In SEO, what fascinates me most is the idea of beating the competition and I quite like the feeling of satisfaction when I see my results on the top of SERPs. Its amazing. And almost all the time, there is a clear strategy behind every successful SEO project that helps me achieve this. Let me share this briefly, with you.

1. Analyze your site, plug the holes, cut the crap

First and foremost step of any successful strategy is  a proper analysis of your own website. Don’t think about others. Chalk out a a plan on what you are going to sell and who you are going to target. Pull up your socks and make your website perfect without any holes. Prune those frills and un necessary files. Get ready.

2. Research the market, find what people want

Now that you know what you’re going to sell and whom you are targeting, analyze the market. Find out the buying habits of your targets. Find out whom they buy from and why they prefer them. From what you’ve learned, if possible add up those additional products to your site, just to make sure that we don’t let down people once they come to us.

3. Ape your competition

Now that you know what you’re going to sell, what your competition is selling and what your target needs, ape your competition. Find what strategies they use, what techniques they employ and what they are up to. If its feasible, try to mirror whatever they are doing and get the numbers balanced.

4. Find the weakling, strike him first

Once you have copied your competition, you should be able to know who’s the weakling and what their weakness is. Out do him first, give him the first blow. Though your ranks won’t reflect soon on the SERPs, keep doing this to every second weakling on the SERPs. Document the data.

5. Get your “super strategy” ready, fire it one by one

Now, after having out done every other weakling in the SERPs, get ready to plan ahead. Your ranks wouldn’t have updated by now on the SERPs, so instead of getting pacified with cancelling the competition, out perform yourself and get a set of numbers ready for the future, just in case.

Ex:- Now that you have the same number of backlinks and the same guys linking to you, get an additional 10 high authority incoming links to you. Or get your additional set of content rich pages targeting that extra 10 keywords your competition had missed.

6. Watch yourself out do your competition, draw the graph

By now, your ranks would have slowly started improving. Observe the trend well each day, document the rank reports and see yourself outdoing the competition. If you see any glitches with any particular keyword/page, quickly get to fix it by adjusting the onsite optimization metrics or whatever you think is wrong there. Sometimes when things are in a hurry, you may have overdone something, so don’t miss to detecting glitches during this time/

7. Don’t stop. Keep improving

Now things may also not start working right away sometimes, don’t panic. Just keep documenting the metrics, links, ranks etc. And keep improving constantly, don’t rush and get into trouble, but don’t sit without any action hoping for the best. Keep in mind that your competition also would be planning their strategies now, so just to make sure you don’t lose out on anything, keep those wheels rolling.

8. Don’t let your competition outdo you

You’ll know why its important to document the SEO metrics now. If you have to track your ranks and competition you have to have your documents ready. The most important of the entire strategy is to keep improving and not let your competition eat you. Most of us make the mistake of leaving things as such where we left on achieving a top rank. Not many understands that your competition can buy an SEO to fix their problems and he’d be doing the exact same things as you did. So don’t stop, let the cycle go on.