the most important factors for driving organic traffic to your MSP company website. This is why you should analyze the keywords your high-ranking competitors use. Competitor keyword analysis can help you in the following ways:
Compete for Google’s top search ranking using the same keywords as your competition
Make use of keywords that your competitors haven’t thought of yet
Discover keywords that you hadn’t targeted before
How to Go About Finding Your Competitors Keywords
Discovering keywords used by other MSP businesses is not always easy, but it’s worth the effort. You can use keyword research tools that speed up the process. Hands-on digging can also give you a thorough list.
- HTML Page Source – This is the manual approach to finding keywords. Just go to a competitor’s website and right-click on the page. Click on the “page source”. You’ll see a window that shows the HTML code for the web page. Scan the code for keywords in the title tag, meta description, optional keywords tag and any of the image title tags or alt tags. Following this manual method gives you all the keywords used for the page you’re visiting.
- SEO Spider Crawler Tool – One automated SEO crawler tool is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. this software is available in free and paid versions. It crawls any website’s URL and extracts the elements of the page. You’ll find useful information about your competitors’ links, metadata, keywords, and sitemaps. This tool is also useful for your own website. It can find duplicate content and broken links.
- Online Keyword Tools – Several online keyword tools can help you find other MSP keywords. These automated tools include Google Keyword Planner, BuzzSumo, Google Alerts, and SemRush. Just do a Google search, and you’ll find many more helpful keyword tools. Give them a try, and you’ll discover your competitors’ organic keywords, ad keywords, and traffic data.
Monitoring your MSP company competitors is a never-ending task. Take the time and effort to analyze your SEO competitors, and you’ll increase your Google ranking.